Are we a nation of laws or a nation of lies? We cannot be both.
The Republican Party, remade in the image of Donald Trump, seeks to impose one-party rule and overturn the rule of law
Donald Trump and his Republican Party will undermine the rule of law and everything that goes with it if they are not defeated. Here’s how I know.
The rule of law is about equality, human dignity, and freedom. It is universal idea and has often been resisted by those in power.
The Republican Party has been completely made over in the image of Donald Trump.
This new version of the Republicans Party has sought to undermine the rule of law across the country.
They have already made it harder for voters to remove them.
A second Donald Trump term would replace the rule of law with a one-party personality cult, more like the government in China.
All of this is made possible by lies.
Here’s a closer look at all of those issues:
The rule of law
This notion that we are all subject to the same law is hardly universal. China and Russia have never accepted the idea. It does not hold in dictatorships on the left or the right. Its implementation was always a product of conflict, where people without power insisted upon their individual dignity.
The rule of law finds its basis in both the Greco-Roman world and the Hebrew bible. Plato and Aristotle understood that law provides necessary checks on rulers and magistrates. It allows citizens to act without fear of arbitrary attacks on their persons and property. The Hebrew bible, similarly, creates a framework of law meant to structure society around the idea that each person is made in god’s image, protecting the dignity of every member of society.
The rule of law was slow in becoming the dominant feature of our lives. Rulers were not bound by laws until 1215 and the signing of the Magna Carta. It would be another 400 years before the Glorious Revolution in England permanently established the notion that even kings were subject to the law. Still, societies were organized on other principles: primogeniture, divine right, military power, religious and racial bonds. It took another hundred years before a new Nation, the United States, drafted and ratified its constitution, and the world finally had a nation where the law was its organizing principle. And it was not until 1968 that all citizens were legally allowed to vote in our elections.
The Republican Party, remade in the image of Donald Trump, seeks to throw that all away and to impose one-party rule.
That the Republican Party has been remade in Trump’s image can no longer be seriously disputed. Republicans who once had some self-respect now seek merely to flatter Mr. Trump. According to CBS’ congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, the U.S. House is looking at legislation to require the Treasury to print $500 bills with Mr. Trump’s portrait. Dozens of Republicans made the trek to the Manhattan Courtroom where Mr. Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies for the purpose of undermining the jury verdict. Former cold warriors like Sen. Lindsay Graham now regularly excuse pro-Putin efforts to undermine the security of western democracies simply because Mr. Trump is more comfortable with dictators than with democratically elected leaders around the world. And, if that’s not enough, the party has expelled its traditional conservative members who put the rule of law before rule of party- just ask Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney.
Is it going too far to say that Mr. Trump’s GOP seeks to overturn the rule of law? No, it is barely far enough.
Republicans in the U.S. House work tirelessly to make sure the rule of law does not apply to Mr. Trump. Through bogus oversight hearings, they work to undermine every investigation into his wrongdoings. Their members and allies in the press never miss the chance to speak out against every conviction. House Speaker Johnson is now pushing legislation to strip states of the power to hold President’s accountable for crimes they commit in those states. In court, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that no President can be held accountable by the judicial system unless he is first impeached and convicted in the Senate. In other words, only his party may pass judgement. The Supreme Court takes this view seriously enough to have delayed any federal prosecution of Mr. Trump until after the next election.
When Mr. Trump was president, his administration engaged in partisan enforcement of the law: Bill Barr personally intervened to protect two of Mr. Trump’s allies, Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, and the Justice Department held Michael Cohen in solitary confinement as a warning to others. Meanwhile the IRS engaged in partisan audits, targeting two FBI agents who were tasked with investigating Mr. Trump.
Nor is the GOP content with abusing the law in the criminal and administrative realms. They are determined to abuse power to make law. Radical gerrymandering in Republican controlled states means that voters no longer have a real say in the legislation that gets passed. Ohio is a good example, and, as David Pepper has shown, the result is a self-reinforcing corruption. Those in power reward those who can keep them in power, resulting in corporate and government collusion, and terrible outcomes for citizens. As I explain below, it will get worse.
The GOP has already made it harder for voters to check their power.
You might argue that at the end of the day voters can just put an end to all of this. And that’s true, but it now requires a herculean effort because the deck is stacked. It is not just that gerrymandering means it now takes a super-majority of voters to force change in many states. Republican power has been cemented into place by the Supreme Court. Recall that Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once in the last thirty years. Yet Republican Presidents have appointed six of the nine Supreme Court Justices. Those Justices gave us Citizens United, a ruling that overturned campaign finance laws and allowed corporations to contribute to candidates, creating dark money political action groups that now spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence elections. Those Justices also said partisan gerrymandering was legal and dramatically watered down the Voting Rights Act. Court decisions to undermine voting rights and flood our politics with dark money, along with the ongoing radical gerrymandering, have consolidated Republican power.
A second Trump term will be much worse than the first.
Now you might think that we survived one Trump term, a second can’t be worse. No, that’s wrong on two counts. First, we barely survived on Trump term. Because of his disastrous leadership during COVID, the country’s economy collapsed. GDP fell at a 32.9 percent annualized rate, and 30.2 million Americans were receiving unemployment checks. Economists described this as the biggest blow since the Great Depression of the 1930s. During that time, then President Trump called the pandemic a political hoax, urged Americans to drink bleach, and claimed the economy was rebounding. While he was driving America into a hole, Mr. Trump was also delaying aid to Ukraine as it was being attacked by Russia. Mr. Trump famously conditioned that aid on Ukraine lying about his opponent, Mr. Biden.
Second, we know the damage a second term will cause. Mr. Trump has laid out his second term agenda in a document called Project 2025. This document explains in detail how the next Trump administration will remove every check on its power, and how it will consolidate power in the executive branch - and in the President in particular. The civil service, one of the 20th centuries’ major reforms, will be wiped out and replaced by party patronage hires. The ability of Congress to fund particular projects will be stripped away, so that the President can direct federal spending as he alone wishes. Using immigration as an excuse, the plan calls for the creation of mass detention camps where undocumented Americans will be forced to live until they can be deported. Mr. Trump calls these people animals (a term he also uses for many reporters). You can expect the massive sweeps to pick up all sorts of citizens who stand refuse to bow down. If you are conjuring up images of folks in military garb asking you for your papers, you beginning to see what they plan.
Everything Trump is built on lies.
Lies about the last election. Lies about our judicial system. Lies about immigrants. Lies about the media. Lies about crime in our cities. Lies about the beneficiaries of tax breaks. Lies about the IRS. Lies that both parties cause this kind of damage. Lies about the size of crowds and the path of hurricanes. Lies about everything, because lies make it harder for us to trust one another. And without trust even the rule of law cannot hold.
So, are we a nation of lies or a nation of laws. November will tell.