When Donald Trump stormed out of his trial last week— and in case it’s hard to keep track, this was the trial for defaming the woman he’d already been convicted of sexually abusing— he told spectators in the courthouse hallway, “This is not America.”
That told the rest of us everything we need to know about Trump. It might not be Donald Trump’s America, but it is our America. It is a nation of laws, and a nation where no one is above them, not even an ex-president. It’s a nation where our system of justice calls everyone accused of violating the law to account. That includes ex-presidents. It’s a nation where someone charged with breaking the law has the right to be tried not by an autocratic tribunal but by a jury of his peers.
Yes, Mr. Trump, even if you don’t approve, this is America. It’s an America where you are now under indictment in four different courts for 91 criminal counts. It’s also an America where you are as free as any other citizen to use all the tools the system allows to fight every charge. And to appeal when decisions don’t go your way.
I can’t think of a better America than that.
But Trump can. In his America, he’s not even liable for any crimes. He ceaselessly demands full criminal immunity for presidents, partly as an effort to avoid prosecution for his own alleged criminal conduct but also to permit him to behave, if he gets back to the White House, exactly as he pleases, with no risk of consequences. In Trump’s America, he’s neither liable nor responsible for what he does. When he tries over the phone to extort the president of another country by withholding appropriated aid, it’s not extortion, it’s “a perfect call.” When he pleads with a high state official to alter the outcome of a presidential vote, it’s not meddling in an election, it’s another “perfect call.”
In Trump’s America, a lost election is a rigged election. It’s only honest if he wins. As opinion columnist Alexandra Petri satirically wrote in The Washington Post last month after Trump won New Hampshire, “A primary election happened, and Donald Trump just accepted it. As though tallying who got more votes in an election could possibly be used to determine who had won it. As though he were going to just participate in democracy now, as though nothing had happened.” The derisive title of the column was, “Trump accepts election results, outraging his base.”
But it’s true. He didn’t question the results, he didn’t demand a recount, he just accepted the win. Although not without caustic comments about his opponent Nikki Haley. That’s because on election night, while conceding the state to Trump, Haley put a positive spin on the support she got. Which Trump just couldn’t tolerate. He called her “delusional,” eventually dubbing her “birdbrain,” and told his victory rally, "Let's not have somebody take a victory when she had a very bad night.” To her insistence on staying in the race, the low-class winner told the crowd, “I don't get too angry, I get even.” He even threw in a nasty remark about her dress. That is Donald Trump’s America.
We already knew he was a bad loser. Turns out, he’s a bad winner too.
In Trump’s America, if prosecutors who are going after him are black, they are “racists.” He has used the term against three of them, each one out to cost him his money or his freedom. He has used the term against New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is preparing to prosecute Trump for falsifying business records to hide illegal hush money payments to the stripper Stormy Daniels. Bragg is black. He has used the term against New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who has prosecuted Trump for the falsification of financial records for the Trump Organization. She is black. And he has used it against Fani Willis, the D.A. in Atlanta where he faces 13 criminal counts of racketeering and fraud for trying to overturn the 2020 election. She too is black.
About the only prosecutor he hasn’t called a racist is special counsel Jack Smith in Washington, who is white.
But Trump has other disdainful names for him on social media: “deranged,” “a lunatic,” “a thug,” and “psycho.” About the only official Trump hasn’t gone after is the judge in his forthcoming trial for mishandling classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, where charges include violating the Espionage Act. In all the cases against him, she’s the one judge he appointed.
In Donald Trump’s America, if he actually believes that he has to spend so much time in courtrooms because the system of justice has been “weaponized” against him— what he incessantly calls “a witch hunt”— then it’s okay to threaten to use the system against his adversaries if he does return to the White House. When an interviewer on Univision asked him whether he might weaponize the Justice Department and the FBI as retaliation for his legal troubles, he said, “Yeah. If they do this, and they’ve already done it, but if they follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse.” Then he followed up on the threat: “If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”
Yet another piece of Donald Trump’s America.
He also has said many times now that he would use his power if he gets to be president again to actually provide pardons for “a large portion” of the insurrectionists who are in prison for their part in the January 6th riots at the Capitol.. “Some people call them prisoners,” he told a campaign rally before the Iowa caucuses, “I call them hostages.”
It is worth quoting federal judge Royce Lamberth, who has presided over many of those trials. He said at a sentencing hearing last week for yet another convicted insurrectionist, “The rioters interfered with a necessary step in the constitutional process, disrupted the lawful transfer of power, and thus jeopardized the American constitutional order. Although the rioters failed in their ultimate goal, their actions nonetheless resulted in the deaths of multiple people, injury to over 140 members of law enforcement, and lasting trauma for our entire nation. This was not patriotism; it was the antithesis of patriotism.”
It would only be called patriotism in Donald Trump’s America.
In Trump’s America, in contrast to most every president before him, politics do not stop at the water’s edge. Before him, our unity was seen through foreign eyes as an American strength. But Trump blew that up a long time ago. And he hasn’t stopped. After the drone attack that killed three American servicemen at a military outpost in Jordan and injured more than forty, his message was neither sympathetic nor helpful. Just hypocritical. He said in a statement that if he were president, “(We) would right now have Peace throughout the World. Instead, we are on the brink of World War 3.” As we saw too many times during his presidency, the path to peace in Donald Trump’s America means we align ourselves not with western democracies that share our values, but with dictators and tyrants.
He makes the same gross and inaccurate generalizations about the southern border. “There’s a 100% chance that there will be a major terrorist attack in the United States, so many attacks, maybe, and it’s all because of what’s happened over the last three years,” he told a campaign rally last weekend in Nevada. He is so hypocritical on that issue that after years demanding an air-tight border— which he himself did not achieve during his four years in the White House (and what he did achieve, Mexico didn’t pay for)— he’s now torpedoing the most conservative border bill that Congress has ever considered. And he’s not even hiding his motives. He has as much as admitted, he doesn’t want to give Joe Biden a victory. And Trump’s acolytes, especially in the House, lap it up. So they obstruct, and the border festers. No one has explained to Trump and his toadies, half-a-loaf is better than none. The options are to take what a bipartisan Senate has negotiated, or to take nothing.
For political expediency, they are happier taking nothing. Which also, because legislation is linked to the defense of our southern border, torpedoes aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel, aid to Taiwan. In Donald Trump’s America, partisan security is a higher priority than our nation’s and our allies’ security.
It is, as Judge Lamberth wrote, “the antithesis of patriotism.”
I want my America, our America, not Trump’s.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Trump's America will change life on earth for everybody and every thing including the air.
Spot on right Greg. Thank you