If you can't win, call the judges corrupt

There is so much—a deluge of evidence that a second Trump administration would be far darker, far more dangerous, and far closer to fascism and authoritarianism than the first one was. Like a wounded animal that is cornered, Trump has no other way out. It’s not difficult to see the signs. What’s difficult is understanding how so many people are able to ignore the truth that is in front of us.

Trump was back at it on Truth Social on Saturday, posting throughout the day, including a 2-minute and 45-second video titled, “God made Trump.” Another post featured an endorsement of Trump as “incorruptible” from Sammy the Bull Gravano. Gravano was the underboss of the Gambino crime family before he became a government witness against other Mafia figures and confessed to committing 19 murders—hell of a character witness.

But it was this post that did me in:

The observation is wrong—no need to look further than what the Supreme Court did to Roe v. Wade to appreciate that some Republican appointees to the federal bench are far from impartial jurists. But most federal judges are, setting aside their political affiliation to decide cases based on the facts and the law. There is certainly no indication that judges appointed by Democrats follow some sort of party line as Trump suggests. But here Trump is, again, trying to undercut public confidence in the judiciary ahead of the two significant losses he is about to suffer in civil cases—the New York Attorney General’s fraud case and the second E. Jean Carroll defamation case—and heading into his criminal cases. If you can’t win in court, then claim the judges are biased against you. All of them.

We know that is on Trump’s mind from his posts, like this one:

It should be unthinkable for Trump to make these comments, especially on the heels of the bomb threat called into the home of Judge Engoron, who is trying the fraud case, last week. Now he has moved on to Judge Kaplan, who is assigned to the E. Jean Carroll case. Despite knowing comments like this target people Trump identifies as his enemies in the minds of some of his followers, he continues to do it. And no one in the Republican Party condemns him for it. In fact, on Friday, Trump garnered an endorsement from Utah Senator Mike Lee. Lee is a graduate of Brigham Young University Law School. He clerked for two federal judges, including now-Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, both when he was on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and after he went to the Supreme Court. Lee worked for a respected national law firm as a young lawyer and as an Assistant United States Attorney.

“I’ll take the mean tweets,” Lee said, before declaring, “I choose Trump.” Apparently, it’s okay with the Republican Senator from Utah if his party’s leading candidate for the presidency wants to threaten federal judges.

None of this is pretense. There has been too much violence, like the attack on Speaker Pelosi’s husband Paul, for Trump or any of his supporters to credibly maintain that his rage-tweeting doesn’t put lives at risk. As if we needed more evidence of the threat some of Trump’s supporters pose, audiotape of long-time Trump ally Roger Stone discussing killing two Democratic members of Congress as though it was the normal thing to do surfaced over the weekend, and received little mention. You can listen here.

Stone was convicted of obstructing a Congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In July of 2020, Trump commuted his sentence, preventing Stone from entering prison. Then, in December 2020, Trump gave Stone a full and unconditional pardon. The official release, which you can hear written in Trump’s voice, justified the pardon because “Mr. Stone was treated very unfairly.  He was subjected to a pre-dawn raid of his home, which the media conveniently captured on camera.  Mr. Stone also faced potential political bias at his jury trial.  Pardoning him will help to right the injustices he faced at the hands of the Mueller investigation.”

Roger Stone. Sammy the Bull. These are the people Trump cloaks himself in. Far too many people support, or at least continue to tolerate him. People like Trump, would-be strong men, count on the fact that most people can’t sustain outrage. Hold on long enough, like Trump has, and most people end up too exhausted to maintain any form of protest. And that’s exactly where we are, with the Iowa Caucuses upon us, and Trump showing a strong lead in the polls heading into them.

NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard noted that Trump leads the pack with 48% of respondents saying they support him, compared to Nikki Haley at 20%, Ron DeSantis at 16%, and Vivek Ramaswamy at 8%. Still more alarming is the fact that 49% of Trump supporters characterize themselves as “extremely enthusiastic,” while only 23% of DeSantis backers and 9% of Haley’s are that excited about their candidate.

At the start of the Trump administration, I reread George Orwell’s 1984, for the first time in many years, and experienced a frightening resonance between the book and the times we were living in. Orwell wrote about “doublethink,” which is “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” He wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Today, too many people seem to be willing to watch a would-be dictator come to power in this country. We must avoid giving in to complacency. That’s an important part of our job right now. Don’t give up. Don’t think of Trump as inevitable. He’s not, and we’re going to make sure that he doesn’t win.

Thank you for being here at Civil Discourse. Your subscriptions and support let me put more of my time and resources into this work and I appreciate it. I’m grateful to those who share their knowledge of politics, and history and other important topics with us, and it’s an honor to get to discuss the law and its intersection with politics with you. Knowledge is most certainly power.

We’re in this together.

Joyce