Justice is divisive and that’s OK
The Republicans and their allies in the rightwing media apparatus, which is global in scale, want to convince you that Joe Biden is personally directing the investigation of government secrets discovered at Mar-a-Lago and is directly responsible for the second criminal indictment of a criminal former president.
On Tuesday, while Biden was speaking, that collective effort culminated, for a brief moment, in a chyron on Fox that read: WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”
It was 30 seconds, but as Aaron Blake noted, the chyron “didn’t come out of nowhere; in many ways, it was a culmination. For days and months, [Donald] Trump and his allies have been pointing in this direction, despite the lack of any actual evidence that Biden played a role in the decision to indict Trump.”
READ MORE: Trump’s own attorneys could be witnesses in 37-count Mar-a-Lago documents prosecution
Fox backed away from the chyron amid backlash, but we can reasonably expect more of the same in the coming election year. According to the Post, Trump has decided to put the indictments at the center of his campaign in a bid to discredit the justice system while rallying supporters, who are being told that the Biden administration is “weaponizing” the government against Trump.
The Postsaid, “Trump is now determinedly delegitimizing the legal system, as he has tried to do in the past with public health measures, the intelligence community, elections and other people or agencies he views as opposing him.”
Revenge has become Donald Trump’s campaign theme. He vowed Tuesday to do to his enemies what he said his enemies are doing to him. According toPolitico, his “vow prompted cheers and chants of ‘lock him up!’ from the audience. The idea followed Trump’s own proclamation that he was facing ‘political persecution like something out of a fascist or communist nation.’”
Is Biden personally or directly involved? He said recently that he “never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge.” He added that he hasn’t and won’t talk to US Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland assigned Jack Smith to lead the investigation into government secrets found at Mar-a-Lago. Garland can’t overrule Smith without going to the Congress.
READ MORE: Trump promised 'food for everyone' at Miami’s Versailles — and paid for nothing
Does that mean Smith does not, in some roundabout way, answer to Biden? No, he does. But that’s what safeguards are for, like rules requiring that the attorney general, who does indeed answer to the president, can’t overrule a special counsel without first seeking, and getting, congressional approval. They are designed to prevent even the appearance of corruption by law enforcement.
That said, not enough is being said about the nature of justice. It is naturally divisive. That goes double for equal justice. There’s no getting around that fact.
Yet this fact is missing from the story.
On one side is Trump accusing Biden of “weaponizing” the government against him. On the other side is Biden and the Democrats, saying oh God forbid there is nothing political going on here. Jack Smith, they say, is merely following the facts and the neutral administration of justice. No politics here. Nope. Nada.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle are the respectable white people like Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, a reporter for FiveThirtyEight. They clutch their pearls over the possible impact of these unprecedented indictments on the broader erosion of public trust in institutions, like the Department of Justice.
Thomson-DeVeaux wrote Tuesday that even if Biden dodges the fallout, “trust in the justice system could ebb even further, particularly among Republicans.”
This framing is stupid.
You know what erodes trust?
When lawbreakers go unpunished for breaking the law?
Justice is divisive. It’s going to divide people. That’s its nature – that’s its political nature. I’d say most of us understand this. I’d say most of us accept this. I’d say most of us want justice – equal justice – to be politically motivated.
We want lawbreakers to be held accountable even when they are powerful enough to otherwise avoid accountability. We want them to be held accountable especially when they come right and promise to exact revenge on their enemies using power derived from politics. The wanting is political.
Justice is politically divisive – and that’s OK. Really. For some, it’s going to erode trust in the institutions that administer it. For others, it’s going to restore trust. This is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. It’s a democratic thing.
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