Why the Indictment of Donald Trump Matters (Even) More Than America Thinks
Image Credit: Octavio Jones
The Fight for Justice Never Matters More Than When Fascists Are Trying to Pervert the Very Idea of It
by umair haque
Perhaps he can write his very own Mein Kampf while he’s in prison. It was apparently, after all, his bedtime reading. There’s been a lot of ink spilled already about the indictment of Donald Trump, and plenty more surely will be. Let me offer a few thoughts. Does it matter? Of course it does. This is an historic moment for America, and for the world. The first indictment of an American President?
I want to give you a more thoughtful, considered set of comments than you’ll hear from pundits, hopefully. You deserve that much, and you can be the judge of that.
What’s this case really about? A lot more, I suggest, than many think, even now. The way it’s framed so far — even on the thoughtful side — is the old line about a nation of laws versus a nation of men…people. That’s true, but in a much subtler way than is being talked about.
How do nations fail? How did America get here? What’s really happening to America — right now?
One side — the fascists, basically — abuse their way into power. They cheat, they defraud, they tell Big Lies — “the election was stolen!! Gay people are groomers!! Jan 6th was a peaceful protest!!” On and on it goes.
And then something crucial happens. When they gain power, they begin to rewrite the law. And they’re doing so in increasingly dire and dark and dangerous ways. Take what’s by now the canonical example, Ron DeSantis’s Florida. The law is being weaponized against…everyone. Kids, teachers, parents. Books banned, classes cancelled, words banned. Tip lines set up to “report” on families. Take the Supreme Court suddenly taking basic freedoms away from…more than half of society…women.
We think of “the rule of law” as a static thing. It’s not. The rule of law is dynamic, ever-changing, perpetually in flux. And what fascism does is perverts it. It rewrites the rule of law. Weaponizes it. In a very specific way.
What does the rule of law exist to do in a democracy? It’s there to institutionalize democratic values — certain values, the ones of peace, truth, equality, freedom, justice. It’s there so we can all enact them. Live them, without fear, every single day. And when we enact their opposites — hate, violence, lies, fraud, violence and so forth — at least in different degrees, we are breaking the law. And we are to be punished.
What does fascism rewrite the rule of law to do? To institutionalize anti-democratic values. Not peace, truth, justice, freedom, and so forth — but their polar opposites. Lies, hate, violence, etcetera. Now those values are institutionalized. They are enacted and enforced. The Gestapo — tip lines to report on teachers and families and students. The SS, volunteer paramilitaries of true believers — vigilante forces proposed in Texas and Florida. Book bans, word bans, history rewritten, entire kinds of people criminalized.
The law is not a static thing. And right now, what’s happening in America is an acute phase of fascism. The fanatics and lunatics aren’t just breaking the law. They’re way, way beyond that point of fascist collapse. They’re in power, and they’re actively rewriting it.
Rewriting it to institutionalize anti-democratic values, to make entire states places more reminiscent of Soviet Russia than a modern democracy. Can’t exist as that kind of person, kid, you can’t say that word, teacher, history doesn’t exist, family, you can’t love that way.
Phases of fascism. One, the fascists abuse their way into power. Two, they gain power. Three, they rewrite the rule of law. Four, democracy is broken, for generations. Five, they unleash the cleansing they crave on all their enemies, the hated subhumans, the liberals, the LGBTQ, intellectuals, Jews, minorities, everyone else. America’s at phase three. The fascists are in power, and rewriting the rule of law, building shadow institutions, like little Gestapos, and aspiring SS’s, whose entire point is to make “the law” something that enforces hate, spite, intolerance, rage, bigotry, injustice, lies, violence — not peace, truth, justice, and freedom. That is a bad place to be.
That context needs to be fully, clearly understood. The law is not a static thing. The entire point of fascism is to change it. Think of how the Nazis operated. The Nuremberg Laws expropriated and segregated the Jews. Legally. Now think of DeSantis’s Florida. His entire modus operandi is to make what’s essentially neo-fascism legal. Under the guise of “parent’s rights” and so forth. But of course taking rights away from me is hardly giving them to you — rights are for us all. Fascism operates by rewriting the rule of law to take universal, inalienable rights away — and this is where America is, right now.
That’s really why the indictment of Donald Trump matters. It’s not just about Trump, or Stormy Daniels, or his businesses, or even consequences for an ex President, since nobody should be above the law, or any of that, at least not just about that. It is about the question raised by the dynamic above.
How do you really stop fascism? If fascism is a kind of cancer that eats away at democracy from the inside, by rewriting the rule law so that it’s perverted, what do you do about it? Then democracy must have teeth. You have to defend what’s left of the democratic corpus of the rule of law…before the fascists pervert all of it.
Think of it as a contest. There’s a corpus, a body of law, that’s vaguely democratic, even if, like all such bodies of law, it has plenty of flaws. The fascists are rewriting it, at some accelerating rate, taking rights away, perverting the entire meaning of the rule of law. Now it’s a contest to defend what’s left, from being eaten away, turned inside out, weaponized, used against people, institutionalized in the name of hate, lies, injustice, violence, supremacy, not peace, truth, freedom, equality. Now it’s a race against time, with teeth.
Democracy must have teeth if it’s to win this race. It has to punish those who are perverting the rule of law, or else…that rate at which the perversion’s accelerating…the law’s being weaponized to take rights away from innocent people…just keeps rising. Now it’s a contest between two forms of the rule of law: the democratic one, and the fascist one. To win that contest, democracy has to claw back its notion of the rule of law itself. It has to say not just that obeying the law matters, but that this form of law matters. The democratic one, in which laws exist to institutionalize democratic values, not, say, making teachers felons for holding history classes, or investigating families because of who their kids are, and we all know where that road leads.
Does all that make a little sense? This is a contest not between Trump and Bragg. It’s not really about fraud charges or hush money. It is about a contest being played out in America about which kind of rule of law matters. Trump’s and DeSantis’s? The fascist ideal, where the rule of law itself now a captured institution, which punishes people for democratic values like peace, freedom, truth, and equality? Average people, like teachers, kids, families, innocent, normal, peaceful people? Or the democratic rule of law, in which no, none of that’s OK?
This is about a contest between the fascist and democratic rule of law. Is the law there to give people basic democratic rights — or take them away? The law isn’t static. The fascists are rewriting it at light speed. Democracy only wins if it defends its own ideal of the rule of law itself, and that is what this case is really about. I know that’s subtle, and I know that’s a little complex, but I think it’s rarely been truer. This is isn’t just about whether or not justice is done — it’s about what justice is, what form of it prevails in a society: the fascist perversion of it, or the democratic kind.
Now. I know that I tried to really drive that point home. Here’s why.
Already, you can see plenty of the media taking a groan-inducing angle. They’re buying into the line that this will only provoke the far right, the lunatic right, which is, sadly, the only right left, really. Let’s dispense with that red herring immediately.
Will this “make” the GOP more likely to act in vengeance, and come after the next Democratic President, or power figures, and so on? No, because they’re going to do that anyways. Take a hard look at where the GOP is. They’re trying to put teachers and professors and parents in jail. Normal people. They’re criminalizing teaching kids about…history…being gay…being themselves. They’re already coming after average people, and that word, “criminalizing,” is anodyne, so let’s spell it out: the GOP is already perverting institutions to make everything from being a woman to being LGBTQ to reading books against the law. So the idea that somehow indicting Trump is going to “provoke” them into “retaliating” is such a complete absence of reality and truth it’s laughable. “Retaliating”? They’re already the ones who are trying to destroy democracy.
What don’t we do with fascists? Rule number one. Let’s all take a moment to remember. Appease them. Because what happens? History tells us: they walk all over you, laughing, and say it’s your fault for making them mad, in the classic gaslighting pretzel twist of abusers’ logic. Nobody should fall for this line: “Don’t make them mad! They’ll just retaliate!!” They’re the abusers in this situation, not…those of use who believe in democracy and the rule of law.