A History of Violence
And Aileen Cannon's justice.
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Before we start: After slow-walking the classified documents case for months, Judge Aileen Cannon chose today to . . . dismiss the most open-and-shut criminal case against Trump. Wholesale.
Her reasoning is that a special counsel does not have standing to prosecute a former president.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems that the logic of her decision is that had a regular prosecutor from the Department of Justice handled the prosecution, then maybe he/she would have had standing, so it is precisely the attorney general’s attempt to put the prosecution beyond reproach which fatally wounded the case. (Hunter Biden, in other words, gets no such luck I’m Ron Burgundy?) We’ll have actual lawyers break this down for you soon—check out The Bulwark homepage later this afternoon.
But I would say this: It seems pretty clear that Cannon was intent on making this problem for Trump go away. No matter what.
And there is no remedy. This case is, as a practical matter, a dead letter. At least before the election concludes and possibly forever.
It’s a remarkable perversion of justice—remarkable because of how transparent and brazen it is. Like with the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, Cannon does not even bother to pretend to be operating in good faith.
But when it comes to the rule of law, them’s the breaks. Sometimes the criminal justice system functions properly. Sometimes it doesn’t. And we have to live with both sides of the coin.
This is a highly unsatisfactory answer. But it’s the only answer.
Highly unsatisfactory answers are kind of what we do here. If that’s not the best invitation to join The Bulwark, then I don’t know what is.
But I guess it’s better than Come and experience the fall of the Republic with us?
I don’t know. It’s been a rough few days for everyone.
1. Whirlwinds
At dusk on August 3, 1914, Britain’s foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of his office overlooking St. James Park and said to a friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Which is more or less how I feel about America today.
First things first: The attempted murder of Donald Trump is abhorrent. The killing of Corey Comperatore is a grave evil. We hold the people who were injured and everyone who was present at Saturday’s shooting in our prayers.
It would be nice to believe that this attack will represent the nadir of political violence in the Trump era. But it is difficult to do so. Because the entire hallmark of the Trump era is that Donald Trump brought political violence back into the American mainstream after a fifty-year slumber. He did this intentionally and his mainlining of political violence was not a regrettable side effect of his political program. It was—and remains—his secret sauce. Trump’s embrace of political violence has been the one zone into which his establishment imitators feared to tread. Say what you will about Ron DeSantis’s shameless attempt to outflank Trump from the right on policy: At least DeSantis was never willing to joke about shooting migrants.
Republican voters noticed.
I cannot improve on David Frum’s analysis, so you should read it all.
When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.
After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”
Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television. . . .
In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.
Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.
As I said, I cannot improve on this, but I can add to it. A few vignettes from January 6th:
At his rally on the morning of January 6th, when Trump learned that some people in the crowd had weapons, he reportedly said “I don’t [fucking] care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.” He ordered that the metal detectors screening the crowd for weapons be taken away.
When his mob attempted to murder his own vice president, Trump was sanguine. Then Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Trump and begged him to make it stop. Trump said, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
Months later reporter Jonathan Karl asked Trump about the attempt to kill his vice president. This is what Trump said:
“Well, the people were very angry,” Trump said.
“They said, ‘hang Mike Pence,’” Karl told Trump.
“It’s common sense, Jon. It’s common sense that you’re supposed to protect,” Trump said. “How can you, if you know a vote is fraudulent, right, how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress?”
There is more; so much more. There was the time that a Trump-aligned group holding an event at a Trump property (with Donald Trump Jr. in attendance) aired a video depicting Trump murdering his political opponents.
There was the time Don Jr. encouraged supporters to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas.
There was the time Trump reposted a video of a pickup which had a decal depicting Joe Biden, hogtied in the bed of the truck.
There were all the times Trump referred to his opponents as “vermin,” “human scum,” and alternately “enemies of the state” or “enemies of the people.”
Mere weeks ago Trump inflamed his supporters by claiming that the FBI and Joe Biden had attempted to assassinate him back in 2022.
Any one of these items would have been a large enough transgression against norms to have ended the viability of a normal politician.
For Trump, this is just the Cliff’s Notes version.
2. History
Authoritarian movements thrive on political violence for a number of reasons.
It intimidates ordinary people who might otherwise resist.
It destabilizes institutions that are supposed to act as guardrails.
Because authoritarian movements are not bound by honor or norms, they can exploit any violence for their own ends.
Chaos is a ladder.
See the Reichstag fire; or Mussolini’s use of street violence; or the American tradition of bloody-shirt politics. This is what authoritarian movements do. They promote violence and chaos—and then use the spread of violence as a justification for their illiberal aims.
Jeremiah Johnson published an essay last night in which he extolled the virtues of liberalism and noted that, in the long run, liberalism has had a great, 300-year run against authoritarianism:
Trump’s rejection of liberal values is why he shouldn’t be considered for public office. But it’s not a reason for you to abandon your own liberal values, not a reason to attempt assassination. If you assassinate Trump, you’ve surrendered your philosophy. You’ve admitted he was right all along to call for violence. In a real sense you’ve become Trump. Going down that road only leads in a single direction, towards an all-against-all war.
“But if Trump’s going to play dirty, shouldn’t we resist? You want us to fight a fascist with peace and love?”
It sounds ridiculous, at first glance, to continue respecting all the norms while your opponent plays dirty. It makes liberalism seem like a limp-wristed, weak-willed philosophy unable to defend itself.
To this argument, I can only point to history. History is filled with genocidal empires, vicious authoritarians, fascists, communists, and evil madmen of all shapes and sizes. Somehow every one of them ends up losing to liberalism in the long run. Europe’s colonial empires all dissolved. Nazi fascism was defeated. Soviet communism was defeated. . . . Liberalism’s track record over the past 300 years is extraordinary.
It’s stirring to realize that, in the long run, liberalism holds its own.
Of course, in the long run we’re all dead.
3. Hope
I want to conclude with David Frum, though, because he has the darkest view:
Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptly turned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.
Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.
One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.
Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.
The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him.
Pass the hemlock.
If there is a silver lining, it’s that Democratic elites, at least, have held to the norms. They have said the right things. They have offered their thoughts and prayers. They have maintained the principles of liberalism. And for that, they deserve our admiration.
Remember kids, the party who says that:
- dems are grooming children
- dems are pedophiles
- dems are literal communists
- dems murder babies
- dems want to replace whites with immigrants
- dems steal elections
- dems want to confiscate all of your guns
- Mike Pence should hang
- Kyle Rittenhaus did nothing wrong
would really like dems to tone down their rhetoric about Trump being a proto fascist who tried a coup and failed and might try again in the future because some 20-year-old incel whose motivations are still yet unknown tried to kill him.
And as to Jeremiah's points in Part 2, those violent movements were put down with violence, not with "let's all tone this rhetoric down guys" liberalism. It took the practitioners of liberalism going violent themselves to put the fascists down. That's an important footnote.
Anyone who tries to equivocate, tsk-tsk Democrats about "heated rhetoric", or gaslight people into "both sides do it equally badly" should simply be reminded of this: Trump is naming his VP this afternoon. The reason Mike Pence isn't saddling up for his second VP rodeo is because at the end of the last one he did the right thing and they literally built a gallows to hang him for it.