The Age Of Trump: Lawlessness And Disorder

American Fascism's Betsy Ross

Has there ever been a president less about either law or order than Trump? I though Nixon was so bad that I went to live overseas for nearly 7 years after he won the first time. And on Nixon's worst day, he was never as bad as Trump on his best day... not that I recall any Trump best days. You?

Ben Mathis-Lilley, writing for Slate yesterday, probably doesn't. He noted just before Trump went on that "One major theme of the Republican National Convention has been 'rioting' and alleged lawlessness in 'Democrat-run' cities across the Untied States. Anxious Democrats and media observers have wondered if this traditionally potent GOP 'law and order' message will be able to boost Donald Trump’s presidential election chances against Joe Biden, who he currently trails by eight-plus points in the FiveThirtyEight polling average. This discourse can be, in a limited sense, connected to events in reality. In recent days there has been notable protest-related violence and property damage in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon. These cities do have Democratic mayors. If Biden were to do literally nothing to respond to the Republican Party’s rhetoric, maybe he would lose votes. In the larger sense, however, what the hell are we talking about here?"

Mathis-Lilley wrote about the ugly Trumpist-era "context in which a police officer in Kenosha was videotaped shooting an unarmed Black man seven times in the back while, according to a family attorney, his three children watched from inside their car. This is the context in which property damage occurred during a protest against Kenosha law enforcement officers, whose sheriff said in 2018 that he wished he could put four black shoplifters in jail for the rest of their lives so they wouldn’t reproduce. This is the context in which a white 17-year-old Trump supporter from Illinois drove to Kenosha on Tuesday and shot two protesters to death with an assault rifle after the police appeared to give encouragement to the 'militia' group he was with. This is the context in which that armed white supremacists have appeared at civil rights protests in Portland and become involved in altercations. Some law and order would be pretty nice, wouldn’t it? What protesters are calling for, with public sentiment behind them, is for people to be able to live their lives in peace and safety. How much unrest is ongoing in the countries that have contained the coronavirus and reopened public spaces? How much political violence is there in the countries in which armed neo-Nazis aren’t ubiquitously present at political events? How much property damage would be taking place in a country whose national response to a widely acknowledged police brutality problem wasn’t 'nothing'?"

This morning, the Politico Playbook crew professed shock that the president used America’s monuments-- Fort McHenry, the Washington Monument and the White House-- for nakedly partisan political purposes. It’s clearly illegal... 'The South Lawn speech was the final demolition of the boundaries between governance and campaigning in a week full of such eroding'." Considering the criminal nature of the Trump regime for the last 3 plus years-- not to mention the existing threat to democracy we're living through today-- the South Lawn speech...? Really?

Jonathan Chait seems to have thought so. "The second night of the Republican convention was a festival of massive lawbreaking," he wrote. "In open violation of the Hatch Act, President Trump turned the White House into a convention stage. He even held an immigration ceremony on camera, and had his secretary of State deliver a speech in explicit violation of State Department regulations. The White House might as well have been surrounded by yellow police tape... [T]he blatant violation was met with resignation. 'Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,' sneers Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. There is a controlling legal authority-- they just don’t care."

Does the Hatch Act matter? Everybody in government thought it did, at least a little, right until the Trump administration. Government officials used to take pains to avoid using their offices for campaign purposes. Two former officials wrote about the hassle they would go through to avoid a small breach. The purpose of this restriction is clear enough: Control of the federal government is not supposed to grant the in party advantages (or at least not excessive advantages) over the opposition. Joe Biden can’t hold campaign events in the East Wing, so why can Trump?

The Trump administration has effectively turned the law into a dead letter, in following its basic principle that any law that lacks an effective and immediate enforcement mechanism essentially does not exist. Trump has ignored the law for years, using his official events for campaigning, while previous presidents carefully avoided doing so, and even reimbursed the government for expenses incurred while traveling for campaign events. After the Office of Special Counsel recommended firing Kellyanne Conway for Hatch Act violations last year, nothing happened. “Some of Mr. Trump’s aides privately scoff at the Hatch Act and say they take pride in violating its regulations,” reported the New York Times last week.

Laws like the Hatch Act and prohibitions on using private emails for official purposes are in a category of laws that effectively bind one party but not the other. (Indeed, Trump’s administration is filled with private email users-- nobody cares.) Why is that?

One reason, particular to this administration, is that Trump violates so many norms so flagrantly that he shatters the scale. There’s only so much journalistic bandwidth. Covering Trump’s violations of laws and norms by the standard you would apply to a normal president would mean banner headlines every day and interrupting television programming with breaking news every night.

But another, more long-standing, reason is that the two parties operate in structurally different news environments. The Republican base largely follows partisan Republican news sources, like Fox News, which largely do not hold their officials accountable. Republicans don’t have to worry that their small legal violations will make their own voters raise questions, because their own voters either won’t hear about the story in the first place, or-- if it becomes too big to ignore-- will learn about it in the context of some kind of whatboutist defense emphasizing how the Democrats are worse.

Disdain for democracy starts here

Democrats, on the other hand, have to communicate to their base through mainstream news outlets that follow traditional norms of journalistic independence. Of course you can critique the media for its implicit liberal biases. Even conceding for the sake of argument that the mainstream media has a strong social liberal bias, though, it is evidently true that they take Democratic violations seriously. The Times might go easy on any number of liberal shibboleths, but it was extremely tough on Clinton email protocol.

The media asymmetry is compounded by a structural bias in political representation. The House, Senate, and Electoral College all have Republican biases to various degrees. Republicans have the luxury of winning through pure polarized base appeals that Democrats do not enjoy. (This is one reason why, if you want Republicans to moderate, reforming the Senate would be a good start.)

And then there’s the additional problem that arises when reporters treat these asymmetrical conditions as unalterable and unremarkable features of the political landscape. From that standpoint, it’s obvious that minor Republican legal violations will not matter, and minor Democratic violations will. “Of course, much of this is improper, and, according to most every straight-faced expert, it’s a violation of the Hatch Act…” concedes Politico’s Playbook. “But do you think a single person outside the Beltway gives a hoot about the president politicking from the White House or using the federal government to his political advantage? Do you think any persuadable voter even notices?”

As analysis and prediction, this is correct. But it also has a self-fulfilling quality. Reporters assume small Democratic scandals “matter” much more than small Republican scandals, because Democratic voters follow news coverage that treats those violations seriously and Republican voters don’t. This is how you get to a world where Al Gore’s fundraising calls are still raising questions about his ethics three years later, while Trump’s latest obliteration of a law will be forgotten within days.