What Comes After Indictment?

 

What Comes After Indictment?

The media are flooded this morning (March 31) with speculation on what comes next for Donald Trump following his indictment in New York yesterday. And that’s the problem: much of it is sheer speculation. But what can he and we know for sure?

As always in times of uncertainty, one should consult a dictionary. Or, even better, several dictionaries. What hope, then, or warnings or encouragement does a brief survey reveal for the indicted former president? (It’s been said that the only place where success comes before work is the dictionary. Now, Trump can adapt that and ask, “What comes after indictment?”)

My Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, which I got in grad school at Indiana University, holds out the most encouraging hope for the former president: immediately after indictment it lists indifference: “the quality, state or fact of being indifferent.” Maybe after the initial flurry of news stories and analysis, we’ll eventually shrug over the slow, protracted legal fights that lie ahead. Maybe Trump’s attorneys, with their endless appeals, will reduce the nation to the equivalent of a food coma, in which we eventually either fall asleep or say, “We’ve had enough. We just don’t care any more; what’s on ESPN?.”

All those legal maneuverings won’t come cheap, so it’s no surprise that a few entries further on in my Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary we find indigent.

A more dramatic suggestion comes from my comprehensive Compact Oxford Dictionary, condensed to two fat volumes of tiny print accompanied by a magnifying glass. This dictionary offers Trump another option: soon after indictment is indies, with the implied suggestion that he consider fleeing to the West Indies.

But however things play out, if Trump read a little beyond indictment in each of these dictionaries the newly indicted former Commander-in-Chief would unavoidably encounter indigestion.

[300 words]