OPINION
MICHELLE
GOLDBERG
Trump’s Second Term Would Be Even More Corrupt
and Vindictive Than His First
June 3,
2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/opinion/trumps-weaponized-justice-system.html
Michelle
Goldberg
By Michelle
Goldberg
Opinion
Columnist
A truism of
the Trump era is that every accusation is a confession. When Donald Trump hurls
wild charges at his opponents, he is telegraphing what he plans to do to them,
preemptively justifying the breaking of laws and norms by casting himself as
the victim of the very misdeeds he’s going to commit.
That is how
we should understand Trump’s ranting in the wake of his 34 felony convictions
last week. After he was found guilty, he told reporters gathered outside the
courthouse, “This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or
hurt an opponent.” It’s tedious to fact-check such claims — the MAGA movement
doesn’t care what’s true and what’s not — but President Biden had nothing to do
with the state case brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney.
And as if to underline Biden’s refusal to interfere in Justice Department
decisions, the federal prosecution of the president’s son Hunter Biden begins
this week. In spinning this fantasy about Biden, Trump is telegraphing that,
should he return to the White House, he will try to use the Justice Department
in exactly the way he’s pretending it was used against him. When the former
president compares himself to the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who
died earlier this year in an Arctic prison colony, he’s giving himself permission
to act like Vladimir Putin.
In an
interview with three Fox News hosts on Sunday, his first since his conviction,
Trump all but promised that his second term would be even more corrupt and
vindictive than his first. In his telling, he never called for Hillary Clinton
to be imprisoned, and magnanimously resisted the entreaties of others to punish
her. Next time, he suggested, he won’t be so nice. “They always said lock her
up, and I felt — and I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a
terrible thing,” he said. “And then this happened to me, and so I may feel
differently about it.”
Speaking to
the Fox hosts, Trump denied saying the words that were the refrain to his first
presidential campaign: “I didn’t say, ‘Lock her up.’” That is, of course, a
preposterous lie, the kind that demonstrates Trump’s strongman ability to get
his followers to accept absurdities. And “lock her up,” it’s important to
remember, was never just rhetoric. As the Mueller report revealed, Trump
demanded that his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who’d recused himself
from investigations involving the 2016 campaign, go after Clinton. “According
to Sessions, the President asked him to reverse his recusal so that Sessions
could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary
Clinton,” the Mueller report said. Eventually, attempting to placate his boss,
Sessions tapped U.S. Attorney John Huber of Utah to probe the right’s
allegations about the Clinton Foundation, but Huber came up empty.
Sessions’s
replacement, William Barr, proved more willing to bend ethical rules to do
Trump’s bidding. Geoffrey Berman, a Republican who served as U.S. attorney for
the Southern District of New York until Trump fired him, described Barr’s
Justice Department in his book, “Holding the Line.” “Demands came down from
Main Justice that were overtly political — among the most outrageous of them,
pressure to pursue baseless criminal charges against John Kerry, who had served
in the Obama administration as Secretary of State,” he wrote.
Eventually,
during Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Barr discovered lines
that even he wouldn’t cross. Given another chance, Trump will surely seek a
Justice Department head who is a fully committed MAGA apparatchik; he’s said
he’s considering the ultraright Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is
currently under federal investigation because of allegations that he accepted
bribes and abused the power of his office.
The point
here is not that Trump and his lackeys are lying about his record; it would be
more newsworthy if they weren’t. What’s important is that Trump has already
tried to use the power of the presidency to harass his enemies, and his allies
have since identified the choke points in the system that previously thwarted
him. As Reuters reported, people close to Trump have a two-part plan to “turn
the nation’s top law enforcement body into an attack dog for conservative
causes.” First, they want to flood the Department of Justice “with stalwart
conservatives unlikely to say ‘no’ to controversial orders from the White
House.” Then they want to restructure it “so key decisions are concentrated in
the hands of administration loyalists rather than career bureaucrats.”
Republican
caterwauling about Trump’s felony conviction provides rhetorical cover for this
planned transformation of America’s justice system by making it seem like that
transformation has already been accomplished by Democrats. On Thursday, Senator
Marco Rubio of Florida, a potential Trump vice president, said that Democrats
“have crossed the line in which now the court system is a political weapon, and
it’s going to be very hard for it not to come back the other way.” In other
words, whatever abuses Trump’s foes are subject to in a Trump restoration will
be nothing but well-earned comeuppance. By projecting the authoritarian
aggression of their movement onto others, Republicans absolve themselves. It’s
the mantra of abusers everywhere: “Look what you made me do.”
Michelle
Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several
books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that
won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace
sexual harassment.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário