The Republican Version of "Law & Order" Is Dictatorship
Plus: The reality is that Trump is on track to win the popular vote.
Programming note: I sat down with Mona to catch up on the past week on our members-only show Just Between Us—Country First or Not? For an opposing view, Tim hosted Bakari Sellers and Elaina Plott Calabro on the flagship podcast: The Case for Riding with Biden.
The Next Level with Tim, Sarah and me will be out later today. You can find the show wherever you get your podcast, on YouTube. Bulwark+ members can access the ad-free edition, here.
1. Dictats
After Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts he had some thoughts about the criminal justice system:
“This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt. It’s a rigged trial, a disgrace,” he said.
During his trial, Trump held a rally in which he welcomed two rappers to the stage with him despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that they are currently under indictment in a massive gangland conspiracy. The suggestion, obviously, was that Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow are innocent men being wrongly prosecuted by the corrupt state.
Trump has spoken repeatedly about America’s “two-tiers of justice.” He has called the FBI and Department of Justice “vicious monsters.” He has claimed that the FBI is so corrupt and out-of-control that it planned to assassinate him.
Also, Trump wants to execute people convicted of dealing drugs.
I hope you click and listen because the entire thing is bananas, with the background music and atmospherics. But just in case, here’s the transcript:
We will institute the powerful death penalty for drug dealers, where each dealer is responsible for the death, during their lives, of 500 people or more. Mothers will never again be forced to watch their children overdosing and hosp-lee.
And we will never allow mothers to watch their child hopelessly dying in their arms, screaming “What can I do? What can I do? Help me God, what can I do?”
We are a nation of whose once-revered airports are a dirty, crowded mess. You sit and wait for hours and are notified that the plane won’t leave. That they have no idea when they will. Where ticket prices have tripled. They don’t have the pilots to fly the planes. They don’t seek qualified air traffic controllers. And they just don’t know what the hell they are doing.
That’s a real thing. That just happened.
Let’s take the two parts of this.
The first is that Trump is making the conservative view of law and order explicit: Any part of the justice system which intersects with his behavior is corrupt and illegitimate.
But this same justice system should be used to execute criminals who the maximum leader deems problematic.
That’s dictatorship. Pure and simple. It is the official policy of the leader of the Republican party. And I defy anyone to show me an elected Republican in good standing who will contradict it.
The second part is that Trump rolls straight from the casual policy maxim of executing drug dealers to complaining about airports.
And not just complaining about them, but fabricating a version of air travel that has no basis in reality.1
We have spent a great deal of time over the last two weeks talking about Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities. Whatever you think of Biden, Trump is clearly compromised. This is flat-out nuts.
There’s just one problem. Here’s David Wasserman from Cook: “This has been a remarkably stable race, but Biden’s post-debate dip represents the biggest polling shift we’ve seen all year.”
More Wasserman: “Trump’s current numbers among Black and Latino voters are incompatible with any plausible Democratic victory scenario.”
And finally: “Biden’s numbers among the youngest group of voters were tepid to start the year, and they steadily got even worse in the spring.”
All of which resulted in Cook moving six states toward Trump.
Oh, and elected Democrats are worried that New York is turning into a battleground state.
Here’s our promise to you: We tell you what we really think and why. You’re welcome to disagree. (Bulwark+ members can disagree in the comments!) We can’t promise we’re always right. Sometimes we change our minds. But we do promise to be honest. We’re building a community based on good faith. We’re happy to have you with us.
People need to get their heads around some very unhappy realities: