Portside

Whether they like it or not, the three prosecutors who have now indicted Donald Trump in four different cases – the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who is bringing charges in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; the special counsel Jack Smith, who is bringing federal charges against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents and January 6 cases; and now Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who is bringing state charges against Trump regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia – are now the former president’s political opponents. They pose a greater risk to his political future than any of his primary rivals.

This, at least, is how Trump is behaving as his presidential campaign lumbers toward 2024: as if he’s running against the prosecution. For one thing, Trump is acting like the prosecutions are political attacks. In the lead-up to the Georgia indictment, he aired TV ads attacking Willis. And for another, the cases are costing him a tremendous amount of money. A Pac that the former president is using to pay his mounting legal fees, Save America, recently requested a refund of a donation it had made to another group supporting Trump’s re-election effort. The money couldn’t go to campaign efforts, as had been planned, because it was needed to pay the legal fees. That’s how rapidly lawyers’ bills are adding up for the former president and his long list of indicted allies.

That list got a lot longer late Monday night, when Willis’s office unsealed an indictment charging Trump and 18 others on charges derived from Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico. Trump himself was charged with 13 felony counts stemming from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, including not just racketeering but also soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, and numerous conspiracy and false statements charges.

The wide-ranging indictment is the result of a two-and-a-half-year investigation undertaken using a special grand jury, and charges stem from incidents ranging from election day 2020 to September 2022, when defendants allegedly perjured themselves in testimony to the grand jury in an attempt to cover up the scheme. The query began after the release of audio of a call in which Trump urged the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to invalidate votes for Biden in majority-Black Atlanta and “find 11,780 votes” to allow Trump to win the state.

Willis has taken a broad view of her mandate, taking advantage of state law’s expanded purview to charge much more expansively in Georgia than Jack Smith has under federal law. Willis has said in the past that she uses Rico charges to tell a complete story of a criminal enterprise to a jury, and the indictment is designed to allow her prosecutorial team to bring in out-of-state conduct in order to add context to the broader effort to overturn the election. The indictment depicts the effort to overturn the election results in Georgia and elsewhere as a criminal enterprise engaged in a conspiracy to commit illegal activity and then cover it up, with Trump as the syndicate boss.

In addition to false statements about election fraud made by the likes of Rudy Giuliani to the Georgia legislature, the indictment also surveys conduct in places as far afield as Pennsylvania and Arizona; includes charges related to the false electors scheme in Georgia; and details a bizarre incident on 7 January 2021 in which a firm employed by the conspiracist Trump lawyer Sidney Powell illegally confiscated confidential election data from voting machines in rural Coffee county with the help of one of those fake electors, the Georgia state Republican official Cathy Latham.

Giuliani, Powell and Latham are all co-defendants, along with figures such as the disgraced law professor John Eastman, the fake electors scheme architect Kenneth Chesebro, the Department of Justice official Jeff Clark, the Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, the former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, and the then Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer. In addition to the 19 defendants, the indictment lists 30 unindicted co-conspirators.

Willis has said that she plans to try all defendants at the same trial. That’s a recipe for chaos: 19 defendants means that there will be multiple defense teams, using multiple strategies to throw sand in the procedural gears of the court and delay, delay, delay. But it also creates many vulnerabilities for the former president: there will be a lot of opportunities for people to flip, and testify against Trump. And those co-defendants may have even more incentive to turn on their old boss than in the other cases, because in Georgia, the Rico charge faced by Trump and other defendants carries a mandatory minimum of five years in prison.

Of the criminal cases against Trump, this is the most expansive and ambitious. It may also be among the most significant for the country. As a state charge, it cannot be crushed if Trump returns to power; in Georgia, due to a history of corruption and Klan affiliations among state officials, the governor does not have pardon power, and so Trump cannot look to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for reprieve. Alvin Bragg’s hush money case seems the weakest of the charges, and Jack Smith’s documents case appears to be the strongest. But though Trump’s flouting of the law both in and outside of office has been prolific, it is his attempts to overturn the will of the voters and illegally retain power that are the most dangerous for our country, most offensive to our nation’s shared aspiration to democratic self-rule.

The fact that the scheme has not been punished – and that it seemed, for a while, as if neither Congress nor prosecutors would have the courage and political will to punish it – was a profound insult to American citizens. The coming months promise to be chaotic, vitriolic and stupid. Trump will try to spin the indictments as evidence of his martyrdom; his Republican allies will rally to his defense in whichever way they think will improve their own electoral prospects while also keeping them out of jail; journalists will be tasked with repeating, over and over, the bare facts, trying to etch out a legible sketch of reality for their readers amid the onslaught of cynical fictions.

But the upcoming trials of Donald Trump, some of which appear to be on track to happen at the height of the presidential election, might also offer a thorough reckoning with what happened after the 2020 election, and an opportunity, for the first time, to truly hold the perpetrators accountable. That, at least, is much needed.

Another specter hangs over this latest indictment of Trump, however. The conspiracy that followed the former president’s 2020 election loss seems to have been a scheme not just to stay in power but to spare the man humiliation. “I don’t want people to know that we lost,” the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump told his advisers. “This is embarrassing.”

If Trump loses again in 2024, he will face not only the prospect of embarrassment, but the prospect of jail time. We should all fear what he might do to avoid it.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist