Opinion | Their hands don’t lie: Republican candidates trash the trial by jury

Because the formulation put to the candidates — would you support Trump even if he were convicted by a jury? — was so stark, and the response so appalling. Every candidate on the stage — with the exception of former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and, depending on how you interpret his hand gestures, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie — effectively declared that a trial by jury is just another American institution that must yield to the demands of Trump.

Pause to consider the implications of this answer. To answer that you would support Trump notwithstanding a jury verdict — to shoot up your hand in the eager manner of Vivek Ramaswamy or to gauge the room like a calculating Ron DeSantis — is to say: I do not trust the judgment of the American people.

Believe, if you will, that the criminal justice system, at the federal and state levels, has been weaponized against Trump. Believe that the Biden administration is out to get him, along with state and local prosecutors. Believe, even, that juries in liberal jurisdictions such as New York and the District of Columbia are irrevocably biased against him.

But the candidates’ answers — yes, most said, I would still support him — mean that even if a jury in the classified-documents case were to find Trump guilty of obstructing justice and illegally retaining classified documents, Trump’s rivals would not be deterred from their slavish support.

Whom do you believe — Trump or a group of 12 jurors, sworn to be impartial, required to be unanimous in their verdict, instructed that the government has the burden of proving its case against him and that the evidence must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?

If you are a Republican running for president, the answer is: Trump, of course.

It would be possible to caveat this answer with the reservation that convictions are subject to appeal and that, although judges are generally reluctant to second-guess jury verdicts, there might be legitimate legal arguments available to Trump. This is not the level of sophistication and nuance on which the candidates were operating. They were simply backing Trump, reflexively and completely.

Is there anything left of our legal system and the rule of law if we follow this path? It is hard to discern what that might be. Hutchinson got it right, but he was the only one. “Obviously I’m not going to support somebody who’s been convicted of a serious felony or who is disqualified under our Constitution, and that’s consistent with [Republican National Committee] rules, and I hope everybody would agree with me,” he said. Good luck with that.

Christie, for his part, tried to slice the salami too thin. “Someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct, okay?” he said. “Now whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of president of the United States.”

Yes, but that is not the only point, and that was not the question. The question was whether you would respect a jury verdict. If you are hedging, your answer is no, and you should know better.

There are, I suppose, some glimmers of hope to be found in this week’s twin spectacles. The candidates, notwithstanding the mass hand-raising, did manage to mostly agree that former vice president Mike Pence did the right thing in certifying the election results. Trump, not that he had much of a choice, did the un-Trumpian thing of, literally, surrendering, at the Fulton County Jail.

And yet, it was a bad week — another bad week — for American institutions. “Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty,” John Adams said in 1774. In 1788, as the Constitution was being debated, Alexander Hamilton observed, “The friends and adversaries of the plan of the convention, if they agree in nothing else, concur at least in the value they set upon trial by jury.” Thomas Jefferson called jury trials “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

We are living in unanchored times, in which ambitious candidates jettison cherished constitutional principles to placate the kind of tyrant the framers most feared.