Donald Trump

If you actually believe the ringing words of the founding document of this country, that all men are created equal, then we must all be equal before the law, neither above it nor below it – neither immune to prosecution nor without the law’s protections.And yet, some have always been below the law since the Declaration of Independence was written. That document speaks of men in ways that exclude women, who in that era were largely controlled by fathers and husbands, and the Black people who were enslaved for another 87 years, and the Native Americans who faced genocide and dispossession into the 20th and, arguably, the 21st centuries.And of course some have been above it, whether by buying their way out of jail with expensive lawyers, by manipulating those who should enforce the law, by actually being those who are supposed to enforce it, or by being granted, as police and various governmental figures have been, various versions of immunity from the law.The idea that a president should be immune from not just lawsuits while in office but consequences for crimes even afterward seems like a stepping stone to authoritarianism, but it has many defenders.I asked constitutional law professor Tobias Barrington Wolff what he thought about that, and he replied: “Presidents, current and former, do enjoy absolute immunity from personal liability for acts taken within the scope of their official duties. But much of the conduct in this case pre-dated this man’s time in office and none of it had anything to do with the duties of the office. Courts give wide latitude to absolute immunity for presidents, but there are clear limits. The supreme court has rejected absolute immunity for a judge who abused his office to commit sexual assault in his chambers, to offer one not-wholly-irrelevant point of reference. A private citizen who falsifies business records to defraud the electorate, cover up a tawdry affair and perhaps also violate campaign finance laws and cheat on his taxes is not a close call.” But the right has denounced it with fury.“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in The 1619 Project. “Black Americans have fought to make them true.” At its best this country has striven to become a more perfect union, to move toward equality and justice for all, and often as Jones notes the most oppressed have led those expansions in equality and protection. Black Lives Matter seeking to make police accountable when they commit murder is one example.At its worst, elites have pursued the opposite goals, whether it’s the Confederacy seeking to perpetrate slavery or attacks on voting rights from Jim Crow to the present or the 2022 supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, depriving women of the right to the bodily self-determination crucial to our equality, or the new war against trans rights. Or the current right’s opposition to accountability for Trump and others and tacit support for the violent attack on the capitol of January 6, part of an attempt to steal an election.Democrats are fond of the phrase “no one is above the law”, which seems to have its origin in something a Republican president said. Teddy Roosevelt in 1903 declared, “No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it.”But a modern-day conservative at the Washington Post argued that the phrase “could be used to justify any prosecution, no matter how poorly predicated, selective or malicious”, by which logic everyone should be above the law. Of course it’s from a conservative writer, and the conservatives at their most wily are trying to find roundabout ways to say that the 45th president is above the law, as this piece does. The most blunt are essentially arguing that every prosecution is just a vendetta in tribal skirmishing and they’re here to fight for their tribe. They are after all the same people who kept shouting “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton’s sloppy security practices, then excused far more egregious ones in the Trump administration (let alone Trump blabbing away about highly classified secrets to the Kremlin’s foreign minister in 2017).It’s a reminder that some of us are loyal to principles and some of us are loyal to teams. Inequality is itself about choosing the team through arrangements in which the same principles don’t prevail for all, and while you can argue that’s who the Republicans have always been, they’ve been more shamelessly so since they got tangled up with Trump. The Republican party excused, denied and justified his lawlessness from the time of his 2016 campaign into the present, and Trump himself has been perhaps the most prominent and flagrant lawbreaker in American history.His crimes were so many and various that they obscured each other – who remembers the emoluments lawsuits addressing how he was illegitimately profiting from the presidency, crowded out as they were by the sexual assault allegations, the alleged crimes committed while attempting to steal an election and later the alleged theft of classified documents, along with the various criminal charges against the Trump businesses?And of course he’s been using social media and speech to menace those prosecuting him, which is the kind of stuff for which normal people go to jail. In the same season as the payoff and coverup for which he was just arrested, the leaked Access Hollywood tape briefly rocked the 2016 election. In it Trump made a blunt case for inequality, declaring that he liked to “grab” women “by the pussy” and “when you’re a star they let you do it”. That is, your status entitles you to disregard the rights and wishes of others.If you’re loyal to principles, you have to be unwavering, whether the victim or offender is high-status or low, whether your enemies are in the right, or your friends are in the wrong. But as Frank Wilhoit famously put it: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”They see the law as a weapon, to be held by the in-group, pointed at the out-group, which is to say they are tribalists passionately committed to inequality. They find the idea of the out-group pointing the law at the in-group outrageous and upsetting. Thus their meltdown over an alleged criminal being charged with and arrested for his alleged crimes.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses More

Reporters were lined up outside overnight, hoping to get one of just a handful of press seats in the courtroom. Protesters arrived, too, both supporting and opposed to the former president, and the cops corralled them into separate pens. By mid-morning, the scene on Centre Street in lower Manhattan had become crowded, chaotic and carnivalesque. Anti-Trump liberal protestors chanted “Lock him up!”, mimicking Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan in a delighted display of sinking to your opponent’s level.Pro-Trump protestors donned aviator sunglasses and their trademark red hats, and led confused cries of, “USA! USA!” Someone had handed out whistles, transforming the scene into a discordant, echoing cacophony. There were cameras outside Trump Tower in Midtown to film when he got into his motorcade to go to the arraignment, and there were cameras there outside the courthouse, to watch him get out of the car and walk inside.Never one to miss an opportunity for attention, some of the Republican party’s most colorful figures appeared, too. George Santos, the disgraced Long Island congressman who was exposed shortly after his election of having fabricated his résumé and who is alleged to have supported himself with a series of weird frauds before entering political life, made an appearance. So did Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiracist Republican congresswoman from Georgia, who tried to stage her own rally across the street from the courthouse. Eventually she left, drowned out by the jeers and noise. Afterwards, being interviewed by a reporter in the back of a car, Greene compared Donald Trump to Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ, who she noted were also arrested.So much of the scene at Donald Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday – at which the former president was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, and conspiracy, pleading not guilty to all – seemed cynically calculated, a way for the various players and those present to try to siphon off some of the massive media attention that has been focused on the event for themselves.But figures like Santos and Greene, for their part, are not wrong in depicting themselves as Trump’s heirs: it was he who ushered unmasked fraud and open conspiracy theorizing into the national political process, he who dispensed with the pretexts of service and patriotism to embark on a politics of naked resentment and self interest, he who transformed American national politics into the carnival of cynicism and indignity that it is today. Trump is not the ringmaster that he once was – the man now charged in the state of New York is weak and damaged – but we’re all still watching his show.Will the criminal charges be good for Trump? Trump seems to think so, or at least that’s what he’s trying to project to the public. He raised a lot of money for his third presidential bid over the five days between his indictment and his arraignment: $7m, according to campaign officials. And as he was inside the courthouse being charged, his campaign sent out a fundraising email, asking supporters to purchase tee shirts featuring a fake mug shot of the former president, along with the words “NOT GUILTY.” They cost $47 a piece.And the indictment has placed Trump’s would-be rivals for the Republican nomination in an awkward position: they want to distance themselves from Trump, but they can’t afford to alienate his supporters, those die-hards who still make up a ruling majority of the Republican base. If anything, the indictment has made it seem more likely that Trump will secure the Republican nomination, for the same reasons it seemed likely back in 2016: while Republican elites and donors scramble to stop him, and rival candidates define themselves against his example, he’s still the sun around which the Republican party orbits, a force exponentially more powerful than the party itself.But that’s not to say that Trump is particularly strong. Over the days proceeding the arraignment, as news stations breathlessly broadcast footage of Trump’s plane taking off from Miami and as the circus proceeded outside the courthouse in Manhattan, liberals online and in the media began to feel a palpable sense of unease. All this attention on Trump felt a little too much to them like the beginnings of the primary season in the 2016 cycle – the election that he won.Should we even be paying attention to this? Have we learned nothing? But with Trump, even studied indifference to him still makes him the center of political attention, like when you tell someone not to think of a white elephant.And perhaps it’s a testament to the strange power that Trump has in the minds of liberals that so many of them think that his indictment on 34 felony charges could be good for his electoral prospects. Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. Some liberals seem to imagine that Trump could drop dead in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and still find a way to become president again.It’s true, too, that Trump is not the candidate he once was. In 2016, Trump had the advantage of novelty, of shock value; people kept their eyes on him because they didn’t know what he would do next.Now everyone knows what he will do next: his is a mind the nation has gotten to know through endless exposure, and few people are as consistent and reliable in their dishonesty and egotism. His boasting, his claims that it’s all unfair – they’re so predictable as to be boring. And Trump, it’s worth saying, has gotten myopic and creepy; at his rallies now he’s less funny and charismatic than he once was, referencing QAnon and various obscure political figures he feels have wronged him.He once had a knack for channeling and weaponizing white and male grievance, often disguised as class resentment, and for funneling hatred of the elites for his own purposes. But now he’s abandoned all pretext of reciprocating his followers’ loyalty: he speaks of them with open contempt. With the exception of a rabid few, they’re eventually going to abandon him, too, or at least wane enough in their enthusiasm that fewer and fewer of them are going to vote.The result was that watching Trump shuffle into the courthouse on Tuesday was a bit like watching a caged gorilla at the zoo: the strength has been taken from him, rendered useless and where once he was formidable and scary, now he just looks ridiculous, less an object of fear than of spectacle.Things could still change for Trump; they’ve changed for him before, and anyone who witnessed the 2016 race knows better than to discount him entirely. But he’s been getting weaker, not stronger, for a long time now. There’s a long way to go until the 2024 election, but you could make an argument that the season began on Tuesday, when Trump entered the courthouse. It’s not an auspicious start.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More