In a world of bullies, no one is secure
Polling seems to be swinging President Joe Biden’s way, for what that’s worth. While he’s out in the field promoting his accomplishments, Donald Trump is stuck in a New York courtroom. The problem for Biden is that Trump’s courtroom antics are getting the headlines. Trump is the living embodiment of conservative disrespect for the rule of law when applied to them: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Trump models himself after mobsterJohn Gotti, says Tim O’Brien, Senior Executive Editor at Bloomberg Opinion, and has compared himself to Al Capone. The would-be tough guy believes it’s appropriate to stare down jurors and look at the judge, as Gotti did, “with a big FU on his face.” His attempts to (successfully, it seems) intimdate jurors and to repeatedly violate the gag order imposed by the court should land him, finally, in jail, Andrew Weissmann, former Department of Justice official, told “Deadline White House.”
The judge cannot tolerate Trump’s behavior lest the message it sends to his MAGA base that they too can violate the law with impunity. “The road to hell in this country is going to be thinking that you should not apply the exact same rules to Donald Trump as wou would to any other defendant,” Weissman said on Thursday.
Ian Bassin struck me to the core with his observations about certain people rejecting a rules-based society for a state of nature where might makes right.
“If you’re strong enough to go punch another kid in the schoolyard and take their milk money, you go ahead,” says Bassin, Executive Director of Protect Democracy. “Some people have no compunction that way. They have no scruples. For the rest of us, we don’t want to live in that state of nature where we’re constantly fighting everybody for a scrap of food. We would like a system in which we are protected, our property is protected, our safety is protected. We would like there to be a system of rules. Those are the two fundamental different ways that we can organize society.”
Guess what MAGAstan looks like? Trump operates in that world. He sees it in his interest to attack every set of rules the rest of us depend on to protect us, even as he dupes his followers into believing they can count on him to protect them in a world of no rules he wants to create.
What Trump is engaged in at his trial in lower Manhattan, Bassin continues, is “an attack on the rules, an attack on courts, an attack on judges, an attack on jurors, an attack on witnesses, because they all represent contraints on what a bully can get away with. And it’s woe to all of us if he is able to succeed in undermining the system that protects us all to be secure and free.”
Too late.
Update:
The International Criminal Court may be considering issuing international arrest warrants in the relatively near future against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials for alleged war crimes, N12 reported Thursday night.
Around 125 countries are members of the ICC, including essentially all of Europe, and are bound by treaty law to honor the ICC’s arrest warrants, though there have been examples of countries protesting such warrants and refusing to honor them.
Underminers Union spokesman, Tom Cotton, is displeased.
“The Rules-Based International Order,” responds Alonso Gurmendi, Lecturer in International Relations at King’s College.
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