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Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, indicted Donald Trump and 18 others on an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in her state. The accused co-conspirators are a reminder that people like Trump are enabled by minor figures who may be as much a menace to democracy as Trump himself.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The agony of Mike Pence Why people won’t stop moving to the Sun Belt Don’t let Donald Trump take his case to federal court.

The Brass Ring, Pulled Away

Former President Donald Trump now faces his fourth round of felony indictments, this time in Georgia, where prosecutors allege in a racketeering charge that he led an effort to overturn the will of the state’s voters in the 2020 election. Not much more can be said about Trump himself: We can note only so many times that he is an emotionally disordered man, beset by feral insecurities, whose actions have, in the words of the retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, “corroded and corrupted American democracy.” So let’s leave him aside and turn to his accused co-conspirators in Georgia (at least five of whom appear to be mentioned in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment accusing Trump of a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election, although Smith has not yet charged them).

The indictments in Georgia depict an alleged racket that looks much like a multilevel-marketing scheme, in which the principals (Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows) have something they want to sell (in this case, an election lie). They go out and recruit a gullible and ambitious sales force to spread the word (relying on loyalists such as the lawyers Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis), who then pull in another group of sellers (state legislators, election officials, state party officials, and others). Go down far enough and you’ll find the marks who were willing to serve as fake electors. In the end, they’re all tied to a sham product that is going to cost them their reputation and perhaps even their freedom.

But we should not be distracted by the inanity of the alleged plot. The Georgia case is an important window into the actions of Trump’s enablers and courtiers, the mediocre people around the former president who were determined to gain the respect and station to which they felt entitled, regardless of their actual talent. Most of us live our lives as ordinary people doing ordinary jobs. Not every career is fulfilling, and as my working-class father used to say, even Hollywood actors probably hate their job on some days, when they have to drag themselves out of bed for an early-morning call time and sit in a makeup chair for hours. (My one foray into watching real actors at work confirmed this wise observation.)

Since he entered politics, however, Trump has played the role of patron saint to this resentful third string. Ellis, for example, began her legal career as a deputy DA in a rural Colorado jurisdiction; she soon marketed herself as a “constitutional law attorney” on television, as The New York Times noted in 2020, despite a lack of experience that had no “apparent bearing on her ability to present herself as someone of great authority.” Unlike Trump, these are not larger-than-life figures. In fact, their most striking characteristics are how small, how odd, and how incompetent they each are—and yet, to judge from the indictments, how dangerous they were as a group.

Among the accused, only Meadows and Giuliani are anything like national figures. (Powell became famous mostly for going on Fox News and peddling unhinged ideas that even Fox management and hosts thought were “kooky” and “crazy.”) Rudy’s descent from “America’s Mayor” to a debt-ridden huckster has been amply documented. Meadows, for his part, seems to be just another politician addicted to life in the capital, whose friends and enemies alike describe him as something of an Eddie Haskell figure, “slippery,” obsequious, and ever-scheming.

I have already written about Jeffrey Clark—or, as I always call him now, “Jeffrey Bossert Clark,” because he reportedly insisted that his full name be used in Justice Department draft briefs—and John Eastman, two of the most egregious figures in this whole affair. Eastman was a law professor, a job that carries a special duty to be intellectually courageous in the face of a possible conspiracy; instead (like the former liberal lawyer turned Trump defender Kenneth Chesebro) he constructed rationales for overturning the election. Clark, at the time of the election a government employee, seems to have been an unexceptional functionary with a professional chip on his shoulder. He may also have been willing to become a danger to his fellow citizens. According to the Smith indictment, when Patrick Philbin, then the deputy White House counsel, warned “Co-Conspirator 4”—who appears to be Clark—that riots would erupt if Trump somehow remained in office beyond his term, Co-Conspirator 4 answered, “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Imagine the frisson, the sense of importance a mid-level bureaucrat such as “Co-Conspirator 4” must have felt saying something so hideous.

While some apparatchik was allegedly sitting in Washington, D.C., and blithely considering the possibility of using the U.S. military against fellow Americans, others were at work in Georgia, including Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for the rapper Ye, previously known as Kanye West. She is accused of trying to pressure the Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman to make false statements. (Freeman, along with her daughter and election co-worker Shaye Moss, had their lives upended when they were targeted by Trump and his goon squad.)

Willis is also prosecuting a group of people that is alleged to have been involved in a plot to replace Georgia’s true electors with fakes, including a former chair of the Georgia GOP and a current Georgia state senator. Meanwhile, two women—one of whom was a county election supervisor—have also been charged in an alleged breach of the voting system in Georgia’s Coffee County.

All of these people are indicted, not convicted. But few of Trump’s defenders are arguing that any of the accused didn’t actually do the things they’re charged with doing. Rather, Trump World and its associated outlets seem to be disputing whether any of these acts are crimes. (In a statement issued today, Trump’s lawyers said that the Georgia indictment “is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.”)

Nonetheless, without Trump, most of these people would never have been in remote proximity to the levers of national power. When Trump lost, they lost. The brass ring of power and influence—and, perhaps more than anything else, respect—was pulled away just inches from their hands. They now all have the importance they craved, but likely not in the way they expected.

Related:

The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture. Trump’s dangerous wannabes (From 2022)

Today’s News

At least 99 people have been confirmed dead in the Maui wildfires; Hawaii Governor Josh Green has warned that this number could double over the next 10 days as searches continue. Russia’s central bank raised interest rates by 3.5 percentage points, the highest increase since the early weeks of war in Ukraine. Typhoon Lan has hit western Japan. At least 26 people have been injured, and evacuation warnings have been sent to more than 237,000 people.

Evening Read

Illustration by Alex Cochran. Source: Getty.

These State Schools Also Favor the One Percent

By Kevin Carey

Earlier this month, the century-old Pac-12 athletic conference was swiftly and brutally eviscerated. In the space of a few hours, five member universities left for rival conferences offering massive paydays financed by TV-sports contracts. As Jemele Hill put it for The Atlantic, the shift “pits the long-term interests of schools and conferences against their own insatiable greed.”

Sports lovers are used to watching their favorite teams put money ahead of the wishes of their fans. That makes it easy to forget that this isn’t a story about professional-sports franchises—or, indeed, private entities of any kind. All five of the defecting schools are public universities: Washington, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State. The money grab in college football is just one symptom of a troubling strain in American public higher education. Many of our public universities, it turns out, don’t act very much like public institutions at all.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Right price, wrong politics The First Amendment is no defense for Trump’s alleged crimes. Afghanistan changed me.

Culture Break

Bluey Images / Disney

Read. “Pemaquid Lighthouse Revisited,” a new poem by Caleb Crain.

“How many years has it been since we were here? / How many summers, which should be spaced apart in memory / by winters, like mica planes by quartz, but aren’t?”

Watch. Bluey (streaming on Disney+), the most grown-up television show for children.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Today is the anniversary of the first day of Woodstock, the legendary 1969 music festival that became a cultural marker for the Baby Boomer generation. I am regularly called a Boomer—I was born in 1960—but Woodstock is an annual reminder that people like me are not, in any way, identifiable as Boomers.

I was 8 in the summer of 1969 and couldn’t have run off to Woodstock even if I’d known what it was. The most enduring comment about it that sticks with me is something Billy Joel said not at the time but in the liner notes of his 1981 live album, Songs in the Attic. For his majestic live version of “Captain Jack,” a depressing anthem about drugs and ennui, Joel left this glum description:

1971 and so many of my friends shoveled under the Long Island dirt. The miracle of modern chemistry killed them if Vietnam didn’t. Woodstock was a nightmare, I was there. Rain, mud, b.o., and acid. You didn’t miss anything.

When I started high school four years later, both Vietnam and the draft were over, and the late 1950s were a sanitized memory on Happy Days. I prefer to think of myself as Generation Jones, a weird notch between the Boomers and Gen X, but whatever I am, I’m not part of the group that went to—or wanted to be at—Woodstock.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The "Rico" Act helped earn Rudy Giuliani a reputation as a "mob buster". Now he's facing a Rico charge.

If justice is blind, she sometimes heads down unpredictable paths. For example, only in Donald Trump’s fourth felony indictment, unsealed last night in Atlanta, has a local prosecutor managed to deliver a sweeping, nationwide view of the former president’s scheme to steal the 2020 election.

The indictment, obtained by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, accuses Trump and 18 others of a racketeering scheme, stretching across states and months, that sought to subvert the results of the election Trump lost. Some of the names are household ones, or have become so over the last three years: Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mark Meadows. Others will be new to all but the most avid followers of the post-election machinations in Georgia.

Earlier this month, Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump in connection with the post-election scheme, but Smith kept his indictment narrow, focusing on Trump himself and just a few of the fronts along which he tried to challenge the vote.

[David A. Graham: A brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy]

Willis takes a very different approach, with 41 counts against the 19 defendants. Crucially, the charges are brought under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That’s a favorite of the prosecutor—“I’m a fan of RICO,” she said in a news conference about a gang-related case last year—that allows her to charge a large number of people with a concerted effort toward a goal, even if not all members of the group committed all of the crimes involved.

The indictment charges that Trump, the 18 co-defendants, and 30 other unindicted co-conspirators “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.”

This indictment is not a gripping read, stretching over 80-some pages and collecting 161 separate alleged overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. But in its comprehensive scope, it gives a fuller picture of the Trump’s attack on American democracy than any other indictment so far. In many ways, it echoes the report put together by the House committee on January 6 that completed its work earlier this year, just before Republicans took over the majority.

[David A. Graham: The criminal-justice system and the election are not going to get along]

The elements of the conspiracy include crimes specific to Georgia, including a breach of voting machines in Coffee County; an attempt to intimidate Ruby Freeman, an election worker in Fulton County; lies told to Georgia officials and attempts to enlist them in the election subversion; and the creation of false slates of electors to be submitted to the Electoral College.

But the indictment also sweeps up crimes committed by the defendants elsewhere, including similar efforts at the state level in Arizona and Pennsylvania; an attempt to leverage the Justice Department to help justify subversion schemes; and a ploy to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw a wrench in the January 6, 2021, certification of the election.

It is remarkable, and a bit troubling, to see a local official like Willis—even one in a huge county like Fulton—bringing charges of this scope. On the one hand, common sense says that the paperwork coup, whether or not it was criminal, was clearly a connected whole and not a series of isolated actions, and so it makes sense to treat it as such in court. Smith’s August indictment is an odd document, hitting some elements hard while ignoring others.

On the other hand, an attempt to undermine the presidential election on a national scale is clearly a matter larger than any county prosecutor’s purview. A nation in which local district attorneys feel empowered to charge presidents, current or former, is a potentially chaotic one. (What’s to stop conservative prosecutors in small counties bringing flimsy charges against Joe Biden?)

Willis has the freedom to bring a much broader case in part because she is a local prosecutor. Though under Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has emphasized its distance from politics, Smith must know how politically incendiary and possibly unworkable an enormous federal RICO endorsement would be. Perhaps even more important, he knows that if Trump or another Republican wins the 2024 election, they will be likely to try to shut down any federal prosecution as soon as they take office—incentivizing him to keep his case tightly focused and fast-moving. Willis, an elected official, doesn’t have the same political constraints, and her case isn’t subject to the whims of the federal executive branch.

[David A. Graham: Trump is acting like he’s cornered]

But proving such a case will be difficult. RICO cases are famously complicated, unwieldy, and sometimes confounding to jurors, even in less politically charged situations. In a statement last night, Trump argued that his actions as charged under the indictment constitute acts of free speech. “They are taking away President Trump’s First Amendment right to free speech, and the right to challenge a rigged and stolen election that the Democrats do all the time,” he said.

Trump also complained that the charges have taken too long to bring. Without any evidence, he wrote that Willis had “strategically stalled her investigation to try and maximally interfere with the 2024 presidential race,” adding, “They could have brought this two and half years ago.” Though investigations take time, he’s got a point. Still, underscoring that all Americans were aware of his subversion scheme at the time it was happening is not as exculpatory as Trump might like to pretend.

Whatever the reasons for the timeline, Willis has speed on her mind now. She said at a press conference after the indictments were released that she wanted a timeline bringing all 19 defendants to trial together within the next six months. That would put the case right in the heat of the Republican primary.

As I have written, the criminal-justice and political systems are not just designed not to work well together; they are designed to be separate. This case is about Trump testing the strength of the American system of governance; trying it will be yet another chance for him to test it.