A criminologist explains why half of America does not care about Trump's crimes

Since 2023, when Donald Trump was criminally indicted in a combined four criminal cases on 91 felony counts, I have repeatedly been asked to explain how one-half of the American public seemingly does not care about the alleged crimes committed by their former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

Conversely, not once has anybody asked me to explain why the other half of America cares so deeply about holding Trump accountable for his alleged willful retention of national defense information, obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States government, soliciting and impersonating public officers, conspiracy to commit forgery, false statements, falsification of business records and obstruction of justice.

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The answer to this two-sided question — why an exaggerated half-and-half America does or does not “give a damn” about Trump’s crimes — has less to do with whether folks think the former president is a criminal.

Nor is this division about whether people believe juries will find Trump guilty or innocent of violating these particular criminal statutes.

The answer has much more to do with the social reality that these transgressions are not ordinary or commonplace offenses as criminologists refer to them.

Rather, these offenses are ideological or political in nature — as evidenced by the unsigned majority opinion of SCOTUS’ ruling on the 14th Amendment earlier this week.

Supreme Court, off-course

While I agree with the 9-0 decision that individual states should not have the right to disqualify insurrectionary candidates from running for national office, I also agree with the three liberal and one conservative justice who concurred that the conservative majority went too far in limiting the ability of federal officials to disqualify candidates that have violated their oaths of office.

More importantly, I agree with constitutional law professors William Baude, Michael Paulsen and Laurence Tribe, as well as Judge Michael Luttig, who argue that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the part that speaks to disqualifying people from holding office — “requires no legislation, criminal conviction, or other judicial action in order to effectuate its command,” as neatly summarized by Cornell University law professor Michael C. Dorf.

Instead, Section 3 is “self-executing” in the same way that treaties are self-serving. Because the Supreme Court rejected the very idea, Trump supporters and others may believe that there are no laws in place to enforce the law.

As I wrote last week in Raw Story, Trump just received the gift of time, and democracy’s clock is ticking because the United States has no laws in place against domestic terrorism and acts of rebellion or insurrection.

Had there been a federal law against insurrections in place, then Special Counsel Jack Smith would have been able to straight-up indict Trump or his unindicted co-conspirators for their crimes.

Meanwhile, what I am more disturbed about is that SCOTUS has needlessly delayed the January 6th trial from March 4th to now at the earliest late summer. All because it unnecessarily granted certiorari as well as a stay after a panel of three DC Circuit Court Appellate judges had ruled unanimously in a striking 57-page opinion that the US justice system allows for a former president to face charges for actions he took while in office.

In addition, the panel held that a potentially criminal president should be held accountable because the interests of the people outweigh any “chilling effects’ this may cause on the office of the presidency.

'Self-interest of their perpetrator'

So what do criminologists mean when we maintain that Trump and his conspiring allies have been engaging in ideological or political offenses?

A classic definition was put forth in 1972 by the late M. Denis Szabo, a Canadian criminologist. He wrote in the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy that ideological or political crimes are “those infractions committed for reasons over and above the self-interest of their perpetrator and which are an attempt to achieve changes of a political, social or religious order.”

Few people on either side of the political aisle would disagree with the assertion that Trump has been attempting to achieve changes in the order of things in the United States not only on the day of January 6, 2021, but pretty much every day since.

The Republican-Democratic divide, however, has to do with whether Trump committed these infractions over and above his self-interest.

Democrats are of the belief that Trump’s offenses were all about himself and his quest for unchecked power and that he should be held accountable for his illegal actions.

Republican supporters of Trump are of the belief that his actions — as well as his inactions — on January 6 were not about the former president’s personal grievances per se.

Rather, they believe that the criminal indictment regarding Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election are about an “illegitimate” 2020 presidential election, one that Trump actually won.

They also believe that the felony charges against Trump are principally retribution for Trump protecting his supporters from all manner of bogeymen: the Deep State, crooked Joe Biden, a weaponized Department of Justice.

Thus far, the Supreme Court’s rulings in both the 14th Amendment and presidential immunity case have helped to reinforce Trump’s narrative that these criminal indictments aren’t really about him, they are about his legions of MAGA followers.

In equating his problems with their problems, Trump has ample fodder — bogus as it may be — to once again argue that his legal troubles are not of his own doing, but rather, the work of political adversaries who have been conspiring to interfere with his retaking of the White House from Biden in 2025.

Back in the early 17th century when the secular aspects of political power were developed and kings became increasingly independent of the church, central power was becoming more important than local power. During the transition, a legal tradition was born in democratic- pluralistic societies to remove political crimes against the state from the regular courts. These political criminals would receive leniency that often involved exile or banishment “for the good of the state” by reducing the potential for social conflict and violence.

These criminal and penal relations become more complicated when the crimes like rebellion or insurrection are perpetrated by agents of the state no less than by the sitting president.

So because the Supreme Court has both dodged the constitutional question of insurrection and delayed the adjudication of the January 6 criminal trial until after people will have started voting shortly after Labor Day, we won’t actually learn whether Trump supporters would have abandoned him after this particular criminal conviction.

I suspect, however, that they would be more likely to accept Trump's criminal conviction by a jury of his peers than they would another loss by the American people.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice and the author of numerous books on the crimes of the powerful, includingCriminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel,Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy, to be published April 1.