First, The Lawyers

 

“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s safe to assume Trump is as unfamiliar with Shakespeare as he is with the Bible, but he’s taken that proposition to heart. His Mafia-style extortion of protection money from some of America’s largest and, until a few days ago, most respected law firms has been of a single purpose: to rob people who oppose him of legal representation. It’s working.

And it’s part of a larger plan to block all avenues of escape from his authoritarian takeover of America. Nor is it just lawyers: It’s the entire justice system. Through Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, he already controls the DOJ. Panegyric Pam refuses to investigate the perpetrators of that security breach by Trump’s unqualified and incompetent clowns at the DOD. And she just ended an ongoing lawsuit filed under President Biden that sought to overturn a Georgia voting restriction deemed specifically targeting Black voters. She called the lawsuit, not the law, “an attempt to divide us.” And Trump just fired career prosecutors who’d been looking into his or his friends’ crimes.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. Trump wants to be rid of all judges who rule against him; true to form, Holy Mike Johnson, who loves everything about America except for everything about it, proposed getting rid of courts altogether – the ones who stand for the law. JD Vance and Elon Musk have been calling for judicial impeachments since before Vance embarrassed his way to Greenland and Tesla stock tanked.

As to that Hegseth-inspired security breach, well, according to Trump’s congressional henchfolk, it wasn’t a breach at all. Trump’s MAGA-speak communication director, Steven Cheung, combined spin, gaslighting, and outright lying in his defense of it.

We’re witnessing not just the word-for-word implementation of every regressive goal of Christian nationalists’ Project 2025 – that thing that Trump has never heard of, the goal of which is to blow up government and keep the leftovers for themselves – but total rejection of the rule of law, domestic and international. KKKristi Noem’s photo-op in front of Venezuelan alleged criminals violated standards dictated by the Geneva Conventions, to which the US is (so far) party: “Prisoners may not be publicly exploited for purposes of propaganda.” But seeing those people, most of whom were already imprisoned here, shackled and sent off to a horrifying El Salvadorean gulag is too much enjoyed by MAGAmericans to ignore. So the White House produces videos of it.

Describing the asymmetric advantage held by authoritarians, Bill Kristol, former Republican operative and Chief of Staff for Dan Quayle (I know; but still...) wrote: “The authoritarians break the rules, and the liberals restore the rules. The authoritarians cheat, and the liberals try to play fair. The authoritarians enjoy their ill-gotten gains, and the liberals try to restore a level playing field for all.” As should be obvious to anyone not Foxomagafied, that’s what’s happening. (Lest conservatives take offense, Kristol’s use of “liberals” refers to the “ism,” not the party. People who oppose authoritarianism. Americans of old, which used to include Republicans.)

Among my “conservative” friends who love what’s going on, one is a professor at a prominent East Coast university who feels his career has been held back because he’s a white male. He’s glad that people he considers unfairly privileged whiners get their due from Trump, especially trans people, for some reason. Another is a retired Marine with whom I get along well as long as we don’t discuss politics. He loves seeing stuck-to libs, and, like Trump, who “couldn’t care less,” he finds the economy-crushing effects of Trump’s tariffs and tax cuts a reasonable price to pay for the pleasure.

For phony Christians like Holy Mike, it’s about ideology and a hall pass to Heaven. For Trump, who has no values, it’s about power for its own sake. And revenge against critics. Because he neither understands nor cares about American history, forcing the Smithsonian to rid itself of “anti-American ideology” (i.e., our history) is the perfect example. (tinyurl.com/by2smith)

Same with threats to universities for what he claims are weak protections against antisemitism, about which he cares even less. It’s power over “elitists” who never accepted him. For the same reason, he allowed President Musk to fire the FDA’s top vaccine scientist and to make drastic cuts to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. To Trump, the hurt he causes is irrelevant. Only his narcissistic psychopathology is.

In Trump’s America, people whose only crimes are expressing opinions, or who are falsely accused, are abducted off streets by masked government men, jailed or disappeared, without the due process our laws require, against judicial orders, and lied about. A government that does that, without resistance, will feel free to do it to anyone it chooses. People unafraid to speak out are accused of defending terrorists. It’s North Korea. It’s Tiananmen Square. If any Republicans care, they’re keeping it to themselves.