Undermining the rule of law is a choice
And Republicans will make it every day of the week
The Republican Party used to be the party of law and order. Of being tough on crime. But now their leader is a convicted felon – and they’re mostly not handling the transition well.
In the hours since Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Republican Party officials and conservative media figures have been having what might politely be described as an emotional meltdown. Senator Marco Rubio has called the verdict a “complete travesty” and a “political show trial”. Senator Josh Hawley says that the trial is an example of Joe Biden wanting to “CRIMINALIZE” his political opposition. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said it was a “shameful day in American history”.
Curiously, many on the right have combined these dire warnings about bias in the criminal justice system with another, less alarmist message. The result of the trial is actually a good thing, they argue, because the sight of Trump being unfairly victimized by the establishment will all but assure his election in November. The trial result is apparently both a five-alarm fire and a great campaign tool.
Although these responses some inconsistent, they’re actually not. They stem from the decision that the modern Republican party has taken to place themselves firmly in opposition to the rule of law, democratic equality, and any other principle that might get in the way of their will to power. If large numbers of Americans do come to see the trial result as a travesty of justice which threatens the foundations of American democracy, then they will do so in large part because they have been deliberately lied to by the conservative political-media complex.
The core of this lie has been to act like the New York case against Trump is some strange outlier, a matter which would never have been brought to court if the defendant weren’t the next Republican candidate for president. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Although it has often been described as the weakest of the cases faced by the former president, the humdrum and routine nature of the New York conviction is actually precisely what makes it the most damaging and plausible.
The other matters that Trump faces trial for – organizing the January 6th insurrection and the retaining of highly classified national security information – are unusual things that not many people are in a position to do. Cases addressing them, however justified, would be genuinely unprecedented. On the other hand, falsification of business records is a crime that has been charged nearly 9,800 times by New York State since 2015. Hush money payments to lovers are one of the oldest scandals in the book – in fact, they were the subject of arguably the first major political scandal in American history, Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds.
Instead of simply admitting that a tawdry and serially scandal-plagued man did a tawdry and scandalous thing, Republicans have made a strategic choice to discredit the criminal justice system. And they’ve done it despite knowing full well that many of their criticisms of the process are based on mistruths. Take Hawley, who blamed Biden for the charges despite the fact that as a graduate of Yale Law School he is no doubt aware that the president of the United States has no influence over legal proceedings under New York state law.
These sorts of lies have consequences. They undermine the trust that many Americans have in the rule of law and important democratic institutions, making them the subject of bitter partisan fights. They convince millions of Republican voters that American democracy is a corrupt and rigged system which isn’t worth defending. Most seriously of all, they provide rocket fuel to Trump’s own plans to degrade and dismantle America’s democratic institutions if he returns to office after this year’s election.
That’s a choice that the Republican Party has chosen to make - and one it should be held accountable for.