What Happens When a Felon Throws a ‘Law-and-Order’ Convention
It’s law and order for thee, party for me.
ONE OF THE DEFINING ELEMENTS of authoritarianism is selective application of the law. In fascist movements, “law and order” is invoked against scapegoats and political enemies, while the leader and his allies are exempt from legal accountability. This distinction has become central to Donald Trump’s Republican party. At the party’s national convention this week, speaker after speaker affirmed that the law must be rigorously applied to undocumented migrants, but not to Trump or his henchmen.
On Tuesday evening, House Republican leaders delivered several speeches from the rostrum. “We in the Republican party are the law-and-order team,” Speaker Mike Johnson professed. “We always have been—and we always will be—the advocates for the rule of law.” Tom Emmer, the House majority whip, complained that after Black Lives Matter riots in Minneapolis, then-Senator Kamala Harris had “promoted a fund to release the criminals from jail.” But Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, made an exception for her party’s favorite felon. She accused “corrupt Democrat prosecutors and judges” of waging “illegal and unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump.”
Eric Johnson, the Republican mayor of Dallas, told the convention audience that “the heart of today’s woke Democrat party is with the criminals, not with their victims.” The next speaker, Randy Sutton, an advocate for wounded police, lamented that last year “more than 70,000 law enforcement officers were physically assaulted. They were shot, they were stabbed, they were beaten, they were hit with bricks.” Sutton pledged that Trump would defend these officers.
It was an odd claim to make on behalf of a president who sent his followers to the Capitol three years ago and watched them beat police officers—and who now promises to pardon many of those who were criminally convicted for their actions that day. At least one Republican delegate appeared on the convention floor Tuesday night in a t-shirt that borrows Trump’s language and has become popular among his most avid supporters: “FREE THE J6 POLITICAL PRISONERS,” it said. For Trump and these diehard followers, the heart of today’s Republican party is with criminals who fight for him.
Another Tuesday night speaker, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, claimed that Biden and his leftist followers had “unleashed progressive prosecutors across our nation who care more about coddling criminals than about protecting their own communities.” But five seconds later, DeSantis drew the requisite exception for Trump. These same leftists, the governor protested, “weaponize political power to target their political opponents, like they’ve done to our own nominee.”
A PARTY DEDICATED TO the rule of law would distinguish between proceedings of the criminal justice system—no matter how fiercely contested—and extrajudicial violence. But where Trump is concerned, today’s Republican party sees no difference. It treats any threat to its leader as illegitimate. In three speeches on Tuesday night, leading Republican figures likened the criminal prosecutions of Trump to Saturday’s attempted assassination of him—and implied that Republicans should fight these prosecutions just as they would defend Trump against a shooter.
The first speaker to make this incendiary appeal was DeSantis. “He’s been sued, he’s been prosecuted, and he nearly lost his life,” DeSantis said of Trump. “We cannot let him down.”
Ben Carson, Trump’s former secretary of housing and urban development, drew the same connection. Trump’s enemies “tried to bankrupt him,” Carson told the delegates. “And then they tried to put him in prison. . . . And then, last weekend, they tried to kill him.”
In case anyone missed the point—or wondered whether it had the blessing of the Republican National Committee—Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the RNC, repeated it in Tuesday’s closing speech. The speaker who preceded her, Sen. Marco Rubio, had just asserted that “when President Trump was in the White House . . . our laws were enforced.” But Lara Trump added the crucial caveat: Her father-in-law, she insisted, was the victim of a “wrongful conviction” in his hush-money trial.
Lara Trump celebrated the former president for defying the legal system, just as he had defied his would-be assassin’s bullets. “I have seen this man dragged through hell and back: in and out of courtrooms, indictments, impeachments, mug shots, and even an assassination attempt. And yet he has never backed down,” she boasted. The delegates showered her with applause.
ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, two other members of the Trump family piled on. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., said Republicans would create a society “governed by law and order.” But she continued her thought by stipulating—in a figurative nod to her fiancé’s father—that under this new regime, the legal system would not be “weaponized against political opponents.”
Donald Trump Jr. followed Guilfoyle to the podium, raging that “pro-crime district attorneys” had “turned criminals into victims.” But scarcely a minute later, he accused Biden’s government of “persecuting my father. They twisted, contorted, and corrupted the criminal code to turn bookkeeping errors into felonies.”
Wednesday’s most remarkable speech came from Peter Navarro, Trump’s former trade adviser, who bragged—to thunderous applause from the delegates—that he had just finished a four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena. “Joe Biden and his department of injustice put me there,” said Navarro. He portrayed Steve Bannon, another Trump ally serving time behind bars for contempt of Congress, as a fellow victim of political persecution.
Navarro blamed his conviction on a “Democrat judge” and “an anti-Trump jury.” He said Trump, too, had been unjustly found guilty thanks to another “Democrat judge.” And he bragged that he and Trump were unbowed. “They convicted me, they jailed me,” said Navarro. But “they did not break me,” he declared. As the delegates roared their approval, he added: “And they will never break Donald Trump!”
Then, with barely a pause for breath, Navarro implied that migrants crossing the southern border were generally criminals. “Joe and Kamala, they threw out the woke blue carpet across the Rio Grande, opened our borders—to what? Murderers and rapists,” huffed Navarro. “When Donald Trump said ‘murderers [and] rapists’ in 2016, they go, ‘Oh, racist!’ Whatever. We read the papers. It’s murderers and rapists.”
This position—that the party’s scapegoats are presumptively criminal, but the party’s leader and his henchmen are innocent even if they’ve been found guilty by juries—is not law and order. It’s fascism.
Like other speakers at the convention, Navarro implied that the criminal cases against Trump were part of a campaign of persecution culminating in his near-assassination. “When they put people like me in prison and fire figurative and now literal bullets at Donald Trump, they also assault our families,” said Navarro. He urged Republicans to seize “control [of] all three branches of our government: legislative, executive and judicial.” And he called for retribution: “On Election Day, America will hold these lawfare jackals accountable.”
Again and again, as Navarro raged, the delegates howled their approval. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” they chanted. This is not a party of law. It’s a party bent on seizing power to punish its enemies and protect its friends.
The assassination attempt on Trump has completed the memory-holing of Trump's incompetence (e.g., his handling of Covid) and criminality (e.g., his central role in the phony state electoral college slates that were intended to subvert the lawful transfer of power to Joe Biden after the 2020 election and Trump's total dereliction of duty as Commander-in-Chief on January 6th as he watched gleefully for hours as the Capitol was attacked). The fact that Trump likely will again be elected president in November is the real "American Carnage" because it demonstrates that a huge swath of Americans care more about culture wars and the price of eggs and gas than about putting an incompetent criminal back in the White House.
Peru’s General Óscar Benavides:
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”