And you are not
Neighbors shared champaign* out in the street when after several day news outlets finally called the 2020 election for Joe Biden. They weren’t celebrating Biden’s victory. It was a “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” moment. America was done with Donald Trump. The problem was Donald Trump was not done with America.
Nearly three years later, the country is still attempting to clean up behind Trump even as he continues to trash the place. And getting special treatment while doing it.
Fred and Mary Anne never gave little Donny a time out. They farmed out disciplining Little Lord Flauntleroy at 13 to a military academy. Too late, of course. Never in the field of bad parenting was such political carnage foisted on so many by so few.
The 77-year-old brat continues to receive special treatment to this day, explains Dahlia Lithwick:
The irony is lost on nobody that most of the conspiracies of which Trump now stands accused involve variations on speech acts that included threats and intimidation, lies, and bullying—the same actions he takes up with increasingly reckless zeal on social media against the machinery of the justice system itself. And the same things that make him uniquely dangerous with every winking post about a witness, prosecutor, or judge make him all but impossible to silence: He’s a larger-than-life political figure with millions of paranoid followers, of which some subsection will do anything he asks.
Any of us would be cooling our heels in the slammer already. Not him.
Donald Trump knows this. The courts know this. The judges who will likely tolerate ever more transgressive incitement from the former president not only know it but are likely the most obvious, agonizing targets. Judge Aileen Cannon, bless her heart, was resoundingly scolded by a federal appeals court last winter for treating a former president as different from any other criminal defendant. The irony is that the same former president is de facto going to be allowed to go much further than any other criminal defendant in his other three criminal trials precisely because, at least when it comes to the First Amendment, he is like no other criminal defendant in history.
Legal scholars Christopher Robertson and Russell M. Gold wish “that our clients received the advantages that prosecutors are giving Trump.” After charging in each of his first three cases, “his lawyers negotiated dates when he could submit to authorities for processing,” they write:
Most criminal defendants are just arrested and taken to jail, where they may sit for months or even years while they await trial, unless they plead guilty. Three-quarters of federal criminal defendants are locked up to await trial.
Trump asked for a delay in his classified documents trial. He got it. Because he’s special.
Prosecutors charged Air Force reservist Jack Teixeira in June 2023 for disseminating classified information of the sort Trump retained and concealed (allegedly). Citing Trump, Teixeira requested similar treatment. Instead, he’s sitting in jail pending trial.
Pretrial detention has also been shown to result in a higher chance of being convicted and receiving longer sentences.
Indeed, defendants in courts across the country plead guilty to crimes even if they are innocent, in part because pleading guilty gets them home sooner. For some defendants, the pretrial detention is longer than their actual punishment will be, so pleading guilty resolves the case with credit for time served. But the stain of a conviction stays on their record forever.
The scholars point out other ways in which Trump receives special treatment. It’s not so much that U.S. justice treats Trump better that’s the problem in their view, but that it treats ordinary defendants so much worse. It’s like the criticism of racial disparities in assigning the death penalty more to Black murderers than to whites. If (big IF) death is ever a just sentence, then the injustice lies in white defendants not receiving it. But I digress.
Adam Gopnik argues at The New Yorker that there is a movement afoot to paint Trump’s indictments as “a strike of one discrete class against another, with “élite” Americans bent on settling a score with Trump and, through him, with his long-neglected supporters. The educated élite is out to get a tribune of the volk.”
That’s absurd, Gopnik writes. “Trump is a billionaire supported by billionaires.” He may enjoy support among hoi polloi, but insistence that support for Trump falls along class lines is incorrect. Fractures in the English Civil War, Jonathan Healey explains, “ran right down the middle of both ‘classes,’ with some supposed members of the bourgeoisie being staunch Royalists, and some in the aristocracy being the most open to anti-monarchical ideas—and, eventually, actions.” The war was “a clash of ideologies, as often as not between members of the same class.”
Our present culture wars represent …
a conflict between coalitions, each of which envelops the privileged and the underprivileged, the high-status and the status-threatened, the wealthy and the poor. It’s a conflict about values and beliefs, in which both sides—and, more important, each person—determine their own views and are responsible for their own choices. In the end, it is a fight, Lincoln’s fight, perpetual in American history, between those who actually believe in liberal democratic institutions and those who don’t.
That abstraction is difficult to reconcile with the fears of members of the Fulton County grand jurors that Trump and his supporters now target online and in person. And with the fears and increased security that judges attempting work out justice American-style must endure from the accused and his supporters, the wealthy and the poor. Trump issues transparent threats, plays golf, and thumbs his nose at us all as he awaits the arrival of justice that his wealth and privilege has forestalled his entire life. It’s not a sure thing that it will find him.
The problem is not just that the system treats Trump better than ordinary defendants, but that it treats the rest of us so much worse.
* I’m such a geek. A reader caught it.