Republican supporters of former President Trump have reacted to his guilty plea in the New York hush money trial by promising various forms of retribution and retaliation. The New York Times As reported on Wednesday, June 5, 2024, he is “seeking a retaliatory lawsuit against the Democratic Party.”
The reaction is surprising but not unexpected. It is based on the unfounded claim that the various charges against Trump are themselves political, part of a coordinated campaign to undermine the presidential election campaign.
These false allegations are a dangerous escalation of the MAGA movement’s efforts to discredit the rule of law in this country just as it has targeted public confidence in the integrity of American elections. The movement is laying the groundwork to turn criminal prosecutions into a routine tool of political battle.
Few threats to our freedom and ability to choose our own way of life without fear are greater than that possibility.
One example of the work Trump and his allies are doing to pave the way for the politicization of prosecutions can be found in a 2023 essay written by Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. In the essay, he wrote, “The indictment of former President Donald Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith, with the full approval of Attorney General Merrick Garland, is an assault on the American political system and on the fundamental right protected by the First Amendment to freely discuss, debate, and contest serious electoral and political issues.”
Von Spakovsky added that the indictment “represents the ultimate weaponization of the Department of Justice — a transformation begun by President Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder and completed by Garland — designed to eliminate a leading political opponent of Garland’s boss and political patron, President Joe Biden. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Such claims about weaponization have become part of Trump’s regular rhetoric in recent months. At a political rally in March, Trump told supporters that “the Biden administration’s weaponization of our justice system is a Stalinist Russian horror show.”
As National Public Radio The day after the New York ruling, Trump said, “You’ve simultaneously attacked the court and President Joe Biden, falsely trying to link the two. They’re in full collusion with the White House and the Department of Justice. I want you to understand that this is all Biden and his aides.” Referring to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office and Judge Juan Mechan, he said, “They’re in full collusion with the White House and the Department of Justice. I want you to understand that this is all Biden and his aides.”
The poll found that 47% of Americans believe the charges against Trump in New York are “politically motivated,” compared with 38% who say they are not — and, as expected, there are big partisan differences in this perception.
Forty-five percent of independents believe the hush money lawsuits are politically motivated, compared with 83% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats.
President Trump has accused the Biden administration of conducting a political witch hunt while also vocally thinking about ways to use the Justice Department to exact revenge on his political opponents.
He has pondered prosecuting Hillary Clinton. “Wouldn’t that be a really bad thing? … The wife of the president and the former secretary of state, think about it, the former secretary of state and the wife of the president, wouldn’t that be a terrible thing to put in prison?” he said recently.
“It’s a very frightening path they are leading us down, and it’s very possible that the same thing will happen to them,” Trump said of the Biden administration.
“This is a terrible precedent for our country,” he said of the New York lawsuit. “Are you saying the next president is going to do the same to them? That’s really the question.”
The “they” in question is not just Clinton.
After being indicted in the secret documents case last year, Trump promised that if re-elected, he would “appoint a real special counsel to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”
Trump has repeatedly suggested he could prosecute political opponents if he returns to the presidency: “If they do this, and they have done so already, if they want to get away with this, certainly the opposite could happen. What they’ve done is let the genie out of the box.”
These were not just threats.
Some of Trump’s allies don’t want to wait until he’s elected in November. Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser and political ally of Trump, is now asking, “Are all the Republican-controlled House committees using their subpoena power as much as they should right now? Are all the Republican district attorneys starting the investigations that they need to now?”
“We must use every aspect of Republican politics and power now to confront Marxism and defeat the Communists,” Miller said.
by The New York TimesSteve Bannon, another key figure in MAGA politics, said shortly after Trump’s sentencing that “now is the time for little-known Republican prosecutors across the country to make a name for themselves by indicting Democrats.”
“There are dozens of state attorneys general and district attorneys who are ambitious junior members,” Bannon said, “who need to ‘seize the day’ and make this moment in history their own.”
If the past is any indication, whatever happens between now and November, it’s clear that the new Trump administration will see the former president try to put words into action.
During his time in office, Trump “regularly asked the Department of Justice to investigate individuals I considered suspicious.”[d] He has been accused of being a political opponent, particularly of his 2016 general election opponent Hillary Clinton, senior FBI officials, and special counsel Robert Mueller.”
As The New York Times “During his first term, Mr. Trump gradually increased pressure on the Department of Justice, undermining the department’s traditional independence from political control of the White House,” it said.
By the end of his term, Trump had not fully achieved that ambition, which is why plans are now underway to limit the Justice Department’s independence in his second term.
Some of the advisers have devised a plan to allow the president to avoid having to “distance himself from federal law enforcement” and to “treat the Department of Justice no differently than any other Cabinet agency.” They are … promoting an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.
Trump, Miller, Bannon, and whoever becomes attorney general would be very supportive of these plans, and of course they could also take advantage of already well-developed models of prosecutorial politicization in other authoritarian regimes.
Reading about Trump’s desire to use the prosecution as a form of political retribution reminded me of something then-Attorney General Robert Jackson said in 1940. “Prosecutors have more authority over life, liberty and honor than any other person in the United States,” Jackson noted.
Jackson added that “the prosecutor’s most dangerous power” is “not to pick which cases need to be prosecuted, but to pick who they think should be arrested…. In such cases, instead of finding the facts that a crime was committed and then finding the culprit, it’s a matter of picking a culprit and then digging up the law books or hiring investigators to pin the blame on the culprit.”
This is the future of America that Trump and his allies envision. As is so often the case, they are saying the quiet parts out loud so they can assert the authority to implement their plan if Trump wins the presidency again.
If they did, no one would be immune from government prosecutors being directed against them, not for their actions but because, as Jackson put it, they are “unpopular with the establishment and ruling elite” or “adherent to false political views.”
That would be a real American nightmare.
