For the most dangerous reasons, the former president wants his supporters to imagine him doing a perp walk in NYC, but that’s not about to happen.
By Keith Reed
If Donald Trump is indicted by a Manhattan grand jury this morning (or tomorrow, or the next day), as both he and media reports predict, you can rest assured that another thing won’t be happening: his perp walk.
If you relish the thought of the ex-president with his small, pale hands cuffed behind his portly trunk, balding crown visible through his combover as ducks into an NYPD cruiser, abandon that bit of schadenfreude now. Instead, consider that that visual is exactly the image Trump wants you to have, despite the nearly impossibility that it’ll actually happen. You’re playing right into his tiny hands.
Indictments don’t always preface arrests, at least not in the way we’re used to seeing a suspect led away for a shooting or robbery. Rarely does it end there in cases like Trump’s, where the accusation is a nonviolent charge and the accused is a one-percenter among one-percenters: a self-purported billionaire former commander-in-chief with a team of attorneys and a Secret Service detail fully capable of negotiating his orderly surrender. What’s a lot more likely, in fact what’s already being planned, is a tidy trip to a Manhattan courthouse complete with security provided by the NYPD, Secret Service and other agencies.
So why does Trump keep squawking about the prospect of being arrested as if that’s a real thing? And why do so many in the media keep using the word? The answer is just as dangerous as his rhetoric in the weeks before the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, and New Yorkers in particular should be paying really close attention.
Trump is playing us all again, in the same way he has been since he first floated the idea of running for the presidency in the middle of Barack Obama’s second term. He’s using the formula that’s worked for him his entire short, awful political career: say a ridiculous thing (“Obama’s a secret Muslim,” “I’ll get Mexico to pay for a border wall,” “The election was stolen!”), know that the press can’t ignore that thing either because it has news value or because it’s just salacious, and then watch that thing take on a life of its own.
This oversimplifies how Trump operates; his appeal to the worst corners of right-wing Crazytown depends on deep-seated bigotry and resentments that far predate him. But it still accurately captures the tactics that fomented his presidency and how he succeeded in getting his most zealous and gullible devotees to try overthrowing a 246-year-old democracy on his behalf. And that’s where his invocation of the word “arrest” and the perp-walk imagery it conjures get dangerous.
Trump floated the idea that he could be arrested this past weekend as it became clear through media reports that a Manhattan grand jury looked likely to hand down an indictment over his alleged involvement in an illegal scheme to hide campaign funds that were used to pay former porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an affair. “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK,” he posted on his fake-Twitter site, Truth Social on Saturday morning. And then: “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”
It’s that last part that’s the point. Trump doesn’t troll without a purpose, and his purpose here is testing whether he still has the juice to spark another violent demonstration to his perceived benefit, this time in New York rather than Washington. Law enforcement agencies have already started planning for that possibility, though whether or not they have actionable intelligence that violence is imminent isn’t clear. ( PBS and the Associated Press report that Trump’s call to rally his troops was a swing and a miss; maybe because so many of the people who responded to the last one are currently locked up).
Whenever charges are handed down against Trump, it will be a circus, so feel free to get your popcorn ready. A history-making indictment of the immediate past president of the United States is pretty much appointment viewing. But if it’s a perp-walk you expect, just ask yourself where you got that visual, and adjust your expectations accordingly.
