What sealed Trump’s fate | TIME

In HG Wells science fiction classic The War of the Worlds, aliens from Mars invade Earth. The military resists, but human technology is no match for Martian tripods and death rays. Within weeks, the aliens have defeated the defenders and appear ready to conquer the planet. And then, mysteriously, they die. It turns out they had no resistance to the bacteria ubiquitous in our world. They were killed, writes Wells, “after all the plans of man had failed, for the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, had placed upon this earth.”

That’s what came to mind when I heard that a New York jury had convicted Donald Trump of 34 crimes. What seemed like an unstoppable force was brought down by the humblest of state laws. And while 34 criminal convictions may not actually stop Trump, the trial tells us something important about the strengths and weaknesses of America’s constitutional structure.

See more information: Trump is now a criminal. What voters do with this information will write the history of this era

In 2016, some people expected the Electoral College to stop Trump. Hamilton voters, they were called. Did not happen. So impeachment would happen, not once, but twice. Again, no data. And finally, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, written to protect us from oath-breaking rebels, came to the rescue only to be rejected by a unanimous vote of the Supreme Court.

All of these attempts to stop Trump had a few things in common. The first is that they used the tools that the Constitution gives us to prevent bad people from occupying the office of President. These tools are the heavy artillery, the sophisticated devices carefully crafted to protect us from thugs, demagogues, and would-be tyrants. The second is that they all failed – shamefully.

This does not happen because they were not built correctly or designed for these circumstances. Historians and constitutional scholars who opined on Section 3 and the impeachment they tended to agree that Trump presented exactly the threat they should combat. (Hamilton’s electoral scheme was a bit more marginal, but some experts supported too.) The problem is that the safeguards built into the political system are only as good as the politicians who enforce them. The Constitution is no better than the Court that interprets it. The black smoke of partisanship and self-interest (perhaps very similar to Wells) Worlds War) only has to corrupt a few members of the ruling elite for our constitutional defenses to fail.

Trump benefited from this failure, but did not cause it. Our constitutional system does. The electoral college gave us Trump as president, even though nearly 3 million more Americans chose Hillary Clinton. The Senate not only refused to convict in Trump’s impeachments; blocked Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland and gave us the Supreme Court with a Trump supermajority. And if you think the Supreme Court is a defender of democracy, think again. Our noble Senate, our sacred Supreme Court, our sacred Constitution – none of these things protected us from Trump. Overall, they empowered him.

The reason Trump was ultimately held accountable was not that he ran afoul of the special rules that govern the highest levels of our political system, the kinds of things that ordinary Americans are not subject to. (Ordinary citizens, for example, don’t have to worry about impeachment, or Section Three, or faithless electors.) It wasn’t that the enlightened members of our government rose up against it. It turned out, however, that he was unable to cope with the obligations that law-abiding citizens assume as a matter of course in their everyday lives. That’s when 12 ordinary Americans, in an unglamorous courtroom, decided that he had violated the laws that everyone else must follow.

We often think of our system of governance as defined by things that the Constitution creates, structures like the Senate, the Supreme Court, or the electoral college, and processes like impeachment. But negative space matters too — and that’s the backdrop to the state law. State law, not federal law or the Constitution, is the primary regulator for most Americans. State law creates the environment in which we all live; you could say it’s in the air we breathe.

While campaigning for the Republican nomination in 2016, Trump he said that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. Not for the shooting, perhaps. But most people would go to prison for that, and it’s possible that 34 criminal charges drives home a point that some have missed. Most Americans are not involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits. They do not exaggerate their net worth, market questionable training programs as if they were their own universityor manage companies that engage in tax fraud. The fact that the most common of laws has finally caught up with Trump may make it clear how far apart the divide is between him and the normal Americans he claims to defend. State law that applies equally to everyone did what the Constitution’s special rules could not.