“Central to [Donald] Trump’s mystique is that he breaks rules and gets away with it,” writes Michelle Goldberg. It is a perk that comes with being a trust-fund baby that people who sacked the Capitol Jan. 6 at his urging at once despise and envy. The huckster offered them a taste of the Trump life for the low, low price of their constitutional republic.
Rioters who assaulted Capitol police and kicked in windows and doors last week behaved as if they had carte blanche and the president’s blessing. It is “an animating irony” of Trump’s bargain-basement authoritarianism, Goldberg writes, “that it revels in lawlessness while glorifying law and order.”
That is why “showing the world that he cannot in fact get away with it” is essential to ending Trumpism, a scholar of authoritarian regimes tells Goldberg.
Because the principal driver of unrest on the right and the left is not economic inequality, although there is that. It is the stark nature of the inequity in the operation of American justice that feeds distrust in government and in democracy itself.
For that to change, “and justice for all” has to be more than an empty slogan.
Police impunity for the killing of civilians in 2020 inspired the largest wave of Black Lives Matter protests the nation has seen. The police killing by strangulation of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., and the shootings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Ga. brought to a boil the anger simmering for years over the killings of unarmed Blacks by white police officers.
Meanwhile, with exceptions, whites and/or elites and/or police who commit crimes go free if brought to account at all. The contrast in how District and Capitol police prepared for the arrival of Trump’s ragtag army and how they treated Black Lives Matter protesters last summer was stark. Trump’s insurrectionists felt immune.
“My client had heard the oft-repeated words of President Trump,” St. Louis attorney Albert Watkins said of client Jake Angeli. The “QAnon Shaman” was arrested for his participation in the Trump Insurrection.
“The words and invitation of a president are supposed to mean something,” Watkins continued. When the president invites you to do it, “that means it is not illegal.” Watkins implied. Angeli (who is white) has requested a presidential pardon from the patron saint of getting away with it. *
Getting away with it is undermining trust in government on both the right and the left. Two-tiered justice has to end.
Police assault and arrest Black Lives Matter protesters for less. After a months-long investigation, New York Attorney General Letitia James brought suit against the New York Police Department on Thursday for the department’s treatment of peaceful protesters there last summer:
The investigation found that officers allegedly used “indiscriminate, unjustified, and repeated use of batons, pepper spray, bicycles and a crowd control tactic known as ‘kettling’ against peaceful protestors,” the release said.”
There is no question that the NYPD engaged in a pattern of excessive, brutal, and unlawful force against peaceful protesters,” said James.”
Over the past few months, the NYPD has repeatedly and blatantly violated the rights of New Yorkers, inflicting significant physical and psychological harm and leading to great distrust in law enforcement.”
Discriminatory (or preferential) treatment of offenders is only one aspect of systemic inequality in this country but, in light of the last year’s event, a glaring one.
After the 2014 poisoning of Flint, Mich. drinking water at the hands of state officials, Michigan’s attorney general Thursday announced criminal charges against former Gov. Rick Snyder and eight other state officials, for their alleged roles in the crisis:
Together the group face 42 counts related to the drinking water catastrophe roughly seven years ago. The crimes range from perjury to misconduct in office to involuntary manslaughter.
The drinking water debacle is linked to at least 12 deaths and at least 80 people sickened with Legionnaires’ disease after untreated water from the Flint River caused lead to leach from old pipes, poisoning the majority Black city’s water system.
NBC News adds:
Snyder, 62, and eight others who worked under him face a host of charges stemming from a water supply switch in 2014 that exposed Flint residents to dangerous levels of lead and Legionnaires’ disease.
“Let me start by saying the Flint water crisis is not some relic of the past,” Michigan Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud told reporters. “At this very moment the people of Flint continue to suffer from the categorical failure of public officials at all levels of government who trampled upon their trust and evaded accountability for far too long.”
Our-two-tiered system of justice that over-punishes some and allows others to evade accountability “for far too long” is what led the U.S. to a place where trust not just in government but in popular sovereignty itself is at an all-time low. It led to the election of a career con man as president and the rise of a fascist movement that rejects the very principles it purports to love. The actions this week in New York and Michigan may help restore our confidence in ourselves, but don’t hold your breath.
*UPDATE: Federal prosecutors now say insurrectionists including Angeli (legally Jacob Anthony Chansley) intended “to capture and assassinate elected officials.“