I want to quibble with this line from Damon Linker’s New York Times piece on the second Trump indictment:

We don’t have to speculate about the immediate political consequences. Public-spirited and law-abiding Americans believe the appropriate response of voters to news that their favored candidate faces indictment is to turn on him and run the other way.

As a matter of general principle — and that, rather than as a critique specific to Trump, is how Linker presents it — this strikes me as a wholly unworkable notion. Certainly, I can see the argument for turning on a given political candidate if he has been convicted. But indicted? That’s downright illiberal. Indictments are accusations. They’re charges. They’re allegations, complaints, hypotheses. They’re the first step in the process, not the last.

Here’s the same New York Times explaining what an indictment is and is not:

An indictment, whether it is handed up in federal or state court, is a formal accusation — not a conviction — and it is among the first moves a prosecutor can make to bring a case to trial.

When a person is indicted in a criminal court in the United States, it means that a grand jury composed of residents chosen at random believed there was enough evidence to charge that person with a crime. Such panels, generally convened by judges at the request of prosecutors, meet for weeks, and can hear evidence in a variety of cases. The judge is not present during grand jury proceedings after the jurors are chosen, and jurors are able to ask the witnesses questions.

Unlike a criminal trial, where a jury has to reach a unanimous verdict, a grand jury can issue an indictment with a simple majority.

To set up a standard by which a mere accusation is enough to prompt “public-spirited” and “law-abiding” Americans to “turn on” a person and then “run the other way” would be to set up a standard by which any accusation of wrongdoing — even when false — represented sufficient warrant to end an aspirant’s political career. Donald Trump aside, I don’t think we’d want to live in that country.