Now it’s Trump
“For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other,” Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense.”
So much of what the republic’s founders imagined for it remains unrealized. This country has for 250 years been a work in progress. That progress has been impaired along the way by the very sorts of persons who divide the world into kings and subjects. Whether by their own inheritance when born into this world or by their achievements in it, they come to believe their standing in the world (or their inflated egos) gives them the right to rule the rest of us. Their manchinations and their airs ought to warn free people to avoid them lest we come to ruin. Sadly, what sustains the attraction to monarchy is some people’s predisposition to being subjects while declaring themselves free people.
It doesn’t help that one of the world’s great religions, born in a time of kings, teaches its followers to watch expectantly for the return of their heavenly king, and to believe that having a monarch is the best and most efficient way to structure society. Even better, their king promises to make his subjects the world’s rulers in the fullness of time. Perhaps then it is no wonder that the founders and framers constructed this republic to keep church and state separate. Oil and water.
How We the People have backslidden. We have permitted a man who would be king to be our president. Twice.
Everything he touches dies, Rick Wilson warns. David French this morning reviews the tragic 2020 death in Louisville of Breonna Taylor at the hands of police and the further travesty of justice recommended by Donald Trump’s Department of Justice:
Last week, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked a federal judge to sentence a former Louisville police officer named Brett Hankison to one day in prison. Last year, a Kentucky jury convicted Hankison of violating Breonna Taylor’s civil rights when he fired multiple rounds from his handgun into her apartment on the night the police killed her.
Trump has turned the Civil Rights Division on its head. Whatever the Biden administration hath wrought, Trump must tear assunder. Hankison has suffered enough then.
French writes:
It’s hard to read those words — dripping with sympathy for an officer who wrongly used deadly force, endangering innocent people in two different apartments — at the same time that the Trump administration has been sending immigrants who’ve been convicted of no crimes at all into indefinite confinement in brutal and inhumane conditions overseas.
Here’s the key point: Trump’s corruption of justice isn’t just individual; it’s categorical. We have grown accustomed to him rewarding his loyalists and punishing his critics. That he fired the prosecutors who worked on his federal criminal cases while pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters represents a textbook case of individual favoritism.
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law,” said Peru’s General Óscar Benavides, his latter term characterized as authoritarian fascism. Trump resembles that remark.
French continues, echoing that analysis:
Civil rights laws are designed in part to protect innocent citizens — including, of course, innocent citizens from minority communities — from unjust government officials. Here, the legal world is turned upside down. The Justice Department is using its civil rights division to protect an unjust government official who violated the civil rights of an innocent individual.
It’s hard to describe how thoroughly Trump is disrupting and corrupting our system of justice. At every turn, the pattern is the same. His friends catch a break, and his foes get the boot. The same week that Dhillon intervened on behalf of Hankison, the Trump administration fired Maurene Comey, an assistant U.S. attorney who helped prosecute Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean Combs.
French concludes, “Donald Trump is determined to transform America’s system of justice into his personal political weapon, and now Breonna Taylor’s family bears the fresh pain of a new and terrible miscarriage of justice.”
If you don’t share their pain quite yet, give Trump time.
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