editorials
Trump Pleads Not Guilty
E arlier this week, former President Donald Trump
entered a Miami courthouse to respond to criminal
charges made against him by the Office of Special
Counsel of the Department of Justice that, among other
things, he violated the Espionage Act by knowingly
mishandling classified documents that he kept upon
leaving office and obstructed the government’s efforts
to reclaim them.

The 37-count indictment against the former president
— which provides detail regarding the charges of willful
retention of national defense secrets, conspiracy to
obstruct justice and the making of false statements in
response to inquiries about them — are serious criminal
charges. A conviction on any one of them could have
significant consequences. Trump pled not guilty.

We feel like we’ve seen this movie before, even
though we haven’t. Trump, who loves to claim he is the
first person in history to do one thing or another, now
has the dubious honor of being the first former president
to face federal criminal charges. But part of the reason
we feel a sense of déjà vu is that the federal indictment
comes about two months after local prosecutors in New
York City filed more than 30 felony charges against
Trump in a case arising from hush money payments
made to a porn actress before the 2016 presidential
election. Trump denied those charges.

And we have been regularly reminded about two
other criminal investigations that are being pursued
separately from the New York and Miami indictments:
First, a Justice Department investigation of Trump’s
wide-ranging efforts to stay in power after losing the
2020 election, and how those efforts led to the Jan.

6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

And second, an inquiry by the district attorney in
Fulton County, Georgia, relating to possible election
interference by Trump in the 2020 election.

Had anything of this magnitude happened to almost
any other national politician a decade or more ago,
the result would have been largely predictable. The
politician would declare his innocence, bow out of public
activity and pledge to devote his full time to support his
family and to the necessary fight against the forces of
evil that conspired to take him down. But that’s not how
Donald Trump operates.

Trump’s approach is to confront his accusers,
declare and repeat his own narrative of the facts that
may or may not be grounded in truth, and ascribe
improper motive to anything his opponents do or
say. Trump is a master at playing the victim card. He
has perfected an aggressive approach that enables
him to strengthen support from his base and beyond
notwithstanding accusations of serious malfeasance,
and parlay that support into increased fundraising and
higher poll numbers. We saw that result following the
New York indictment and are seeing it again with the
Miami charges.

But Trump’s multiple criminal indictments present
an opportunity. Although the ever-expanding group
challenging Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential
nomination needs to walk a careful line, the stage is set
for the emergence of a credible alternative to Trump’s
narcissistic narrative in which he considers himself not
merely above the law, but wholly unlimited by it.

The Miami indictment is serious. Trump would
be well-advised to take it seriously. And so should
his supporters. ■
ast week, Oklahoma’s virtual charter school
board voted 3-2 to approve the opening
of the nation’s first religious charter school. If
allowed to proceed as planned in 2024, the
K-12 online school named St. Isidore of Seville
Catholic Virtual School will be run by the Roman
Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the
Diocese of Tulsa, with religious teaching and
Catholic doctrine woven into every aspect of the
school’s program.

As a charter school — a public school that
is independently managed — the St. Isidore
school would be fully funded by taxpayer dollars.

Since public schools aren’t supposed to provide
religious education (even though they are
permitted to teach about religion) the Oklahoma board’s
decision sets the stage for a high-profile legal fight over
the constitutionality of the plan and the boundaries of the
separation of church and state under the Constitution.

And that’s exactly what Oklahoma’s previously obscure
virtual charter school board set out to do, with the active
encouragement of the state’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt
and the Republican-controlled state legislature.

The creation of religious charter schools is not a
new issue for Oklahoma. It has been in the works for
years. In addition to the consideration of vouchers, tax
credits and other means to offer subsidies to parents
16 JUNE 15, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
to help pay for non-public school tuition, often at
religious schools, the question of the legality of creating
a religious charter school was presented in 2022 to
Oklahoma’s then-Attorney General John M. O’Connor.

He opined that Supreme Court precedent supported
the view that publicly funded religious charter schools
are permissible. That opinion was withdrawn by the
state’s current attorney general, Gentner Drummond,
who recommended strongly against the plan.

But Stitt was on a mission. Three days before the
board vote on the religious charter school proposal,
Stitt appointed a new board member who provided
the deciding vote in support of the plan. Stitt
celebrated the board’s “courage” and declared,
“This is a win for religious liberty and education
freedom.” His attorney general, on the other
hand, bemoaned the fact that “board members
violated their oath in order to fund religious
schools with our tax dollars.”
While some government money already goes
to a wide range of religious private schools
throughout the country, including Jewish day
schools and yeshivot, those funds are earmarked
for secular or other non-religious purposes like
health and safety issues, special education,
secular textbooks and busing. And although
organized efforts are being pursued to expand
funding, Jewish schools have been sensitive to what
has been understood until now as the need to steer
clear of government funding for religious education and
programming. As unlikely as it seems, that could change
under the Oklahoma case.

Shortly after the board’s vote, Americans United
for Separation of Church and State announced that
it is preparing legal action to challenge the decision.

Proponents for and against the plan are lining up on
respective sides of the issue. The case will ultimately be
decided by the Supreme Court. And advocates on both
sides can’t wait to get there. ■
iStock / Getty Images Plus / klenger
Oklahoma’s Religious Charter School Challenge
L



opinions & letters
letters A House Divided
Michael Gelman
P olitical disagreements
are nothing new. But in
a healthy democracy,
ideological and
policy disagreements are settled
through elections, and citizens on both sides respect
the outcome and the rule of law.

More than 40 years ago, the Watergate scandal
tested the strength of our democracy. For the first
time since just after the Civil War, a president faced
imminent impeachment. Some feared violence and a
constitutional crisis. But Republicans and Democrats
put principle before politics and Republican leaders,
to their credit, called upon Richard Nixon to step
down for the good of the country. The system worked
because both sides, despite significant ideological
differences, ultimately shared common values related
to our democracy.

Today’s Republican Party refuses to recognize
fundamental democratic values. The U.S. Capitol
was not attacked during the Civil War, nor did angry
mobs storm the Capitol in support of Richard Nixon.

But on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump incited a violent,
deadly insurrection designed to impede the peaceful
transfer of power. Yet, instead of condemning Trump
and the insurrectionists, 147 Republican members of
Congress voted to overturn the lawful results of the
2020 presidential election.

The recent indictments of Trump on 37 felony
charges should have been followed by bipartisan calls
to respect the judicial process and the rule of law.

Instead, Republicans have defiantly echoed Trump’s
implicit threats of disorder and violence. Speaker of
the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on June 9
that the indictments are “going to disrupt this nation
because it goes to the core of equal justice for all,
which is not being seen today. And we’re not going
to stand for it.”
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said, “We have now
June 8 Poll Results
Have you ever served
on jury duty?
Haredi Not Pulling Their Weight
reached the war phase. An eye for an eye.” Rep.

Clay Higgins (R-La.) referred to the indictments as
“a perimeter probe from the oppressors.” Kari Lake
of Arizona said that most Trump supporters are
“card-carrying members of the NRA.”
None of the Republican presidential candidates have
explicitly condemned this rhetoric. We cannot pretend
that any of this is normal or acceptable. Republicans
want to restrict voting rights, restrict reproductive
rights, restrict minority rights (including LGBTQ
rights) and ban books. Xenophobia, Islamophobia,
antisemitism and other forms of hate — all marginalized
and condemned in the Democratic Party — are
tolerated, emboldened and even embraced in the
Republican Party, where white supremacists and
right-wing extremists have seats at the table. This
was clearly demonstrated by the record number of
extremists who, according to the ADL, ran for office in
the 2022 election — all as Republicans.

It is concerning to observe that, 153 years after the
Civil War, many of the states that rebelled against
the Union are still susceptible to this extremism and
anti-democratic demagoguery. Equally concerning is
that most Republican presidential candidates are still
unwilling to criticize the most corrupt president in our
nation’s history even as they run against him in the
2024 GOP presidential primaries.

Some might find it difficult to be optimistic about
the future of our country when such deep divisions
persist. That is certainly understandable under the
circumstances. However, the most effective way to
safeguard our democracy is by overwhelmingly voting
the anti-democracy Republicans out of office. We
need to vote and encourage others to vote. The
consequences of not doing so will spell the end of our
country and its government as we know them. ■
Michael Gelman serves on the national board
of directors of the Jewish Democratic Council of
America.. He is a member of the owners group of
Mid-Atlantic Media, which publishes the Jewish
Exponent. THREE OR MORE TIMES
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I was quite upset by the editorial “Budgeting for
Haredi Isolation” on June 1.

That fact that they are given many millions from the
national budget without making contributions to the
economy is bad enough.

However, I was appalled by their exemption from
serving in the military. They were 3% of the popula-
tion in 1948 and 13% of today’s population.

They are currently 25% of newborns. This means
the total numbers of individuals from the general
population available for the military is gradually
decreasing. This definitely is a subtle weakness of
Israel’s military might.

Sidney Rubin, Wynnewood
Media Response to Antisemitism at Fault
The hate speech at CUNY (“A Test of White House
Policy,” June 8) should never have happened, but the
university’s response of condemnation was correct.

However, CUNY, the White House and the editorial
skipped over mitigating issues, namely that the U.S.

press leans toward the same anti-Israeli bias until
they are pressed.

The New York Times — I single out the Times since
CUNY is in New York — and many other otherwise
diligently unbiased publications regularly publish
articles about the Middle East from biased sources
without due diligence on accuracy. When, later,
after the headline or front-page story is shown to be
inaccurate, a retraction is published but not with the
same attention-grabbing headlines.

Commencement speaker Fatima Mohammed was
ill-informed with a bias that he was carefully taught.

Then, in the U.S., he had that bias reinforced by
inaccurate reporting of events in the Middle East.

No wonder that he only saw the headlines that
supported his misconceptions and never saw the
retractions that might have corrected his views. ■
Aaron Grosky, Cheltenham
SEND US LETTERS
Letters should be related to articles that have run in the print or
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prior to publication. Please include your first and last name,
as well your town/neighborhood of residence. Send letters to
letters@jewishexponent.com. correction
The June 8 article “Tredyffrin Jews Respond to
Antisemitic Incidents” incorrectly reported that there
are no synagogues in Tredyffrin Township. Chabad
Lubavitch of Chester County is based in Tredyffrin
Township. JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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