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Wednesday
As I’ve been reading about the racketeering charges brought against the Trump “enterprise” by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, I’ve been struck by how important a novelistic sensibility is to the prosecution.
It’s not just that it needs to tell a good story. After all, prosecutors and defenders alike need compelling narratives to convince a jury. It’s that, with 19 indicted defendants, not to mention another 30 un-indicted and unnamed co-conspirators, how does the prosecution keep the story from spiraling out of control?
I think of what Henry James and his acolyte, the literary scholar Percy Lubbock, said of such stories. James labeled many 19th century novels by authors like Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy as “large, loose, baggy monsters”—a phrase which has evolved over the years into “big baggy monsters”—and wasn’t sure that he liked them. His own preference was for the tightly crafted fiction of Gustave Flaubert, which he emulated.
At a time when scholars weren’t sure that novels were literature, James and Lubbock argued that tightly written novels resembled poetry more than their sprawling counterparts. By this criteria, the most controlled of Dickens’s novels (Hard Times) was regarded as the most artistic.
Few literary scholars still think this way, and I myself prefer the big baggy monsters. Rather than regarding them as chaotic, we find underlying patterns.
I take this brief dip into the history of literary criticism because I think one can use the two categories—tightly constructed novels and big baggy monsters—to characterize the two indictments of Donald Trump. Jack Smith has put together a Jamesian indictment whereas Willis’s indictment is Dickensian or Tolstoyan.
It remains to be seen which is a better approach. Smith’s is built for speed, which is what we need right now since, if Trump is found guilty, people need to know before the conclusion of the Republican primary season. Willis’s complicated case may well stretch out until after the November 2024 presidential election.
But Fani Willis’s big baggy monster, like Bleak House and Anna Karenina, has a coherent throughline, which is that Trump headed an enterprise that was willing to break laws to keep him in power. Even though the 19 co-defendants didn’t sit down in a room and plot election overthrow, they were all on the same wavelength, determined to do whatever was necessary to keep Trump in power.
Thus, at one point in this novelistic story there is Trump and those close to him pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to find the necessary votes. There is Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump, Jr. pressuring Georgia Republican legislators to stay loyal to Trump. Some Georgia Republicans forge documents to become fake electors, others try to steal data from voting machines. And in the most heart-rending story of them all—one which lies at the very heart of this novel—some Trumpists pressure two election workers, a mother and a daughter, to confess to non-existent voter fraud.
After getting threatened by certain of the defendants and then vilified publicly by others—so much so that they require bodyguards and have to move—Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss say that their lives will never be the same and that nowhere do they feel safe.
There is something Dickensian or Tolstoyan about their plight, and the Georgia indictment makes for a more emotional reading experience than the stark drama of election theft laid out by Jack Smith. But just as we need both kinds of novels, so do we need both kinds of indictments. Smith’s may be first across the line—like a Flaubert novel, it’s short and to the point—but Willis’s provides more variety and gives a fuller picture.