'Deeply sinister': Analyst laments Jack Smith's report laid bare 'perverse incentives'

Special counsel Jack Smith's report on the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election only serves to underscore how badly the system failed to hold President-elect Donald Trump accountable, conservative analyst David Frum wrote for The Atlantic on Tuesday.

Trump has spent much of the morning raging against this development — but, Frum noted, all the report really shows is that he won.

"Compared with the present outcome, it would have been better if President Joe Biden had pardoned Trump for the January 6 coup attempt," wrote Frum. "A pardon would at least have upheld the theory that violent election overthrows are wrong and illegal. A pardon would have said: The U.S. government can hold violent actors to account. It just chooses not to do so in this case. Instead, the special counsel’s report delivers a confession of the helplessness of the U.S. government."

Trump and his supporters, wrote Frum, "have transgressed the most fundamental rule of a constitutional regime, the prohibition against political violence — and instead of suffering consequences, they have survived, profited, and returned to power. If anything, the transgression has made them more powerful than they otherwise would have been" — because whereas in Trump's first term he actually had some actors in his government reining him in, this time he made support of the coup a "test of loyalty" for who can join this one.

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All of this, he notes, comes after the Supreme Court tried to struggle its way through the question of how much immunity a president enjoys for criminal acts committed in office, coming up with a halfway answer that left many legal experts frustrated.

"Now comes the Smith report with its simpler answer: If a former president wins reelection, he has immunity for even the worst possible crimes committed during his first term in office," Frum concluded. "The incentives contained in this outcome are clear, if perverse. And they are deeply sinister to the future of democracy in the United States."