Editorial: Latest charges against Trump will put America's sense of self to the test

It is an indication of former President Donald Trump’s seismic and sorry impact on American democracy that we have to speak in terms of his "latest" indictment.

But the charges handed down Tuesday against the twice-impeached former president — following indictments over hush money paid to a porn star and another over classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago — are of another order altogether.

The third indictment leveled against Palm Beach’s most famous resident accuse Mr. Trump of four crimes arising from the shameful Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.

The legal team led by Special Counsel Jack Smith alleges that a sitting president of the United States sought to overturn the results of an election and to deny voters the right to choose their candidate.

Think about that for a minute.

A president, determined to stay in power even though he knew he had lost the election, decided to overthrow the will of the American people and reinstall himself in office, according to the charges. And six co-conspirators, including Palm Beach homeowner and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, allegedly helped Mr. Trump try to do it, in part by recruiting fake slates of electors in a bid to stop the certification of the November 2020 vote.

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It’s no wonder that observers are comparing this indictment to the most explosive Supreme Court legal decisions of the past: The Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied that Blacks could be citizens of the United States, and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which did away with the separate-but-unequal doctrines that enabled segregation. Those decisions forever changed American society, and caused us to think about fundamental things: What kind of country are we? What kind do we want to be?

Smith’s indictment suggests that we came very close to losing our country as a democracy in the last days of the Trump presidency. And if he is re-elected, Mr. Trump has promised to institute a retribution-fueled authoritarian regime in which the civil service is answerable to him alone, and not the people.

It is no surprise to hear his supporters attack this indictment as a continued “witch hunt” against Mr. Trump, or to frame it, as Mr. Giuliani did, as an assault on free speech. A likely fourth indictment from Georgia over Mr. Trump’s bid to “find” votes he didn’t earn, and change the result in that state, will generate more of the same outrage from his base.

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It says something deeply disturbing about the country that Mr. Trump, who pleaded not guilty Thursday to the latest charges, could be so far ahead in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. His base of support is unshakeable, and examining the reasons for that will occupy historians for decades.

Which does not change the impact of Tuesday’s indictment. We are called on again — just as we were in the Civil War, and as we were during the rise of the civil rights movement — to determine what kind of country we want the United States to be, and how it should be governed. Do we respect the expressed will of our fellow Americans, even if we disagree with it, and let power be transferred peacefully?

Or do we want a strongman regime that can simply brush aside any result it doesn’t like, so that the ballot box itself is rendered meaningless?

Tuesday's indictment is about much more than a list of criminal charges against a former president, unprecedented though that is.

The nature of the charges shows us that this is nothing less than an existential moment for the United States. If a president is within his rights to refuse to leave when the voters have dismissed him, then the American experiment is truly over.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Editorial: America at a crosswords with latest Trump charges