Towards the end of the outstanding, thriller-ish documentary Trump: The Criminal Conspiracy Case, I find myself transfixed by a courtroom exchange that seems ripped straight from the script of a legal drama. Ashleigh Merchant, currently representing one of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case, is a former friend of Fulton County district attorney Fani T Willis. While Willis’s own lawyer argues that the DA should not have to testify about her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, and whether it would constitute impropriety, Willis enters the courtroom dramatically. On the stand, she coolly tells Merchant that she has been “anxious to have this conversation with you today”, her tone steely and tough. As I say, gripping. It is like an episode of The Good Wife.
This is part of the problem, of course. The future of democracy in the United States has been reduced to a salacious spectacle and it is difficult to remain focused on the issue at hand. Thinking that it’s like a TV drama, likening it to entertainment, is buying into the culture of being unable to take even the most important issues seriously. Still, television as precise as Trump: The Criminal Conspiracy Case comes in handy. It retains focus throughout its 90 minutes, and proves a rare example of a programme that doesn’t seem long enough. It is a lean, effective and chilling summary of exactly what Trump and 18 others have been accused of in Georgia: attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. (This is just one of the four criminal cases against him.)
Even if you are already familiar with the case, it is sobering and depressingly refreshing to have it all laid out with such calmness and clarity. The first hour follows the period from election night in November 2020, when Trump first claimed that he had in fact won the crucial swing state of Georgia, despite the results, to the day after the Capitol riots in January 2021. It pieces together the case against Trump and his codefendants by collecting the evidence that suggested there was a case to be brought.
Using courtroom footage, CCTV, police bodycam footage, recordings of calls to the emergency services and impressive interviews with several key figures on both sides, it manages to establish why there is so much obfuscating noise around these events, while simultaneously stripping it away to reveal the bare bones of what prosecutors allege took place. It does occasionally leave gaps, presumably for legal reasons, though this is frustrating in a documentary so concerned with conspiracy theories.
Trump defenders claim the case is politically motivated sabotage. The film examines each of the targets chosen for blame by Trump and his team: the two women accused of falsifying votes during a count; the company that manufactures voting machines, whose employees were accused of fiddling with “the chips”; and former vice president Mike Pence, who emerges as an unlikely defender of democracy. The way this film tells it, the democratic system was frighteningly close to collapse, which offers a blood-chilling pre-Halloween horror story for anyone anxious about the November rerun. It is hard to come away from this without wondering whether the entire system is fraying at the edges.
There are plenty of shocking details, but what stands out most is that those shouting “fraud” at the highest volume are also those capable of being the most reckless with the lives of ordinary working people. Those caught up in what appear to be baseless accusations of wrongdoing have had their lives turned upside down. They have been threatened, targeted, abused; they have lost friends, homes and any sense of security and safety, seemingly at the behest of their former president. People talk of a need for armed guards, secret entrances, disguises and a plan for what they will do if a man who holds strong grudges is returned to the highest office in the United States. One interviewee says this will involve fleeing the country.
The film waits until the very end to point out that these are extraordinary times in US politics, as if it needs saying. This is an enthralling account of not just the Georgia case, which continues to unspool, but of a nation in a state of turmoil, and the grievances that are powering this continuing stormy season.
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