Following up on a previous post, here’s Jamelle Bouie on Trump’s impunity”
At no point during his long career as a celebrity real estate mogul and businessman has Trump faced any meaningful consequences for his fraudulent, even criminal, behavior. He has operated, for decades, with a shield of impunity crafted from his shamelessness, his celebrity and his craven willingness to intimidate critics with litigation or even just the threat of litigation.
What is striking is the extent to which this shield of impunity has only been strengthened by the political and legal institutions of the United States. First and foremost among these is the Republican Party, which has never wasted a chance to thrust itself between Trump and the consequences of his actions. When it was the “Access Hollywood” tape, Republicans were there for Trump. They were there for Trump when it was his callous reaction to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. They were there for him when he was impeached for trying to coerce the government of Ukraine into supporting his political prospects, and they were there for him when he was impeached for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The much-vaunted guardrails of the Constitution have not done much to stop Trump, either. As I’ve discussed many times, we have the antiquated rules of the Constitution to thank for his elevation to the White House. And those same rules facilitated his effort to deny the will of the voters and retain his grasp on power.
The law has not been much better.
If you helped Trump try to overturn the results of the previous election, up to and including the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, then there’s a good chance you’ve had to face your day in court. One of Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, was ordered to pay nearly $150 million in damages relating to efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, while another Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell, pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor charges relating to the effort to manufacture evidence of voter fraud in the same state. And this is to say nothing of the hundreds of rioters who have been charged and sentenced in federal criminal court.
So far, however, Trump has gotten away scot free. Yes, he has been indicted in federal cases related to Jan. 6 and his handling of classified documents. But the Supreme Court has in effect delayed his trial until the fall as it considers the absurd (but no less serious) question of absolute presidential immunity for criminal conduct in office. The judge in the documents case, Aileen Cannon, can’t claim to be tackling a serious constitutional issue. She seems, instead, to be looking for any avenue that allows her to dismiss the charges against the former president, who nominated her to the federal bench in 2020.
[…]
Over the weekend, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz issued a warning to Letitia James that seizing Trump’s properties would put him back in office. “If the New York attorney general starts to take his homes away, starts to seize his assets, it’s all going to be on camera,” he said on CNN. “Pundits are going to sit there and scream about this, ‘This man cannot be elected.’ You’re going to create the greatest victimhood of 2024, and you’re going to elect Donald Trump.”
This is exactly backward. It is the refusal to enforce the rules — enforce the law — against Trump that has put him in a position to win the White House a second time. It is the impunity, as much as if not more than the cultivated sense of victimhood, that anchors his political appeal.
Yes, indeed. Trump has never had to pay a price for any of his corrupt misdeeds and I don’t have a lot of optimism that he will despite attempting a coup, inciting an insurrection, stealing classified secrets and presiding over the most flagrantly corrupt administration in US history. And in the end, he may end up keeping all his money as well…
It’s the shamelessness that makes this possible and we need to figure out how to deal with that. To the extent that we had a social contract it has completely imploded.