Donald Trump IS Above the Law!

Frontline’s "Lies, Politics and Democracy" Episode Highlights Trump’s and His Followers’ Ongoing Threat to the American Republic

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Donald John Trump really IS above the law!

He bestrides the world like a colossus, doing whatever he pleases and wrecking everything he touches in his wake. Trump is what Superman would have been if his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, had gone ahead with their original plan to make him a super-villain instead of a superhero. Trump stands firmly for lies, injustice and the un-American way. Those of us who aren’t part of his cult look at him the way a lot of decent Germans in the 1930’s probably looked at Hitler: “Who IS this guy? I thought we were better than this!”

By one of the macabre coincidences that have become all too common in the Age of Trump, PBS aired the latest episode in their long-running documentary series Frontline on September 5, the same day a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida named Aileen Mercedes Cannon (how appropriate that her middle name is the same as Hitler’s favorite brand of car!) gave Trump everything he had asked for in the case of the documents the FBI seized from his personal residence/golf club at Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

Judge Cannon not only granted Trump’s request for a so-called “special master” to review all the seized documents, she ruled that he should check the documents not only for possible violations of attorney-client privilege but also for so-called “executive privilege.” She wasn’t fazed by the fact that Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States, and the current President, Joe Biden, specifically waived executive privilege in connection with these documents.

Judge Cannon also ruled that Donald Trump has special privileges due to his status as an ex-President, especially an ex-President who because he only served a single term is not barred by the 22nd Amendment from running for the office again. "As a function of Plaintiff's former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own," Judge Cannon wrote. "A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude."

While Judge Cannon didn’t give Trump everything he had asked for – including a guarantee that any documents not needed by the government for its investigations be returned to him – the ruling was such a major giveaway for Trump that even the judges of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals drew back from some of it. Even though two of the judges on the three-judge panel that heard the appeal were Trump appointees, they ruled unanimously that Trump had no legal right to own the estimated 100 classified documents seized by the FBI.

"It is self-evident that the public has a strong interest in ensuring that the storage of the classified records did not result in 'exceptionally grave damage to the national security,'" the three-judge panel stated in a 20-page opinion. "Ascertaining that necessarily involves reviewing the documents, determining who had access to them and when, and deciding which (if any) sources or methods are compromised."

“Sources and methods” are a Holy Grail to the intelligence community. No country in the world that has an intelligence service wants other countries’ officials to know who we are spying on, how, when and with what sources of data – especially human beings who may literally be risking their lives to provide us with information. As the Eleventh Circuit’s three-judge panel wrote in their opinion, “[W]e cannot discern why the Plaintiff [Trump] would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one hundred documents with classification markings,"

Things didn’t get any better for Trump when the special master was appointed. Judge Cannon ordered both sides – the government and Trump – to nominate two candidates each for the position. Either side could object to the other side’s nominees, and Trump’s attorneys promptly vetoed both names the government put forward. Of Trump’s nominees, the government vetoed one – a man whose wife sits on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which would hear any of the special master’s rulings – but agreed to the other one, Judge Raymond Dearie. So Dearie got the jub – and proceeded to make mincemeat of the Trump side’s claims.

Trump himself had been giving interviews to favorable news outlets like Fox and Newsmax (a hard-Right Web site for people who think Fox is too liberal for them) in which he made sweeping claims that the FBI had planted classified documents and other papers, and that he had personally declassified all the records during his term as President. Judge Dearie told the Trump side, essentially, to put up or shut up. Judge Dearie ashed Trump’s lawyers for a list of the documents they’re alleging the FBI planted, and a list of the ones he supposedly declassified. So far Trump’s attorneys have not come up with any of the lists Judge Dearie asked for.

Obviously Trump’s strategy is to delay and stall the proceedings as longas possible. People who have followed Trump’s career from his emergence as a New York real-estate developer to successful Presidential candidate have noted that delay is his principal legal tactic. Trump is waiting and hoping that Republicans will win back control of both houses of Congress in this November’s midterm elections, and a Republican President – either Trump himself oir one of his clones, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott – will win the Presidency in 2924 and appoint an Attorney General who will cancel all the ongoing investigations of Trump and allow him once again to go scot-free from any consequences.

A Sore Loser and an Even Sorer Winner

The September 5 PBS Frontline episode, “Lies, Politics and Democracy,” aired on the same day Judge Cannon gave her Trump-fawning opinion, It began with a montage of film clips of defeated U.S. Presidential candidates conceding the elections and offering congratulations to the winners. From Wendell Willkie in 1940 to Hillary Clinton in 2016, the pattern held. Even candidates who lost close elections based on disputed results from one state, and could therefore have claimed with some legitimacy that the election had been stolen from them – like Richard Nixon in 1960 or Al Gore in 2000 – publicly acknowledged that they had lost.

Not Donald Trump. As New York Times reporter Peter Baker, who covered Trump’s Presidency and has since written a book about it, The Divider, told Frontline, “He has done this every step of the way through his career, long before politics. When The Apprentice lost an Emmy to The Amazing Race, he claimed that the Emmy contest was rigged. … Every step along the way, anything he has ever lost is because somebody else has cheated and stolen it from him.”

The importance of The Apprentice, the “reality” TV show that cast Trump as the smartest and most successful capitalist of all time – a perception wildly at variance with his actual record as a businessperson – cannot be overstated. It sold millions of Americans – including people who never actually watched it – on the idea that Trump was such a brilliant manager people would literally flock to him and allow him to humiliate them publicly in hopes of learning his secrets to success.

So when The Apprentice repeatedly lost the Emmy for Best Reality TV Series to The Amazing Race – a show that celebrated athleticism over business savvy – it was more than Trump’s fragile ego could handle. He went on his then-favorite social media platform, Twitter, to grouse about the outcome and say the process was rigged: “Amazing Race winning an Emmy again is a total joke. The Emmys have no credibility. The Emmys are all politics, that’s why The Apprentice never won.” In another venue, Trump said, “The public is smart. They know it’s a con game.”

When Barack Obama, a man Trump both publicly and privately hated, successfully won re-election against Mitt Romney in 2012, Romney himself conceded – but Trump didn’t. In statements chillingly similar to the way he would react to his own electoral defeat in 2020, Trump tweeted, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy. More reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama. Let’s fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington.”

During one of the debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump was asked point-blank if he would accept the results of the election – and he said, “If I win.” As Daniel Ziblatt, author of a book called Hoe Democracies Die, told Frontline, Trump’s comments about the 2012 and 2016 elections “set off alarm bells. To be a small-’D’ democrat means to know how to lose elections, and a democracy can’t survive if politicians and political parties don’t know how to lose. Sometimes people have even said democracy is for losers; it’s a system that allows losers to come back and fight another day. And so if the losers deny that they’ve lost, the system can’t endure.”

What’s more, Trump’s refusal to accept defeat has become a role model for other Republican candidates. Many of the major Republican nominees for governor, U.S. senator and other major offices have already announced that if they don’t win, they will declare that the election was stolen. Doug Mastriano and Judy Hice, Republican gubernatorial candidates in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively, have all but promised that they will refuse to certify the 2024 election results if a Democrat wins their state’s vote for President.

Not Just Trump: Republicans Reject Democracy

The Frontline show “Lies, Politics and Democracy” featured many interviews with traditional Right-wingers who feared Trump’s authoritarian tendencies when he first ran for President in 2016 and even earlier. Among them were Bill Kristol, founder of the Right-wing magazine The Weekly Standard, who said, “He had a real feel for people’s anxieties and unhappiness about various things. He was willing to stoke those anxieties and hatreds, in some cases, resentments, in ways that other politicians weren’t willing to. … I was publicly saying that Trump was unacceptable, people shouldn’t support him. They should make clear they couldn’t support him in the general election even. They should band together against him.”

Another Right-winger, columnist Mona Charen, told Frontline, “There were many, many signals throughout 2016 that this was not just a showman, but no, somebody who had definite authoritarian sympathies. And there was violence at his rallies that he openly encouraged. I mean, it wasn't a joke.”

The Frontline documentary featured clips from Trump himself at his 2016 campaign rallies, mocking people with disabilities and urging his supporters to beat up hecklers in the audience. “Knock the crap out of him, would you?” Trump told the crowd at one such rally. “Just knock the hell.” adding that if anyone in his crowd were arrested for assaulting a heckler, “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise.” At another rally on February 22, 2016, he said, “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you. Ah, it’s true.”

“The nastier he got, the more excited the crowd got,” Danien Ziblatt told Frontline. “And rather than trying to clamp that down and sort of pull back, he egged on the crowd further. And that dynamic of the angry crowd and the demagogic leader fomenting anger and using violent rhetoric was a sign that this is somebody who had no democratic core, liberal democratic core. And it was not clear what the limits of this style of politics were. So I think that was very frightening.”

Once again, it’s not just Donald Trump but most of the Republican Party which has rejected the basic tenet of democracy – the idea that the people, or a majority of them, should be able to decide who will lead them and what the people they elect should do. In a July 2022 speech before the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Right-wing policy group that writes model bills and gets state legislators to pass them – former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) openly called for a second constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution to enshrine the policy priorities of the American Right.

Citing Article V of the existing Constitution, which provides that the votes in a new Constitutional convention shall be one state, one vote – not one delegate, one vote – Samtorum boasted that because the convention would be dominated by the voters of smaller, more Right-wing states, "we have the opportunity … to have a supermajority, even though …we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with." (The speech was reported by Business Insider at https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7.)

One of the keys to the Republican Party’s outsized dominance of America’s current political system is their shrewd use of the anti-democratic features of the original Constitution. The framers guaranteed each state, no matter its size, two U.S. Senators – which may have seemed like a livable compromise in 1787, when the largest state, Virginia, had nine times the population of the smallest, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 80 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming.

Under the original Constitution, actual voters would elect no higher office than their member of the House of Representatives. The Senate was chosen by state legislatures, and the President by an Electoral College made up of the total number of House and Senate members – which once again extended the outsized power of small states in the overall design of the U.S. government. Later developments, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s assertion of the right to nullify legislation as unconstitutional ini 1803, and the evolution of the Senate filibuster from 1837 to 1975, added arrows to the modern-day Republican Party’s anti-democratic quiver.

Today we have a six-member radical-Right majority on the Supreme Court which – contrary to the usual designation of them as “conservative” – is on an ideological tear, upending a 50-year-old precedent that guaranteed women autonomy over their own buddies and a 100-year-old law in New York that banned the carrying of concealed weapons. And in its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will take up a case brought by North Carolina Republicans who assert that state legislatures have “plenary power” (a phrase we heard a lot in Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election) to do whatever they like in setting up their districts, and neither the courts nor anyone else can check them.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have essentially given up on the idea of winning the Presidency through the popular vote. Republicans have won three Presidential elections since 1992, but only once did their candidate, George W. Bush in his re-election in 2004, win a plurality of the actual vote. In the other two cases – Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 – the Democrats won the popular vote but the Republicans won the Electoral College, and with it the presidency.

If the 2024 election turns out the way 2020 did – a Democrat wins the Electoral College by carrying states with Republican legislators and/or governors – and the Supreme Court endorses the “plenary power” of state legislatures, they could do what the Trump team unsuccessfully tried to get them to do in 2020: refuse to accept electors pledged to Biden or anyone else who might be the Democratic nominee, and seat electors pledged to Trump or whoever is running as the Republican candidate.

A Worldwide Tidal Wave of Authoritarianism

And it’s not just the United States of America. In country after country throughout the nominally democratic world, autocrats are coming to power with many of the same principles, strategies and tactics as Trump. Strongmen like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Andrzej Sebastian Duda in Poland, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines have won power based on Trumpian hyper-nationalistic appeals to “make [their countries] great again.” The recipe includes attacks on immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and anyone perceived as a threat to “traditional family values.”

And once these people take power, they have no intention of ever relinquishing it again. They systematically go after all other institutions in society that might put a brake on their power, including the courts, the media and ordinary citizens. They also use their power, as Republicans are doing throughout the U.S. states they control, to rewrite the elections laws to make it more difficult for people who would vote against them to be able to vote at all. And their bases of support are consistently among working-class people and others with less education – precisely the sorts of voters who in many of these countries (including the U.S) used to be bulwarks of the Left until they were swayed to the Right by appeals to traditional cultural values.

The latest example of a former democracy which has turned to the dark side and become a neo-fascist country is Italy, where the original Fascist movement started exactly 100 years ago next month. In October 1922 Benito Mussolini staged his famous “March on Rome,” in which he organized 30,000 armed militiamen to advance on the nation’s capital and demand – and get – absolute power. Mussolini stayed in office for 23 years until his nation ended up on the wrong side of World War II and he was captured and hanged by anti-fascist Italian partisans in 1945.

But Mussolini’s last chief of staff, Giorgio Almirante, was not idle. In 1946 he formed a new political party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), with the stated goal of keeping Mussolini’s political legacy alive. Barred by the postwar Italian election law from calling his party fascist or using the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the Fasces (a bundle of twigs with axes embedded in them; the Romans had used this as a symbol of power and Mussolini not only copied it but derived the term “Fascism” from its name), Almirante devised a flame-like symbol based on the colors of the Italian flag – red, white and green – that the party, now called Fratelli d’Italia (“Brothers of Italy”) since it was reorganized in 2012, has used ever since.

On Sunday, September 25, Fratelli d’Italia and its current leader, Giorgia Meloni, won 26 percent of the vote in Italy’s national elections. Together with two other Right-wing parties in their coalition, Meloni’s neo-fascist forces will control 42 percent of Italy’s next legislature and therefore, under Italy’s constitution, will run its government. Meloni expressed her views on cultural issues during her campaign in a speech to another far-Right party, Vox. In words that might have come from a Trump Republican in the U.S., she said, “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology ... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration ... no to big international finance ... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"

Donald Trump was probably overjoyed at the outcome of the Italian election. Not only did a candidate following his recipe for success win control of a major country, it probably held personal resonance for him. One of the members of Meloni's coalition was the party led by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Though Berlusconi, an Italian media tycoon with no previous political experience, was driven out of office in disgrace after he was convicted of tax fraud and sex with underage girls, he is now returning to political influence as a junior member of Meloni’s governing coalition.

That sends a powerful message to Donald Trump. As someone who has managed through gutter tactics, street smarts and total ruthlessness to survive and prosper from blows that would have destroyed lesser mortals, Trump no doubt envies Berlusconi’s comeback and sees it as a role model for himself. It sends Trump the message that even if, God forbid, he’s not only indicted but actually convicted of any of the crimes he’s currently being investigated for, he could still have a shot at a political comeback.

And make no mistake about it: Trump’s re-election as President, especially if accompanied by a Republican Congress, will mean the end of America’s experiment in republican self-governance. It will lead to massive witchhunts against women, people of color and especially Queers. It will also hasten the extinction of the human race because it will mean an end to any meaningful attempt to stop or slow down the devastating, apocalyptic effects of human-caused climate change. Under a second Trump administration, the Department of Justice will become an instrument to reward Trump’s friends and especially to punish his enemies.

Donald Trump already bestrides the world like the proverbial Colossus. Even though he’s no longer President, he still dominates the news cycle day after day, while Joe Biden struggles to get a word in edgewise. It seems to take a super-major news story, like the death of Queen Elizabeth II after 70 years of rule (the longest-serving monarch in British history) or the landfall of Hurricane Ian on the Florida coast, to knock him off the main news slot. Like it or not, we all live in Donald Trump’s America, and he just lets us live in it – or not.