Donald Trump. (photo: Nigel Parry)
Remember, in Trump’s wonderland shooting up a church is not a guns issue
n his latest impersonation of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, the president of the United States stopped just short of shouting “Off with his head!” at the latest New York terror suspect, but pretty much everyone knows that’s exactly
what he meant. Lewis Carroll intended the Red Queen to be an
entertaining caricature by virtue of her absurdity. That’s a luxury we
don’t have when considering our Trump’s affinity with the Red Queen’s
jurisprudence: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.”
That’s just what our Trump demands again and again from legal
proceedings, with appalling disregard for the Constitution and any other
law that happens to displease him.
On its face, that disregard for law, that open
hostility to anything like a fair process that might produce a result
displeasing to Trump – all that would seem to be an obvious and constant
violation of his oath office (“preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”), as well as an obvious and constant violation of the constitutional mandate (Article II, section 3) that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
As recently as 1970, presidential messing with the judicial process was generally taken seriously, as when Richard Nixon at a press conference said of Charles Manson, “Here is a man who was guilty,
directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason.” Manson’s
defense attorneys promptly called for a mistrial, the presiding judge
took it under advisement, and amidst public outcry
Nixon backed off on his prejudicial public comments, claiming that he
didn’t mean to imply that Manson was guilty. Nixon’s attorney general
(and later convicted felon) John Mitchell, who was present at the press
conference, said later: “I don’t believe the President made the charge
or implied one.” [At the time, with killings in Vietnam, Cambodia, Kent
State, and Fred Hampton’s bedroom,
among other places of extra-judicial execution, it would have been more
to the point to note that Nixon was a man who was guilty, directly or
indirectly, of thousands of murders without good or just reason.]
On October 31, the FBI charged Sayfullo Saipov with the truck-murder of eight people
in lower Manhattan. Saipov waived his Miranda rights and said he had
planned the attack for Halloween and asked to display an Islamic State
flag in his hospital room. Referring to Saipov’s attack the next day, in
the midst of a long statement that first blamed immigration policy with
no coherent argument, Trump said to reporters at a cabinet meeting:
Terrorists are constantly seeking to strike our nation, and it will require the unflinching devotion to our law enforcement, homeland security, and intelligence professionals to keep America safe….
We have to get much tougher. We have to get much smarter. And we have to get much less politically correct. We're so politically correct that we're afraid to do anything…. We also have to come up with punishment that’s far quicker and far greater than the punishment these animals are getting right now. They’ll go through court for years….
We need quick justice and we need strong justice — much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughingstock.
In other words, Trump is arguing for an American
police state that is somehow omniscient enough to keep out immigrants
who will commits crimes seven years after being admitted to the country.
Saipov was an accountant came here in 2010 under a Diversity Immigrant
Visa and became a permanent resident with a green card.
And for anyone
who doubted the police state drift of the commander in chief, there was
this exchange near the end of the press event, referring to the Guantanamo prison that is an ongoing crime against humanity:
Q: Mr. President, do you want the assailant from New York sent to Gitmo?
THE PRESIDENT: I would certainly consider that, yes.
Q: Are you considering that now, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: I would certainly consider that. Send him to Gitmo — I would certainly consider that, yes.
If it weren’t such an abomination of torture and legal
horror, Guantanamo would be a laughingstock to the world. Instead it’s a
shock to civilized countries and a great recruiting tool for Islamic
extremists. Guantanamo, whether Americans like it or not, is America’s
face to the world. Established in panic and fear by the Bush
administration, perpetuated mostly by Congressional panic and fear by an
Obama administration that didn’t care all that much, now it is a dark
joke that is a fact of American life, where we keep people charged with
no crime without a chance of release and let them starve themselves in
protest until they’re too weak to resist force-feeding, by which we keep
them alive to prolong the endless torture of hopeless, painful lives.
Trump has long missed the brutal joke of Guantanamo reality while tweeting lies about how many Guantanamo detainees have returned to the field (relatively few), feeding a fake news story of long standing.
That’s not the joke and laughingstock our Trump was
referring to, although it should be. But Guantanamo is a fine example of
“Sentence first – verdict afterwards” jurisprudence, so Trump is
willing to overlook Obama’s fingerprints all over this particular
legacy. Trump’s laughingstock is the constitutionally-based American
judicial system. Except that in the White House wonderland of 2017,
Trump never said what the White House transcript says he said. He didn’t
call the American judicial system a joke and a laughingstock. That’s
what White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied on November 2:
That's not what he said. He said that process has people calling us a joke and a laughingstock.
To be fair, only her first statement is a demonstrable
lie. The second statement, that people are calling us a joke and a
laughingstock is actually true, just not at all in the way Sanders wants
us to believe it. And the Justice Department had already charged Saipov
in federal court in New York amidst widespread reports of how well the
federal court system has dealt with terrorism cases, especially as
compared to the dismal record of the military tribunals at Guantanamo.
Even Trump seemed to acknowledge that reality when he tweeted, once again interfering in the judicial process:
Would love to send the NYC terrorist to Guantanamo but statistically that process takes much longer than going through the Federal system…
Not to leave bad enough alone, Trump tweeted four minutes later with a sentiment that out-Nixoned Nixon:
...There is also something appropriate about keeping him in the home of the horrible crime he committed. Should move fast. DEATH PENALTY!
Our Trump knows no bounds. Every time he tweets like this it’s another impeachable offense that the cowardly majority in Congress will ignore, or even follow. We know what kind of government our Trump would like us to have. He made that clear to the Washington Post:
The saddest thing is, because I am the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by that. I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her dossier, and the kind of money — I don’t know, is it possible that they paid $12.4 million for the dossier, which is total phony, fake, fraud and how is it used?
Our Trump wants to be emperor, perhaps not in name,
but in fact. He wants no checks and balances, he wants no rational
consideration, he just wants obedience.
He wants to punish his enemies:
“Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” He wants the kind of judiciary
they already have in Guantanamo, where the presiding judge (a general)
feels justified in convicting defense counsel (a higher ranking general) of contempt of court, not just for standing up for his client, but for standing up for his client’s civilian attorneys.
This was the first military tribunal conviction since 2008, not of a
terrorist but an American general, sentenced to 21 days in confinement.
The convicted general is the chief defense counsel for military
commissions and the second highest ranking general in the Marines. The
general’s underlying offense was his objection to the government
wiretapping attorney conversations with their clients. He was freed after three days’
confinement. The case is continuing, with Pentagon lawyers uncertain
whether any of the developments so far are within the officials’ legal
authority, and a federal civilian judge reluctant to hear any appeal.
This would all be breathtakingly funny if it were fiction. But it’s a
real world laughingstock.
There are laughingstocks everywhere. We have a
government of laughingstocks. The president is a laughingstock, as is
his cabinet and his veep. The Congress is a laughingstock – that’s the
one truly bipartisan thing about Congress. For the moment, only the
judiciary is not a complete laughingstock, although the Supreme Court is
teetering toward the bad joke category. The federal judiciary continues
to maintain centers of rationality, coherence, and constitutional
principle. But time is against the judiciary. As Trump appointees fill
more and more vacancies, we can expect to be governed by a full
laughingstock. And the joke will be on us. Unless we can somehow regain our full civic size and become another Alice who tells them all: “Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience
in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20
years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers
Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life
magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences.
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