Criminal charges against Donald Trump may not matter. People in Modesto know why | Opinion
Donald Trump’s legal trouble is his own making. But facts won’t matter in his presidential race if enough voters are convinced that he’s just a victim of a vast conspiracy to get him at all costs.
People in Modesto know that the use of government enforcement power to discredit an opponent is a very real thing, because they’ve watched it happen here. Twice.
The political careers of former Modesto Mayor Carmen Sabatino and Stanislaus County district attorney candidate Frank Carson both were effectively destroyed when they were accused in unrelated high-profile criminal cases — even though both won their trials in court.
Shortly after Sabatino was elected in late 1999, I was assigned to cover City Hall. His four years in office were filled with conflict. Many powerful people were alarmed by his conduct and clearly wanted him gone.
I had reported on his questionable judgment in spending taxpayer dollars on golf rounds, limo rides and excessive cell phone use. No one was terribly surprised when then-District Attorney James Brazelton (who died in 2007) announced 10 felony charges, most alleging corruption of one kind or another, just as Sabatino was preparing to stand for reelection in 2003.
He lost, unable to clear the cloud of suspicion. Voters in those days, especially in the Valley, where respect for authority runs deep, would not embrace someone accused of breaking the law.
Except he didn’t, some jurors decided in a hung jury verdict three years later.
Political vendettas in Modesto
Sabatino openly accused some of Modesto’s most powerful public figures of conspiring to ruin him, and to their infinite discomfort, he named names. He went on to lose several races on various levels — more than a dozen in his life, which ended Jan. 1, 2020. He insisted to the end that he’d been the victim of political prosecution. And he was right.
Sabatino’s defense attorney was none other than Carson, who had made a name and career as a thorn in the side of law enforcement. Both men seemed to take joy in upsetting the establishment.
Some saw Carson’s 2015 arrest on suspicion of murder as retaliation for him having run for district attorney the year before. It’s more likely that Carson’s run was a preemptive strike, a middle finger to the powers that were because he sensed authorities were closing in on him. He didn’t think he would win, he didn’t really want the job, and no one was surprised when then-District Attorney Birgit Fladager beat Carson by a landslide.
A few months later, she charged Carson and eight others in the 2012 death of Korey Kauffman. Carson’s trial lasted 17 months — longer than O.J. Simpson’s, Charles Manson’s and everyone else in California except the Hillside Strangler (1981-83), a Los Angeles Times researcher found. When it finally ended, Carson walked free — a monumental humiliation for Fladager’s office memorialized in an eight-episode Times podcast. He died 14 months after the acquittal.
Fladager always has insisted that she pursued Carson’s conviction not because he challenged her in a political race but because he was guilty — never mind the expense to taxpayers at a time when her office was hemorrhaging attorneys and declining to prosecute some crimes for lack of resources.
Prosecutorial blindness smacks of vendetta, a hallmark of political prosecution. When people see that, trust in government diminishes.
Trump’s run could hinge on perception
What does any of this have to do with the former president?
Before Trump changed norm after norm in this country, no presidential candidate facing three criminal indictments would have stood a chance with voters. But by all accounts, Trump is spinning those indictments into political gold.
His supporters don’t seem to care that he may have paid hush money to a porn star, tried to strong-arm election officials to steal an election, or assembled a mob that took over the U.S. Capitol. All that can be disregarded if people are convinced that Trump, the undisputed master of grievances, is indeed a victim of political prosecution.
That’s why, as news broke of his third indictment, Trump’s team released a statement denouncing “the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election.”
It’s all about perception.
The legal community calls it jury nullification when jurors ignore facts to arrive at the outcome they think is right. Trump is banking on voter nullification.
What he did doesn’t matter as much as the perception that he’s being unfairly picked on.
It’s not possible to predict at this stage whether Trump’s gambit will work. If enough people across America have seen what we have here in Modesto — the use of government power to squash a defiant opponent — it just might.
This story was originally published August 3, 2023 at 9:31 AM.
