A rule of law turned inside out
The whole world will watch Donald Trump and his gang of thieves defenestrate the “rule of law” in Putinesque style.
Michael Tomasky considers the implications of Trump nominating Kash Patel to run the FBI inside what Trump likes to call the Department of Injustice. Trump 2.0 aims to make the name a reality. Patel’s only real qualification is that he is a “one-thousand-percent Trump loyalist,” Tomasky writes:
We’re about to enter a world where the rule of law is going to be turned inside out—where everything is converted into its bizarro-world version. It’s a world the conservative movement has been building for 50 years. It took Trump to dare to say the things that no other Republican president would quite say—about how the entire legal apparatus of the United States government is illegitimate and corrupt. But Trump said those things, and he opened the floodgates. For the next four years, we will be living, assuming Patel’s confirmation and that of Pam Bondi as attorney general, under a justice system where the following black-is-white presumptions will hold true:
- Donald Trump, far from being the one-step-ahead-of-the-law hoodlum he’s been his entire adult life, is America’s last honest man, and every legal effort that attempts to say otherwise is, by definition, corrupt and a lie.
- Joe Biden’s near 50-year record of never having been attached to scandal (except a case of plagiarism) is not evidence that Biden has lived an unusually clean public life; it’s evidence of a broad conspiracy by the deep state to protect Democrats. Just wait and see.
- It’s axiomatic that the 2020 election was stolen, as the federal government, now that it is in honest hands, will prove.
- January 6, 2021, was not an insurrection; it was a patriotic outcry by citizens who know the truth, and the attempt to “get to the bottom of” it was the real insurrection—a conspiracy against truth of unfathomable proportions that will now be justly avenged.
Etc., etc.
For all the raising of alarms, the punditry is short on countermeasures. I’m reminded of the anti-nuclear movement’s Helen Caldicott and her rapid-fire, scare-them-straight speech about the horrifying effects of nuclear weapons. Even her allies grew weary of the scare tactics:
“We knew it was past when someone interrupted the speech one evening, actually interrupted it, and said, ‘We know all that, but what can we do?’”
From his remove in England, Brian Beutler recommends Democrats find some actual leaders, stat, while they still have time to define the incoming Trump regime.
“Instead, the spectrum of congressional opposition to Trump ranges from total silence to voluntary obeisance,” he writes. If not naive offers by Democrats to work together on progressive-ish policies toward which Trump made feints but will in no way deliver.
Beutler offers a model from the Obama-era, that used by Republicans against him:
When Barack Obama won a genuinely overwhelming victory in 2008, Republicans began plotting lockstep opposition before he’d governed a full day.
Voting was a component of their strategy, but far from the totality. Their rhetoric was defiant. Their procedural maneuvers were designed not to expose Democrats’ promises as hollow, but to mire them in legislative quicksand. When they proclaimed interest in bipartisan dealmaking, the bad faith was palpable. They might as well have crossed their fingers behind their backs and chortled.
They refused to help Obama revive the economy, then blamed him for the economic destruction they had caused. When the right-wing grassroots proved restive, Republicans and their allied groups egged them on and helped them organize.
The strategy was a wild success.
Maybe. It wasn’t enough of a success to prevent Obama’s reelection in 2012, but it launched the T-party movement that morphed into MAGA once Trump rode his golden escalator into history. That T-party opposition model could work for Democrats, Beutler argues, giving them something to offer voters in 2026 and 2028:
- If Republicans destroy the agencies that protect consumers, workers, and the environment from rapacious oligarchs, a new generation of Democrats will be prepared to reconstitute it, leaner and meaner, the moment they retake power.
- If Republicans rescind the federal health-coverage guarantee Democrats enacted under Obama, Democrats will restore it—this time by extending Medicare to all Americans, without hesitation.
- If Republicans dissolve the rule of law, Democrats will be prepared to re-establish a legitimate anti-corruption apparatus, and it will seek justice for any crimes committed between now and whenever that day comes.
But this is still more policy-speak, the sort that 77 million voters “in no mood for quiet professionalism” tuned out in 2024 while Democrats pursued their pet kitchen-table issues. The T-party protests were more visceral, and only nominally about being “taxed enough already.”
Benjamin Wallace-Wells argues in The New Yorker that perhaps the opioid crisis had as much of an impact in red areas of the country as economic conditions. A study by Carolina Arteaga, of the University of Toronto, and Victoria Barone, of Notre Dame, noticed the overlap in red areas among depopulation, job loss, cancer rates, and the opioid epidemic. Right-wing outlets wrapped the opioid crisis with border issues and made hay of it:
Many post-election op-eds have instructed the Democratic Party to move to the center, or to become more pragmatic, or to break with the neoliberal system more sharply. But the Democrats’ failure in the fentanyl case had little to do with political theory or economic systems. It was, much more simply, a failure of political attention. The history that Arteaga and Barone describe is not one that primarily apportions blame for the fentanyl crisis to more liberal immigration controls at the southern border. Bernie Sanders might look at this material and, not unfairly, call the ongoing suffering of the opioid epidemic a Purdue Pharma plot. But as with the other temporary crises that eventually came to doom the Biden Administration—the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the migrant surge at the southern border, and, perhaps most important, post-pandemic inflation—the Democrats were a little too ready to dismiss the hubbub over opioids as partisan hysteria, and a little too slow to notice that people were actually troubled.
The anxieties the right exploited were less about economic policy and more about people’s uneasiness about their own life circumstances.
Again, the GOP works people’s guts, not their heads. Democrats can’t seem to get out of theirs. Nor do they make enough fuss that earns enough press to improve their brand-image. Doing that will take some relearning. What I find is that teaching yellow dogs new tricks is a helluva challenge. It will be even more challenging in a world where the rule of law is a matter of caprice.