There are norms, and there are laws. Trump likes to smash both.

The Trump presidency generated an enormous amount of discussion about “norms”—the unwritten rules of American political life that everyone tacitly agrees to and that keep democracy functioning. Many of these norms had been somewhat invisible until Trump began shattering them, by doing things like profiting from his business during his time in office or demanding that the Justice Department investigate his political enemies.

But what makes a norm a norm is, at least in part, the fact that it’s not necessarily a legal obligation. When Trump bulldozed through these collective agreements about how politicians and particularly presidents should behave, in many cases there was no obvious means by which to punish him, legally speaking, or hold him back. Much of the public learned for the first time that many things they believed had been required by law—such as the expectation that presidential candidates release their tax returns—were essentially just gentlemen’s agreements. Trump’s actions raised this question so frequently that The Washington Post launched a podcast titled, simply, Can He Do That? Often, the Post’s reporters discovered, the answer was “yes.”

I’m definitely part of that public who kept thinking he was breaking at least rules, if not laws, and finding out otherwise.

Among the many norms that have long held up American democracy is the shared belief that political candidates should accept the outcome of a free and fair election. And if, after the 2020 election, Trump had confined his discontent to grousing on Twitter about supposed fraud, that would have violated this norm but, in all likelihood, not have been illegal. Yet according to both Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Trump’s actions moved from destructively poor sportsmanship to outright illegality when he began actively scheming to hold on to power. “The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won,” the Smith indictment states.

He may have had a legal right to lie about the election, but I still say he had no moral right to do that.

But Trump “also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”

Sometimes, then, the answer to the question Can he do that? is actually “no,” at least not legally. Consider, for example, Smith’s decision to charge Trump under Title 18, Section 241, of the U.S. Code, a civil-rights statute first passed during Reconstruction to empower the federal government to combat white-supremacist attacks on Black Americans. Courts have since interpreted the law as prohibiting efforts to interfere with both the process of voting and the accurate counting of the vote.

I bet Trump has no idea what Reconstruction was.

State law adds to this landscape, too. Repeatedly throughout his presidency, Trump arguably violated his own oath of office and encouraged others to violate theirs. At the federal level, the oath isn’t judicially enforceable; the president’s adherence to it can’t be investigated by a prosecutor or charged by a grand jury. It is, once again, a reflection of a normative commitment to carrying out the duties of the office in the public interest. Georgia, though, criminalizes the violation of an oath by a “public officer” in the state. And the Fulton County indictment charges Trump with soliciting Georgia officials—whom he pressured to overturn the state’s election results—to violate their oaths.

That Trump has been charged with these crimes doesn’t mean he’ll be convicted. And securing accountability for his wrongdoing is a much larger project than criminal law, whether at the state or federal level, can carry out on its own. After all, Trump will be busy campaigning for the presidency at the same time as prosecutors are hoping to bring these cases to trial—and even following a conviction, voters could still decide to grant him a second term. But the indictments are a signal that the foundation of American democracy rests on more than norms alone. These prosecutors aren’t criminalizing politics. They’re criminalizing, well, actual crimes—ones that Trump and his allies are alleged to have committed.

A bold move.