Guest post: We don’t have the luxury of time
Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.
The Trump appeals court reprieve really bothers me. Here’s a take by David Graham in The Atlantic, which argues that, even though Trump routinely exploits legal procedures to get out of justice, it’s right of the appeals court to lower his bond and grant him yet more extensions. It would be “unjust” for Trump to lose his ill-gotten assets if he succeeds in getting this case dismissed:
But then imagine that a few weeks from now, Trump won his appeal, convincing the court that Engoron’s finding was incorrect, or that the calculated amount of the penalty was unfair. Trump would have no way to recover the assets he’d been forced to unload at fire-sale prices. It doesn’t take any affection for Trump to see why a court would want to avoid such an outcome, and why—even if Trump would still be filthy rich—this would be unjust punishment
In other words, in the face of Trump’s brazen abuse of legal procedures to get out of justice, if we lean into offering him more legal leniency, the very kind which he keeps using to his advantage, it will in the end prove that the legal system works just as it’s supposed to. The idea is, give him every possible chance we can, so we can show the world that when he eventually loses, there can be no question that he lost fair and square.
The problem is, we’re not trying to use Trump as an example to demonstrate how noble the legal system is. That’s a foolish idea. Right now we need to use the legal system to urgently stop a dangerous man from destroying democracy. Trump and his followers don’t care about fair-and-square; they won’t ever be reasonable. The judgment against him is plainly reasonable and the odds of a successful appeal are minimal. That’s grounds to take hard action, now. He will rage about procedure no matter what you do moving forward, so stop trying to appease him. There’s no fucking point in saying please and thank you to an angry bull. It won’t stop him from charging.
This is exactly the kind of cowardice we saw when the Germans were puzzling over how to stop Hitler’s brazen power grab in 1932. In the face of someone recklessly trampling over the institutions that uphold a democratic society, the instinct to lean harder into process, procedure, decorum and restraint is perhaps understandable, but it’s all wrong. That logic ignores the asymmetry at play when you’re dealing with a corrupt narcissist.
Democratic systems keep failing at dealing with raging bulls because too many individuals within “the system” are cowards. What people like the appeals court panel who granted Trump reprieve today and the SEC who greenlit his blatantly illegal stock scam are doing is passing the buck: they’re preemptively ceding to Trump the benefit of the procedural doubt because they’re scared to do their jobs, to uphold the rules, when it’s their turn to step into the ring and face the bullhorns. They tell themselves that the system will eventually work and justice will prevail, because viewing “the system” as an abstract force for good is easier than facing the fact that “the system” is only ever as just as they, the tangible, fallible individuals it’s made of, are willing to act under duress.
Trump has lately taken to comparing himself to Al Capone. That’s an apt comparison. It took Eliot Ness and his Untouchables to bring down Capone. Ness recognized right away that playing strictly by the book was no use after corruption had reached the threshold where it was threatening the survival of the system of law and justice itself. Extreme circumstances sometimes call for extreme measures.
And Trump has shown very clearly that today, more than the justice system is broken — the entire democractic system is ill-equipped to defend against this kind of tyrant.
But don’t worry, says David Graham. There’s plenty of time to play nicey-nice; it’ll all get sorted out down the road:
As for Trump, he may just be delaying that outcome—but that’s another problem for him to try to wriggle, cat-like, out of on another day.
No, David. We don’t have the luxury of time. There may not be any legal system left by the time the credulously pedantic legal idealists are done extending Donald’s rope. The time for passing the buck is over. This is a tyrant and if there are opportunities within the legal system to stop him, we must grab them now while we still can.
We should have brought the Untouchables in to clean this up years ago.
Much of what we “know” about Eliot Ness is myth. Yes, he played a role in the fight against Capone, but it wasn’t through extra-legal means and gun battles. In the end, what brought down Capone was tax evasion. See here and here.
There is no silver bullet against Trump. Even if he loses all his cases, has all of his properties confiscated and gets thrown in jail, a large part of the electorate will vote for him. The only way to defeat him is to get the rest of the voters–including the ones who dislike Trump but don’t trust Biden, or don’t think Biden is far enough left, and the ones who vote according to how they feel about the price of milk–to vote against him. And not just him, but everyone in the Republican party who won’t stand up to him, whether they’re true believers or opportunists or just cowards. It’s hard work, and messy, and frankly not something Democrats as a whole are very good at, but it’s the only way.
To be clear, I didn’t say anything about extralegal means or gun battles. I don’t know much about Ness but it’s my understanding that he ran a tight ship, he offered no consolations, he pushed hard for conviction and against corruption, and I think his team contributed to the push to prosecute Capone for tax evasion and the push to ensure he served a long sentence in jail.
It’s exactly things like extending deadlines and reducing bonds that could have helped Capone wriggle out of sentencing.
And I think things like seizing Trump’s money and properties can make a huge difference in his campaign. in addition to humiliating him, it will drain his all-important campaign funds.
He should never have been allowed to proceed with the stock deal; that $3 billion is a gift from feckless SEC enforcers. And he should not be receiving leniency for the sake of pursuing a bogus appeal of his civil fraud conviction in New York, either. Those things are valuable gifts to him at an incredibly crucial time.
Fair enough; I was reading things into your post that you didn’t say, because they are part of the Ness mythology, but I realize you weren’t saying that. Still, while Ness gathered a lot of evidence against Capone, that wasn’t what was used to take him down; it was the work of the accountants going patiently through his tax returns and gathering evidence of his income that eventually got him. This was very much “playing by the book” and not “extreme measures”. (And for the record, the reason Ness and his team was called “untouchables” was because they played strictly by the rules, specifically not accepting bribes.)
To be clear, I agree that Trump should face the legal and financial consequences of his actions, but the main problem is political, and it through politics that he needs to be defeated.