Trump's attacks on his liberal nemesis are projections of his own guilt

In between President Donald Trump’s attempted firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and the successful termination of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vengeful and retributive Commander-in-Chief and his team of lawless fascists have had a busy and chaotic time, harming the collective interests and well-being of the American people.

The Trump administration placed more than 30 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees on paid leave, in addition to 140 the month before, all because of an open letter they signed criticizing leaders for taking the agency back to the pre-Hurricane Katrina era.

Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security barred states and volunteer groups who receive federal funds, such as the Salvation Army and Red Cross, from providing services to undocumented immigrants.

Disaster aid groups warned that new contracts for awards and grants “would make it harder for nonprofits to help the most vulnerable Americans in the aftermath of a disaster.” No matter.

Last Friday, the White House Office of Management and Budget said Trump would cancel $4.9 billion in international aid already approved by Congress, under a little-tested theory called the “pocket recission,” without approval from lawmakers.

Trump is trying to wrest spending power from Congress, which enhances the likelihood that unless Democratic senators chicken out, there will be a government shutdown this month.

The OMB also said Trump was using his authority under the Impoundment Control Act to cancel billions of dollars “in woke and weaponized foreign aid money that violates the President’s America First priorities.”

Amid all this, I want to turn our attention to the lawless president’s repetitive use of the rule of law as a tool of intimidation against actual and fantasized enemies. I do so to capture one of Trump’s favored forms of victimizing others, as part of his modus operandi: retribution and normative abuse of power.

I use one of Trump’s long-time fantasized targets for slander to illustrate what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the “up is down and down is up” reality of Big Brother totalitarianism. I’m referring to one of the world’s foremost philanthropists, now the subject of Trump’s fake threats to bring “serious charges against billionaire liberal donor George Soros and his ‘wonderful Radical Left son,” accusing them of wrongdoing without evidence.

I do so because of our need to appreciate, if not understand, Trump’s psychic need to defend himself from his life course of lawlessness and associated harms, such as those he is currently causing millions to suffer, both domestically and globally.

It is this mental condition from which Trump suffers that calls out for a therapeutic intervention — like using the 25th amendment to stop him conducting political-legal affairs in the way in which the “pot calls the kettle black.” That is to say, by psychologically projecting onto others that which he has already done or will do, with or without the help from his loyal Gestapo-like fascists.

‘Outrageous’ threats

Soros has been a long-time financial supporter of Democrats and liberal causes. He has been a vocal critic of Trump, saying during his first administration that the president “would like to establish a mafia state.”

Last Wednesday, 27 Aug., in a social media post, Trump contended that Soros and his son Alexander “should both be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America.”

Remember, before returning to office this year, Trump and 18 co-conspirators – of whom three pled guilty — were indicted for RICO violations, for participating in efforts to steal the 2020 election from Joe Biden, culminating in the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021.

Like most of Trump’s lies, he was making up things to intimidate others who have a whole lot less money and power than Soros or his son.

Trump continued: “We’re not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America anymore, never giving it so much as a chance to ‘BREATHE,’ and be FREE. Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country!”

In his rambling and usually disconnected way Trump added, “That includes his Crazy, West Coast friends. Be careful, we’re watching you! Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Soros is a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor. He and his offspring would never back down or capitulate to Trump’s autocratic desires or schemes.

In response, the Open Society Foundations, the nonprofit funded by the Soros family, posted: “Threats against our founder and chair are outrageous. Our mission [has always been about advancing] human rights, justice, and democratic principles in the United States and around the world.”

Who is George Soros?

This alleged “radical,” a frequent target of far-right ire, who Trump has for years publicly defamed, was born in Budapest to a non-observant Jewish family in 1930. Surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary, in 1947 he moved to England, where he received BSc and Master of Science degrees in philosophy from the London School of Economics.

George Soros Billionaire investor George Soros attends the Schumpeter Award in Vienna, Austria June 21, 2019. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner

An investor, hedge fund manager, author, and philanthropist, Soros is best known for founding Soros Fund management, the Open Society Foundations, and the Central European University, and in the late 1980s and early 90s influencing the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

In the world of banking and finance, Soros formulated the general theory of reflexivity for capital markets, providing insights into asset bubbles and the market values of securities, as well as value discrepancies used for shorting and swapping stocks. Not surprisingly, he did quite well (or badly, depending on one’s financial standpoint), netting himself $1 billion as a result of his short sale of $10 billion of pounds sterling during the 1992 Black Wednesday currency crisis .

In 2025, Soros’s net worth is $7.5 billion, according to Forbes, even after giving away more than $32 billion to charitable causes, according to the International Business Times.

In the first quarter of the 21st century, no other individual has invested as much in criminal justice research, reform, and policy change. Key initiatives include:

  • In 2014, the New York Times reported a combined investment of roughly $175 million in criminal justice and drug policy changes since 2004, plus another $62.5 million for marijuana legalization.
  • In 2020, the Open Society Foundations pledged $220 million for racial justice, including funding for criminal justice reform and civic engagement opportunities.
  • Soros has contributed to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors, such as $1.7 million provided for Larry Krasner's first campaign for Philadelphia district attorney.
  • The Foundations have supported initiatives like the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, investing nearly $20 million in programs aimed at improving life outcomes for Black men and boys.

Who is Donald Trump?

According to Bloomberg, in 2017, when he first became president, Trump’s net worth was $2.3 billion: less than he received and/or inherited from his father, Fred, Sr., between 1949 and 1999. In a lifetime as a real-estate entrepreneur and businessman, Trump lost more than he made.

However, notwithstanding numerous emolument violations, including refusing to place the Trump Organization into a blind trust, by his return to power in 2025 he had more than doubled his net worth to $5.1 billion, primarily by way of investments in crypto currency and his Truth Social media company.

Unlike Soros’s founding of the well-respected, not-for-profit Central European University, which after 34 years is thriving in Austria, with students from more than 100 countries, Trump operated from 2005 to 2010 his for-profit, fraudulent Trump University. After the 2016 election, Trump agreed to pay $25 million to defrauded students who had paid up to $35,000 to enroll in sham programs.

Trump also founded the philanthropic Trump Foundation — which was forced to shut down in 2018, after public exposure of its “egregious pattern of illegality.’” Trump had to pay $2 million over misuse of funds. The foundation’s remaining $1.5 million was distributed to charitable organizations.

As previously mentioned, via initiatives such as the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Soros has championed philanthropic giving to improve the lot of some of the most disadvantaged sectors of U.S. society, and thereby tackle some causes of crime.

In office, supposedly responsible for the administration of criminal justice, and criminal policy reform, Trump has claimed to defend “law and order,” while becoming the greatest de-funder of law enforcement in U.S. history.

For example, in April the Trump administration terminated 373 multi-year grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, amounting to about $500 million and affecting 221 organizations in red and blue states and urban, suburban, and rural areas alike.

Sixty percent of these cuts had nothing to do with programs to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the cited reason for such harsh action. Forty percent of the cuts had to do with reducing civil rights abuses by law enforcement: ending federal oversight of local policing, cancelling consent decrees meant to curb police violence against Black people in more than 20 cities.

These terminated grants represent a terrible setback in crime prevention, as they provided federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution; victims’ services; juvenile justice and child protection; substance use and mental health treatment; corrections and reentry; justice system enhancements; research and evaluation; and other state and local public safety functions.

Lose-lose

As Trump’s autocratic and anti-democratic coup pushes dangerously forward, the agent of chaos and destruction himself continues to be driven in part by his antisocial personality disorders and desire for power, in part by a fetishized indifference to data, facts, rights, ethics, and injustices.

This Trumpian dystopia is already having dreadfully adverse and debilitating impacts. These include but are not limited to the national debt, domestic and international politics, micro- and macroeconomics, ecological and environmental sustainability, education and research, health care and human services, and market regulation and social control.

The result is clearly a lose-lose situation for everyone in the United States except for the malignant narcissist-in-chief, his sordid billionaire buddies, and those AI technocrats whose momentary bubble is likely to burst by 2029 — as the mortgage bubble did in 2008 and the dot.com bubble did before that.

As even Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreed, that is just the way financial capital works. George Soros is one billionaire who has sought, in some way, to mitigate the damage such disasters wreak. If this comparison between Soros and his would-be persecutor tells us anything, it is that Donald Trump is perfectly willing to make things worse for most everyone else, so long as it makes him richer.

This disorder explains the full horror of Trump

Unlike those people gathering together at either end of the anti-MAGA and MAGA continuum to engage in conflict over what looks like an emerging authoritarian, dystopian, back-to-the-future America, there are still some 40 percent of the electorate who are going about their lives undisturbed, as though nothing unusual was happening.

This trichotomous reaction to the sadomasochistic world of Donald Trump has much to do with his lifelong and chronic condition. We can blame most of the avarice and self-aggrandizement by Trump 2.0’s complot on his unacknowledged antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).

In this commentary, I do not focus on the mental states of those MAGA folks who are attracted to and support Trump, or on those anti-MAGA folks who are repelled by and resist him, or on the largest group of people who for whatever reasons choose to ignore him.

Instead, my attention is focused on delineating Trump’s instances of ASPD as a means for better understanding the president’s behavioral motivations and transactional reactions in relation to his political and policymaking decisions.

ASPD is key to explaining why Trump is perpetually breaking institutional norms to save his own ass or to go after somebody else’s — as in the weaponized Justice Department’s selective releasing of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Meanwhile, the president’s corrupt FBI Director, Kash Patel, along with Vice President JD Vance and crooked Attorney General Pam Bondi each inappropriately tweeted about searches of John Bolton’s home and office, seeking classified records.

This type of public disclosure had always been a DOJ no-no. But this performative display of anti-constitutional power on behalf of a vengeful Trump occurred so he could inflict pain upon Bolton, intimidate other critics, and derive pleasure for himself.

Whatever harm may come to Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, is due to his having written a negative book about the president’s first term, and having become one of Trump’s most credible and formidable critics.

ASPD has also been critically central to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, which could not have been any uglier and less supported by the American people.

This examination of Trump’s ASPD helps reveal many other quandaries in which the president finds himself, in particular when it comes to his alleged dealmaking and peacemaking skills. Say, like diddling around for eight months without coming close to ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Earliest and latest signs

Before I turn to Trump’s racist policies on crime control, his antihuman executive orders, and his counterproductive tariffs, as derivative and illustrative of his ASPD, it is incumbent to lay out the very dangerous and unfortunately ignored dynamics of Trump’s condition.

Trump’s ASPD first publicly appeared when six-year old Donnie got up from his desk, walked over to his male teacher and in front of the whole class hit him upside the head — because the first-grader did not care for the teacher’s taste in music.

Trump’s parents would send him to a military academy for “straightening out.” It obviously failed. Then, some 66 years after Trump was sent to military school — and about 57 years after he dodged the Vietnam draft by way of his bone spurs — a very different intervention occurred.

This was when President Volodymyr Zelensky showed up at the White House on August 18, 2025. Six months after Trump and company’s earlier brutal attack on Zelensky, and a few days after Trump’s suck-up meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the Ukrainian president brought with him seven of Europe’s top leaders, all for the purposes of appeasing the president.

With the cameras rolling, the world witnessed a political intervention to stop a superpower leader spouting “old pro-Moscow talking points that even the Kremlin doesn’t bother with anymore.”

More important than merely correcting Trump’s ignorance of history, this intervention stopped him doing something really stupid like negotiating a resolution to the war that would have been harmful to the U.S. and its Ukrainian and NATO allies while benefiting Putin.

Just three days earlier, Trump had rolled out the red carpet for the dictator who invaded Ukraine — the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, for war crimes including the kidnapping and re-educating of more than 19,000 Ukrainian children.

Psychopathy and sociopathy

As used by the National Library of Sciences, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders characterizes those with ASPD as having “a pervasive and enduring pattern of disregarding and violating the rights of others, typically emerging in childhood or early adolescence and persisting” throughout their lives.

Lacking empathy and seldom feeling any remorse, these individuals tend to manipulate others, usually for personal gain. Those suffering from ASPD may regularly engage in lawless behavior and “struggle to learn from the negative consequences of their actions.”

Besides failing to conform to societal norms, other common symptoms or tendencies characteristic of those diagnosed with ASPD include aggressiveness, deceitfulness, egocentrism, entitlement, impulsivity, irritability, irresponsibility, narcissism, recklessness, revengefulness, self-aggrandizement, and superiority.

While “psychopaths” and “sociopaths” are two of the more common names for sufferers from ASPD, these diagnoses are not interchangeable. However, doing so in the case of Trump may not actually be wrong, because the 47th president does exhibit a mixture of both forms of ASPD.

Clinically, these two groups of ASPD sufferers are distinguishable by origins, traits, and behavioral patterns.

Psychopathy is typically attributed as having to do with genetics or early brain development issues affecting areas of the mind related to emotions and impulse control.

Sociopathy is typically attributed to environmental experiences such as early childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse.

As Mary L. Trump, a psychologist and niece of the president, detailed in her first book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020), Trump’s ASPD has been an etiological mixture of these two illnesses.

As for behavioral actions and social interactions, psychopaths tend to be more controlling, calculating, and manipulating than sociopaths. Psychopaths expend much energy planning their lawlessness and they also employ manipulative actions to avoid detection. Psychopaths can be very charming and blend into society.

Sociopaths are less adept at concealing their antisocial tendencies. They are more impulsive and erratic. Sociopaths are prone to emotional outbursts, anger, and aggression.

As for violence, lawlessness, and crime, both high-functioning (HF) psychopaths and sociopaths like Trump are less likely than low-functioning (LF) psychopaths and sociopaths to engage in personal violence such as murder or felonious assault.

Deviating a bit from these patterns, the president has an extensive record of allegations of sexual assault and was found liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll by a jury of his peers.

Psychopaths are viewed as more dangerous than sociopaths because of their acute lack of empathy and overly calculated actions. HF psychopaths are more likely than HF sociopaths to engage in serial offenses, such as financial fraud and corporate exploitation.

Finally, because of a greater impulsivity and propensity for recklessness, sociopaths engage in more violent outbursts or poorly executed coverups of lawlessness or corruption than do psychopaths. On the other hand, sociopaths prefer not relying on violence, rather preferring lying, extortion, and intimidation.

Whatever benefits or inflates and animates Trump’s egomania or detracts from his sense of self-worth shapes, if not determines, his cruelly irresponsible actions.

Not to be overly reductive or to oversimplify Trump’s decision or policymaking production, but these have little to do with advisers — “the last person that the president talked with” — or anything to do with whether a piece of legislation or a judicial verdict is “good “ or “bad” for the nation, the rule of law, representative democracy, or even the interests of Trump’s constituents, billionaires excepted, including the MAGA base.

I contend that Trump’s actions or decisions are purely a matter of what in any given moment he perceives to be the most beneficial and least detrimental to him.

For example, here is what the president had to say in praise of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2017, when he toured the museum, led by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch and with his daughter Ivanka Trump, U.S. Senator Tim Scott, Alveda King, and the then Secretary of Housing, Ben Carson:

“It’s amazing to see. I could stay here for a lot longer. Believe me, it’s really incredible … I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage…”

This May, Trump reversed course. Six years after Bunch, the first African American and first historian to lead the Smithsonian, was hired, Trump tried to fire him, against the wishes of the Board of Regents.

No longer were anti-racists and racists alike both “good guys,” to paraphrase Trump’s comments during his first administration about the killing in Virginia of an anti-racist protester by Nazi demonstrators, some of whom shouted “Jews will not replace us.”

Just the other day, in a Truth Social post, the president showed his deep contempt for the coverage of slavery in museums:

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ Like the Smithsonian museum, they are all OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”

As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, Abraham Lincoln “urged Americans to move past the Civil War ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all,’ unlike Trump who “has malice for all, charity toward none.”

Fascistic in nature

As a general rule, correlation should not be confused with causation. However, as an integrative criminologist with a decades-old clinical background in counseling adolescent and adult offenders and nonoffenders, I would more than suggest that Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic agendas are the consequences of his ASPD intertwined with his family history and socialization and the wider processes of cultural assimilation.

Trump’s biosocial or cultural conflict encounters predate “wokeism” and the undoing of 60 years of civil rights reform, diversity, equity, inclusion, and multiculturalism that may turn out to be his ugliest legacy. Trump’s pre-coming-of-age experiences were subject to and reflective of an age of gender polarization and of ethnic exclusion and racial segregation.

As I argued in a recent commentary on the militarization of policing in DC and the emergence of Trump’s police state, the Outlaw-in-Chief “could care less about whether crime is getting worse or better and whether or not people are safe and secure.” Similarly, the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles “had absolutely nothing to do with curbing civil unrest or political violence.”

Most everything else Trump is doing in the name of “law and order” or “crushing crime” has been fascistic in nature and antidemocratic in practice. These norm-breaking actions of militarism, as well as illegal plays by ICE agents, are simply about consolidating Trump’s executive power and desire to nationalize local and state law enforcement, as in the upcoming deployment of the National Guard and most likely active duty troops to Chicago.

All of this normative or institutional deviancy is consistent with Trump’s framework of doing away with the post-Nixon Department of Justice as well as the post-Hoover FBI, and replacing them with a Department of Retribution and Star Chamber-like “Federal Bureau of Inquiry.”

As for Trump’s antihuman executive orders to eliminate “nearly $4 billion for USAID to spend on global health programs and more than $6 billion for HIV and AIDS programs,” they could leave millions of people, mostly children, dead.

And since Trump’s tariffs will only result in what economists agree will be higher costs, slower economic growth and investment, global trade disruption and retaliation, as well as sectoral harm to U.S. manufacturing and agriculture, inquiring minds might want to know what could possibly motivate the president to pursue such a disastrous and counterproductive course of action?

Turns out it has little to do with Trump’s iconoclastic love of tariffs and much more to do with the psychologically complex interplay of dominance, personality traits, negotiation tactics, narrative construction, and cognitive biases rooted in his ASPD.

These defensive psychological projections in combination propel Trump through his destructiveness and cruelty, allowing him to transcend the pain these tariffs cause everybody. At the same time, they are not enough to prevent Trump from having to lie about the tariffs’ effects.

Other than losing the Congressional elections in 2026, the egocentric Trump could care less about the Nineteen Eighty-Four-like American dystopia he is fabricating with assistance from ICE, the National Guard, and the military.

One might even consider that the psychopathic side of the Commander-in-Chief is indeed looking for a fight, and an excuse to replace the civilian government with martial law. In all likelihood, the Boss and his gang of sycophants are already planning for it.

Trump’s checkered past proves this massive move was smoke and mirrors

As a life-long and serial violator of law and order – both civil and criminal – and likewise constitutionally, as president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, the Outlaw and Extorting Commander-in-Chief, is someone criminologists would commonly label as a “career criminal.”

Accordingly, Teflon Don or the Houdini of White-collar Crime, as he is known in criminological circles, possesses an unmatched or unique expertise in fraud, corruption, and lawlessness. And ever since the Boss narrowly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and even before he returned to the Oval Office in 2025, he has been ratcheting up his dictatorial lawlessness and amplifying his corruption more than in his first term.

As Anand Giridharadas writes on Substack, or as he stated August 12th on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “DC’s real crime problem is the insurrectionist fraudster crime family boss who wants to take it over.”

Unfortunately the rest of the nation’s crime problem is the same one that plagues DC.

To believe for one moment that this enduring and persistent lawless criminal cares one bit about either law and order or crime and justice — other than to exploit them — is like believing in the tooth fairy. That or a stickup man guarding the bank, the police policing the police, an inmate running the asylum, a president pardoning 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists, or Trump’s Department of Justice or Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing anything according to the rule of law.

Trump could care less about whether crime is getting worse or better and whether or not people are safe and secure. His deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles earlier this year had absolutely nothing to do with curbing civil unrest or political violence. Similarly, the deployment of nearly 800 troops to D.C. for 30 days will have no lasting or even temporary impact on preventing or deterring violent, property and other garden variety crimes.

If Trump and company were sincere about addressing the very real but hardly out of control crime problem in D.C., then instead of having no plan or merely providing “back-up” for the Metropolitan Police Department as a “show of military force,” the administration should have been targeting specific habitual offenders and places by redeploying senior officers into the poorest wards.

Instead, Trump’s inappropriate and disruptive deployment of the National Guard is just another performative and assaultive exercise in cruelty, like the exporting of noncriminal migrants to an El Salvadoran prison or to home-grown places in violation of the Eighth Amendment like “Alligator Alcatraz,” the detention facility in the Florida Everglades.

The mass deployments of the National Guard are also emblematic of an emerging police state and the testing of the boundaries — of an authoritarian strongman’s desire for ever-increasing executive power and central control of institutions across society.

Trump’s fake descriptions of “roving mobs,” “caravans of mass youth,” or “bloodthirsty criminals” being “out-of-control” in Democratic-run cities, as contrasted with supposedly safe Republican areas, only divides the American people further. It stokes the fears and anxieties of mostly white people who have never lived in any of those urban communities.

Likewise, as Giridharadas correctly points out, “more generalized anxiety that the country is ungovernable” will not only “be given flesh by exaggerated tales of cities overrun [with] junkies and criminals,” but such tales will also help to negatively represent nonwhite Christian others as threatening criminals.

As for reactions to Trump taking control of the D.C. police and his “crackdown” on crime and homelessness in the capital, local protesters led by Black Lives Matter activists spoke out against the federal intervention of some 800 National Guard members into their neighborhoods.

‘Suite’ vs ‘street’

Even if Trump wanted to apply his expertise to stopping or preventing “suite” crimes, as opposed to “street” crimes, within his first seven months in office the president and his administration of quackery have pretty much done everything within their legitimate and illegitimate power to exacerbate the very real world nature of both sorts of crime.

Before turning to Trump 2.0’s massive reductions in expenditures for law enforcement and to the mismanagement of criminal justice for social control purposes, as well as to Trump’s upward trends of unproven corruption and lawlessness, allow me to set the stage by underscoring how the president and his network of well-organized disciples have been engaged in an ongoing treasonous enterprise to kill U.S. democracy.

With plenty of toxic masculinity and thanks mostly to the blessings of the 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. the United States, the new administration has been busy sabotaging the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the application of “the one-person, one-vote rule.”

This administration has also been suppressing any person, place, or point of view that upsets the president’s false narrative, renders Trump’s dystopia and repressive America as merely authoritarian hoaxes, or challenges any fraction of his antidemocratic and anti-constitutional agenda as being un-American or anti-patriotic.

The MAGA extortionists have been coming for the attorneys, the judges, the inspector generals, the regulators, the whistleblowers, the consumers, the CEOs, the scientists, and the historians. In brief, they are doing their worst in real time to whitewash, rewrite, and reshape both Trump’s ubiquitous criminality and the nation’s cultural and social history.

MAGA has been coming for the Fourth Estate, National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Station, Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the Smithsonian Institution, the Voice of America, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Library of Congress.

MAGA and Trump 2.0 are also doing their darndest to weaken or break altogether the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, 10th, 13th and 14th amendments.

Finally, with respect to the civil arenas or the public commons, the Trump administration has done its uneven best to divide them by truncating as much as possible citizen rights, civil rights, consumer rights, employment rights, environmental rights, human rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights, and taxpayer rights. That pretty much wipes out “liberty and justice for all.”

‘Eviscerate due process’

According to the Council on Criminal Justice, here are some key cuts and reductions reported in May of this year:

  • In April, Trump terminated 373 grants from the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) amounting to more than $300 million after $500 million was restored by a judicial decision.
  • These terminated grants provided federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution, victims’ services, juvenile justice and child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice systems enhancements, research and evaluation, and other state- and local-level public safety functions.
  • The cuts affected grantees from mostly not-for-profit organizations across 37 red and blue states alike as well as in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
  • About 40% of those cuts involved references to diversity, equity, race, gender and so on, while the deepest cuts were to organizations that provided training and technical assistance to OJP grantees.

With respect to D.C., we learned from several news outlets including Fox News that three days after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the formation of the Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force Law Enforcement Working Group, the Fiscal Year 2025 Homeland Security Grant Program slashed D.C.’s security funding by 44%, to $20 million.

We have also learned from the Prison Policy Initiative that with respect to federal prisons, Trump has “taken actions to eviscerate due process and the rule of law, worsen prison and jail conditions, expand the use of harsh sentences and law enforcement tactics, eliminate oversight, undermine solutions that reduce incarceration and make communities safer.”

Assertions or claims of often overlapping corruption and/or lawlessness by Trump and company have been far too numerous to count.

The allegations of corruption include:

  • Undermining oversight by dismantling checks and balances, as in the firing of the head of the Office of Government Ethics and more than 15 Inspectors Generals.
  • Numerous conflicts of interests stemming from the president maintaining ownership of his businesses like those involving his bitcoin, media, and real estate ventures at home and abroad.
  • Extorting the legal profession, universities, and other corporate businesses.
  • Targeting Trump’s political opponents for doing their lawful jobs.
  • Selling access and influence for personal gain as in the use of presidential one-on-one meetings for $5 million a pop or conducting global trade talks to benefit his personal businesses or selling more than $100 million in Trump merchandise.
  • Suppressing ongoing anti-corruption prosecutions like those of New York mayor Eric Adams as well as ending police reform agreements and halting the ongoing investigations into police abuse, mismanagement, and civil rights violations.
  • Turning the Department of Justice into an extension of himself vis-à-vis the purging of senior career civil servants as well as any of those FBI agents or U.S. attorneys affiliated with the criminal prosecutions of Trump.

The allegations of lawlessness include:

  • Executive orders targeting law firms in violation of the first amendment.
  • Mass firings or layoffs of federal workers across multiple agencies without due process of law.
  • Undermining regulatory agencies as in the closing down of the Consumer Protection Agency or Trump’s EPA’s move to repeal the landmark “endangerment finding” that allows for climate regulation by scientific expertise.
  • Ongoing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and taking baseless actions targeting organizations perceived as adverse to the president’s repressive and authoritarian agenda.
  • Numerous executive orders including limiting birthright citizenship, imposing travel bans, and restricting access to mandated health regulations as well as federally contracted grants that were immediately legally challenged.

Even if the Republican sycophants in Congress unanimously support Trump’s fearmongering on behalf of supposed “crime control” and extend the president’s takeover of the D.C. police beyond the original 30 days, per some kind of fake emergency, it will have no sustainable impact on the prevention and deterrence of crime and violence in the capital city.

This is because of the administration not treating gun violence in general as a public health crisis, in addition to its criminalizing and stigmatizing of Black and brown urban communities by unnecessarily sending in federal troops.

By the end of its stay, the federal intervention into local policing will prove of dubious value for law and order. It will turn out to be more wasteful, costly, and unproductive than were Trump’s original cuts and reductions to law enforcement while ICE’s resources and manpower have been boosted to the tune of $150 billion.

And worse yet, the “deployment of FBI agents to deal with local crime puts agents from counterintelligence, public corruption and other divisions with minimal training out on the streets in potentially dangerous encounters, diverting them from their typical jobs at the bureau.”

But what else would one expect from a know-nothing administration and its odious, lawless and corrupt Criminal-in-Chief?

Trump is the same self-dealing fraudster who made $600 million in 2024 from his various properties, licensing deals, crypto holdings, and private golf clubs. And as David Kirkpatrick has maintained in The New Yorker, Trump’s profiteering to the tune of $3.4 billion since 2017 would never have occurred without his becoming the president for a second time. That figure also represents more money than Trump ever earned between the years 1973 to 2016.

Trump's rage threatens to unearth his biggest skeletons

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported a 50th birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein that included a drawing, note, and signature from Donald Trump — an album compiled by Epstein’s longtime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison for conspiring with him to sexually abuse minors.

Given the president in turn filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the WSJ and owner Rupert Murdoch for “knowingly and recklessly” publishing “numerous false, defamatory, and disparaging statements” allegedly causing Trump “overwhelming financial and reputational harm,” there has been a minimal amount of reporting on and discussion of other documents, if not evidence per se, that have made accusations of in tandem sexual abuse of minors involving Epstein and Trump.

For example, Salon has reported on Maria Farmer, a sexual accuser and former employee of Epstein who on two occasions, in 1996 and 2006, told the FBI to look into Trump.

Similarly, Raw Story has reported on one lawsuit filed by Katie Johnson (a pseudonym) against defendants Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein in 2016.

In that lawsuit, Katie Johnson v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein, filed on April 26, 2016 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, the plaintiff alleges that the defendants “did willfully and with extreme malice violate her Civil Rights under 18 U.S.C.: 2241 by sexually and physically abusing” her, “by forcing her to engage in various perverted and depraved sex acts by threatening physical harm to Plaintiff Johnson and also her family.”

In the same complaint, “Katie Johnson” further alleges that the defendants violated her civil rights “by making her their sex slave.”

She also “alleges that she was enticed by promises of money and a modeling career to attend a series of underage sex parties held at the New York City residence of Defendant Jeffrey E. Epstein and attended by Defendant Donald J. Trump.”

The lawsuit sought $100 million in damages.

You can read the complaint for yourself if you are interested in the scandalous details. I am more interested in referencing a similar federal lawsuit filed in New York not long after Johnson’s case was dismissed on the grounds that it had not raised civil rights claims under federal law.

In that second case, Jane Doe v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein, filed in the United States District Court Southern District of New York on October 3, 2016, the plaintiff’s complaint alleges that she was the victim of “rape, sexual misconduct, criminal sexual acts, sexual abuse, forcible touching, assault, battery, intentional and reckless infliction of emotional distress, duress, false imprisonment, and defamation.”

However, when the accuser was to hold a news conference on November 2, 2016, it was abruptly called off.

Attorney Lisa Bloom had previously arranged for her client to appear at Bloom’s Woodland Hills law office. At the appointed time, Bloom told the assembled journalists and TV cameras that “Jane Doe has received numerous threats today…she is too afraid to show her face…She is in terrible fear.”

“Katie Johnson” spelled out in the California lawsuit: “I loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop, but he did not. Defendant Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted. … Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump’s sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed.”

During the 2016 presidential campaign, other lawsuits and claims by 26 women were made against Trump for sexual assault.

Only two defamation lawsuits and a sexual abuse claim filed by E. Jean Carroll, that resulted in damages totaling $88.3 million, ever came to fruition.

Nevertheless, it is highly likely that those California and New York filed lawsuits are among the flagged items mentioning Trump collected by the thousand-plus FBI agents working on 24-hour shifts to comb through some 100,000 pages of the Epstein files.

Needless to say, this type of information is precisely what Trump does not want revealed now or anytime in the future to the American people of any political persuasion.

Of course, should Donald J. Trump v. The Wall Street Journal not be tossed out of court, then most if not all of this material would become available to the Journal’s attorneys through discovery.

Behind the legal tactics Trump is using to dodge justice for January 6

It would undoubtedly be of consequence and consolation if Donald Trump were held civilly liable for January 6, especially if he managed by hook, crook or Supreme Court to escape blame for his four criminal indictments. At this point, however, the civil lawsuits against Trump do not seem to be faring any better than the criminal lawsuits against him.

After nearly four years post January 6 and Trump’s failed insurrection, the former president’s tactics of delay, delay, and delay for both his criminally and civilly related lawsuits have been enormously successful. As of the November 5th presidential election, Teflon Don will still be escaping from seven out of eight election interference cases that have resulted in one criminal trial, 34 felony convictions, and no sentencing.

In light of Trump’s high-profile criminal indictments, defamation cases, and financial lawsuits, the four civil cases against citizen Trump involving the January 6 insurrection have fallen below the political radar. Most people have forgotten all about these, assuming they knew about them in the first place. Ergo, I thought it was time for a briefing or an update on these four civil cases.

A trio of forgotten lawsuits that the federal Appeals Court for the DC Circuit agreed to hear included one from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and one from several Capitol Police officers. Oral arguments for these lawsuits were held in December 2022, and none were dismissed per Trump’s motions. Yet no trials have materialized to date. AXIOS dubbed these absences “the case of the missing lawsuits.” I would prefer to label these absences as Trump “gets over on the legal system” or Trump “escapes accountability and justice for all.”

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The first of these three civil lawsuits case occurred on February 16, 2021, when Cohen Milstein, in partnership with the NAACP, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of the Honorable Mississippi Congressman Bennie G. Thompson (D) against Donald J. Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, 42 U.S. C. § 1985(1).

This law was passed to allow Members of Congress to sue individuals who conspire to violently “molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede” the discharge of official duties such as certifying a presidential election.

Thompson, and subsequently, the Honorable Barbara Lee (D) from California and nine other members of the House of Representatives, joined the lawsuit before Thompson announced that he was withdrawing from it to avoid any conflict with his role as the Chair of the House Select Committee to investigate the Capitol riots.

Trump filed his appeal in March 2022. On December 1, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided that President Trump is not entitled to official-act immunity for his actions leading up to and on January 6, as alleged in the complaint, since he was acting as office-seeker, not office-holder.

Trump did not appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, the district court’s jurisdiction was not restored until February 2024. Last Wednesday was supposed to be the immunity-related discovery deadline, but neither party resisted extending the deadline until October 28, 2024. This means the judge’s decision will not happen until after the presidential election. If Trump does not like what’s in and out after the judge decides on discovery arguments, he will appeal. This would delay the case well into 2025 or beyond should he also appeal the Circuit Court’s decision when it likely goes against him to the Supreme Court.

On March 5, 2021, House Representative Eric Swalwell in Swalwell v. Trump et al. filed in the same U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia a similar lawsuit to Rep. Thompson accusing Trump and his co-defendants Donald Trump, Jr., Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Rudy Giuliani of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act by conspiring to interfere with the Electoral College count on January 6, 2021.

The Swalwell lawsuit also alleges that the defendants committed criminal incitement under the local DC code–§22-1321(a)(2) and is therefore civilly liable for negligence. Beyond the civil rights and incitement counts, Swalwell has claimed that the defendants are not only liable for aiding and abetting the rioters’ violent conduct but also for intentionally inflicting emotional distress on members of Congress.

The four defendants filed their responses to the lawsuit between late May and early July 2021. Giuliani’s motion to dismiss argued that he had never formed a conspiracy and that his speech did not qualify as the First Amendment also protected incitement, which he maintained. Rep. Brooks’ motion to dismiss argued that he was acting within the scope of his employment under the Westfall Act.

By late July, the DOJ and the Chairwoman of the Committee on House Administration had submitted briefs stating that Brooks was not acting within the scope of his employment and thus should not be shielded by the Westfall Act.

Both Donald Trump and Donald Jr. filed motions to dismiss. Like his father's, Junior’s motion to dismiss contended that the First Amendment and the canonical Brandenburg test protected their speech.

Additionally, the former president claimed immunity because his alleged misconduct was within the scope of his official duties as president. Both Trumps also raised arguments ranging from standing to the political question doctrine.

Finally, Donald raised a unique “double jeopardy” question when he claimed that Swalwell was barred from suing him over the same conduct he had already been acquitted of at the culmination of his second impeachment trial.

On March 30, 2021, Capitol police officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby sued Trump for injuries they sustained during the January 6 riots. As with the other January 6 lawsuits, the plaintiffs claim that their injuries resulted from the former president’s incendiary rhetoric before and during the violence, aiding and abetting the rioters, and negligently inciting the riot in violation of DC’s public safety codes.

In addition, Blassingame a Black officer pointing to racial slurs and taunts hurled at him by the intruders, accused Trump of directing intentional infliction of emotional distress. The officers are each seeking from Trump a minimum of $75,000 in compensatory damages and an undisclosed amount in punitive damages.

On April 28, 2021, the plaintiffs added two conspiracy claims to their lawsuit. One was based on the KKK Act and the other on common law conspiracy alleging that Trump conspired illegally with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to storm the Capitol, resulting in their injuries.

On June 6, 2021, defendant Trump filed a 55-page Memorandum supporting his Motion to Dismiss. On December 1, 2023, the Appeals Court ruled against Trump, permitting the cases to proceed. However, they have yet to do so.

Trump had unsuccessfully argued that he has absolute immunity, the Constitution forbids the court from exercising jurisdiction over the president’s actions during his presidency, the political question doctrine bars claims against the president, and res judicata and collateral estoppel or double jeopardy regarding his Impeachment acquittal preclude any such claims by the plaintiffs.

A fourth civil lawsuit was filed on August 26, 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia when seven Capitol police, the plaintiffs, represented by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sued Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., Stop the Steal, LLC, Ali Abdul Akbar, Brandon J. Straka, Roger J. Stone, Jr., Proud Boys, Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph R. Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Charles Donohoe, Dominic J. Pezzola, Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, Thomas E. Cardwell, Jessica Watkins, Kelly Meggs, Alan Hostetter, Russell Taylor, Erik Scott Warner, Felipe Antonio Martinez, Derek Kinnison, Ronald Mele, and John Does, 1-10, the defendants.

Sharing much common ground with the lawsuits filed by Thompson, Swalwell, and especially by Blassingame and Hemby, this case was filed several months after the others and has the most comprehensive scope of conspiratorial cases.

For example, the complaint has ten sections, perhaps the most illuminating is number nine, quoted in its entirety here:

TRUMP employed, planned for, and encouraged the use of force, intimidation, and threats to try to stop the Congressional count of electoral votes on January 6. He followed the Capitol Attack on television and social media as it happened, and despite requests made to TRUMP to call off the attackers—including from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—he refused to do so for hours as he watched on live television the attackers overrun the Capitol and threaten its lawful occupants.

Instead, TRUMP encouraged and supported the attackers. While the Attack was ongoing, TRUMP and his co-conspirators contacted members of Congress, not to offer support or protection, but to pressure them to delay further and to stop the Congressional count.

Even after the attackers—including white supremacists and hate groups—were finally repelled and cleared from the Capitol, TRUMP ratified their attack and praised them, “We love you. You’re very special,” and to “Remember this day forever!” TRUMP later confirmed that he and the attackers shared the same goal, stating, “Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted.”

In summary, this civil lawsuit claims that the defendants were responsible for the violent assaults against and injuries to the officers as well as fearing for their lives. Also, the black officers became objects of racial slurs and epithets.

Also, by falsely claiming that the election was rigged and stolen, Trump and his associates incited a mob of the former president’s supporters to storm the Capitol to stop Congress from confirming Biden’s victory as the 46th president.

In addition to violating the federal Ku Klux Klan Act, the defendants violated the D.C. Bias-Related Crimes Act, conspiracy, and several other laws. The lawsuit does not seek a specific monetary award but asks for compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined by “the jury in trust.”

On April 18, 2024, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rejected Trump’s effort to pause lawsuits brought by both members of Congress and police officers against him for his actions on Jan. 6 to subvert the 2020 election -- until after the federal election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith is resolved.

While a few of the complaints from one dead officer’s spouse were dismissed in January 2024, “a group of U.S. Capitol Police officers are moving forward” like the other civil cases because of the appeals court ruling that Trump as a citizen has no immunity from civil lawsuits.

In the meantime, no civil trial dates have been set for any of these overdue lawsuits of liability.

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Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Buckle up: Win or lose, Trump promises potential scenarios of violence

Journalist and former editor of the Stars and Stripes for three decades, D. Earl Stephens, has recently opined in a guest essay for Raw Story that “The New York Times and our broken mainstream media seem to need the America-attacking Donald Trump a helluva lot more than the America-attacking Donald Trump seems to need The New York Times and our broken mainstream media.”

Stephens has accused mass media news institutions of committing journalistic malpractice for not “monitoring the dangerous maneuvers of a sociopath, who is still free and on the loose after unleashing his rabid attack dogs to besiege our Capitol, stomp on law enforcement officials, seek out political leaders for harm and hanging, and prevent the certification of our vote while doing nothing for three hours except to root for the attack’s success.”

To this criminologist, as the custodian of the democratic republic, the Fourth Estate seems derelict in its duty for not correctly framing the genuine issues that confront or threaten American freedom and constitutional democracy.

Should Trump win the fall presidential election, perhaps the most dangerous of these maneuvers will have to do with the forthcoming transformation of the U.S. Department of Justice from an independent and self-directing law enforcement system to one that would become part of a proxy “police state.” A law enforcement system whose absolute discretion of power would become exclusively dependent on a de facto dictator with presidential immunity from any crimes, harms, injuries, or violence that he may inflict or unleash on the people of the United States.

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Chapter Seventeen of Project 2025 outlines other changes that would accompany the former relations between the office of the presidency and the Department of Justice.

A non-exhaustive listening of these changes includes:

  • placing FBI agents on loyalist leashes
  • curtailing its online investigations of misinformation
  • ending investigations of police misconduct and canceling existing consent decrees with police departments
  • stripping local and state attorneys of their discretionary power to prosecute
  • changing the federal government’s roles from upholding voting rights to suppressing them
  • downplaying right-wing domestic terrorist groups and organizations like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys
  • focusing instead on those groups and organizations advocating for voting, civil, equity, climate, and worker rights

In tandem with these changes in the federal and state relations of the administration of justice, Trump plans on using the military to enforce domestic law violations involving, for example, criminal gangs, protesting demonstrators and securing the borders by using detention camps — all characteristic of illiberal democracies such as today’s Hungary or authoritarian regimes like contemporary China or North Korea going back to the 1950s.

Trump also plans to “target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists.”

Let’s not forget that at least a “dozen times Trump pushed to prosecute his perceived enemies,” including Hillary Clinton, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and Joe Biden.

Presently, Trump continues to bang “the drums of hate” and to follow “the roadmap created for him by” the MAGA 2025 Manifesto. The Insurrectionist-in-Chief is also “backstopped by a radical, bought-off Supreme Court, and bolstered by known election deniers.” Relying on the twisted Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, Trump is now saying that “he had ‘every right’ to interfere in the 2020 election.” During a podcast interview with Russian American computer scientist Lex Fridman that aired on Tuesday of this week, he also admitted that he did lose the election “by a whisker.”

At this point, Trump is undoubtedly winning this legal battle. It has even been more effective than the tactics of delay, delay, and delay. Then again, with the sentencing for his criminal conviction of 34 felonies in the election interference case being postponed from September 18 to after the election on November 26, the former president has been quite successful at “beating the law” concerning all four of his criminal indictments.

As David Rhode in Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy has written, during Trump’s presidency, he “intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys Generals Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants.”

If this were not enough, the would-be dictator is promising “retribution to anybody who dares get in his way” and, if elected again, clemency for his all-American patriotic “hostages” who have been “unfairly” convicted of crimes for their First Amendment activities at the Capitol on January 6.

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Lest anyone forget, as I have elaborated in great detail in Criminology on Trump, while in office, the president’s practices of granting pardons and awarding clemencies were quite different from those of other presidents, going back as far as the 25th, William McKinley.

For example, Trump did not use the usual vetting process and sold pardons at $50,000 each — often for much more. We learned earlier this week that two of those individuals Trump released from prison were known to be wife abusers, including one who was also a drug dealer as well as a cop killer.

Accordingly, on September 5, at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey, a fundraiser for the January 6 riot defendants was held. Tickets at the “J6 Awards Gala” ranged from $1500 per person to $50,000 for a table of twelve.

At a bare minimum, retired journalist Stephens wants to know, “Why haven’t Democracy Desks been set up in these broken newsrooms staffed with journalists who do nothing but monitor the Republicans’ movements as they ruthlessly defend an attack on America and go about annihilating truth, justice, and our right to even vote?”

Instead of Democracy Desks, the mass media is busy spinning their wheels trying to decide what facts to check and what lies to share. Meanwhile, during Trump’s incoherent speeches, they ignore his “word salad” discourse and the abnormal things that Trump says, like his responding to a reporter’s question about inflation when he pointed out that people are not eating bacon because of the use of wind power. In other words, what about the lack of coverage of Trump’s “alarming cognitive decline?”

These media companies are also wasting time repeatedly contrasting two narratives on the aftermath of the 2020 election as well as the January 6 attack on the Capitol as though there are competing interpretations of what transpired back then rather than reporting only on the one factual version.

Where the mainstream media has been at its worst and has failed the American people the most is for the economy. Mainly because the comparative data has consistently shown that the Democratic Party outperforms the Republican Party in general and between Bidenomics and Trumpian economics in particular. Yet most people in the U.S., regardless of political party, falsely believe otherwise. As an educator, I sincerely blame this societal-wide ignorance on the mainstream media.

Each of these commissions or omissions favors Trump and is the antithesis of “objective” or “balanced” journalism. They are nonetheless rationalized away under the banner of objective and balanced journalism. These journalistic inadequacies are also excused because, after nearly a decade, the mainstream media still can’t figure out how to cover Trump. Here’s a clue: why not simply tell the truth?

Similarly, Stephens and many other media critics would like to know how these mainstream news platforms can continue to normalize the illegal and bizarre behavior of Trump and his morally bankrupt political party. After all, at this very moment in time, his MAGA minions are doing everything they can think of to destroy American Democracy as we know it.

Stephens accurately points out that Trump is the “literal definition of a terrorist and/or an authoritarian strongman — a thug. He bows to murderous fascists like Putin and openly revels in their success.” Yet, the mass media currently seems indifferent or oblivious to these facts, not as if they previously paid enough attention to them.

While it has occurred to many in the news media that Trump is a wannabe authoritarian strongman, few think of him as a gangster or as a thug, let alone as a domestic terrorist, even though he is armed with plenty of MAGA backup. Nor has the mass media discussed the various types of violence that are likely to occur should Trump win or lose in November.

Between now and then, as Trump most likely continues to slip in the polls to Kamala Harris, he will undoubtedly become more desperate. In response, he will spend even less time discussing the campaign issues except when he is forced to respond to journalistic queries. For example, “Will he or won’t he” vote for the six-week abortion ban in Florida? Meanwhile, these same journalists seldom point out that, in the first place, this terrible choice about abortion bans was only made possible because of Trump’s three appointed justices to the Supreme Court.

Trump has already been spending most of his time and energy doubling down on demonizing immigrants as well as his political and legal adversaries, which – except for his sycophantic supporters – may not be enough to run on and win the election. Besides, these absurd statements are becoming so stale and boring.

In the wake of “his attacks on immigrants becoming increasingly delusional” and as his fake data and claims about hordes of rapists and murders invading the Southern border are amplified by Fox News and other right-wing media, such dangerous rhetoric is only increasing the number of discriminatory and hate crimes committed against those who may or may not be Latin American immigrants.

This stirring of violence serves as a distraction for the likely far-right MAGA violence that looms shortly. Mass, as well as social, media, law enforcement, Homeland Security and the Democratic Party should all be mindful of and foreshadowing the dangers of this potential violence. Rather than continuing to ignore the signs online and off or sticking their proverbial heads in the sand because they would prefer not to go to such dark and ominous places. Then again, this may very well be the fricken case because they are experiencing cognitive resistance to and/or the unconscious denial of these sordid types of activities.

More concretely, the absence or lack of focus on the likely violence is related to the fact that “mainstream American political journalists have always been shockingly indifferent to right-wing violence emerging in our midst,” says David Neiwert, “America’s foremost writer and thinker on far-right extremism.”

From the Ruby Ridge standoff to the Waco siege and massacre of 76 Branch Davidians to the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing in the 1990s to the Unite the Right weekend rally in August 2017 by white supremacists protesting the taking down of a Robert E. Lee monument who during their marches chanted anti-Semitic and Nazi-associated phrases at counter-protesters in Charlottesville, South Carolina, to the MAGA rioters assaulting the Capitol in January 2021.

For different but related reasons, both law enforcement and FBI personnel have also downplayed right-wing violence when compared to their concern with both real and imagined left-wing violence attributed to groups or organizations such as the ACLU, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Antifa, the Animal Liberation Front, or Black Lives Matter.

In both 2020 and 2024, journalists and law enforcement have not been paying enough attention to online right-wing chatter, such as the rhetoric on Telegram about how the outcome of this election will be “decided by the bullet box, not the ballot box.” Or to on the ground real Republican assaults on the First Amendment, including the banning of books and ethnic school curricula, affirmative action, equity, and diversity.

Otherwise, the forces of law and order should not be once again underprepared and unable to respond quickly in anticipation of the different types of violence that ensued after Trump’s 2020 electoral loss to Joe Biden, leading up to and culminating with the failed coup d’état on the day of election certification, Jan. 6, 2021.

Looking forward, two scenarios of MAGA violence will likely occur after the 2024 presidential election: one if Trump wins and one if Trump loses. In the latter outcome, there will also be possibilities for fixing what ails our constitutional democracy.

Scenarios of Violence After Trump Wins

If Trump wins in November, we can anticipate two types of violence-related activities occurring not long after the de facto installation of a dictator as the 47th President of the United States in January 2025.

The first has to do with the peaceful protests that are likely to occur, not unlike the 2017 women’s marches across the country in reaction to Hillary Clinton’s defeat and to Trump’s election campaign and history of sexism toward women. The other has to do with the immigration front and the accelerated arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Whether Trump invokes the Insurrection Act of 1807 in both scenarios, he will deploy the military nationwide to address these domestic conflicts.

In either case, armed with AR-15s will be the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other militias like the Minutemen, who will be augmenting the Trumpian government as “citizen cops.” They will be busy rounding up and turning over protestors or immigrants to agencies of law enforcement or the Border Patrol for processing.

Concerning immigrants, recall that this was precisely what was done for several years in Arizona during Trump’s first administration. Now, these noncommissioned “bounty hunters” will, in all likelihood, spread out nationwide, in hopes — who knows? — that Trump might award them the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Scenarios of Violence After Trump Loses

Here, we will see a repeat of what occurred after Trump lost in 2020. States will again be besieged and contested as they were in several swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. These same MAGA-type fraudsters, joined by their election-denying associates, will show up at ballot-counting centers as well as state capitols to create enough chaos and disorder to prevent the votes from being certified in a timely fashion and then, where possible, shift election certification over to Republican-controlled state legislatures.

The goal is ultimately to force the election outcome to be determined by the current Republican-MAGA-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and/or by the MAGA-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.

And should Harris still prevail despite this Republican election interference, then extremist expert Neiwert thinks that “we’ll have at least a year or two of dedicated domestic terrorism against various government entities” as well as high-profile liberal figures. Neiwert also believes that these MAGA warriors will be leaning “heavily into the Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda” and against anyone supporting the “demonic liberal agenda.”

At the same time, should the Democrats also retain control of the U.S. Senate and take back the U.S. House – a long shot – then possibilities would exist for accomplishing an array of necessary legislative, judicial, and constitutional reforms.

For example, Democrats would be in a position to abolish the Senate's antidemocratic filibuster rules or pass the No Kings Act to counteract the “unconstitutional” Trump v. U.S. decision by the MAGA Supreme Court that erroneously granted presidents criminal immunity.

With the Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches of government, they would be able to try to pull off a very difficult trifecta. I am referring to the long-overdue abolition of the undemocratic Electoral College that unfortunately still requires the daunting task of amending the U.S. Constitution.

Unless a new or a second U.S. Constitution is written to replace the original one as called for by Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law.

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Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Trump's old tricks lose power as Harris' mojo gains momentum

Since the 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the politics of emotion has surpassed, if not eclipsed, the politics of self-interest and old-fashioned Republican conservatism.

Like it or not, as Sara Ahmed reveals in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, emotions often shape the contours of individual and collective bodies: They “feel” rather than “think” their way through the caverns of identity politics and social movements.

For example, these politics of emotion and the legacies of our “cultural wars” are engendered not only by the partisan memories of Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election that culminated in the January 6 failed coup d’etat but also from the fraudulent lawlessness surrounding the stolen classified documents as he was leaving the Oval Office.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has maintained that the challenges the United States faces are not logistical. They are metaphysical, and “the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with policies to address this crisis.”

Murphy was referring to what he called the “fall of American neoliberalism.” Or the broken consensus surrounding the U.S. version of liberalism – defined by an emphasis on free markets, globalization, and consumer choice – that has begun to feel to many as a dead end. In other words, no matter what the metrics told us about how well Bidenomics was performing, most Americans weren’t buying it and still have a dismal view of the economy.

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Sensibilities on both sides of the political aisle are also bounded by the omnipotent racial, gendered, elitist, populist, and xenophobic relations of cultural reproduction.

In different but emotionally related ways, the 2020 and 2024 races for the White House have together been about “how the myth of Reagan became the cult of Trump,” enabling a narcissistic sociopath to defy the rule of law and constitutional democracy while aspiring to become the nation’s first authoritarian dictator.

And yet emotionally, this no-holds-barred 2024 contest between Trumpian chaos and Project 2025 versus the Democratic Party is not just about the Harris-Walz campaign to save American democracy from the threat of autocracy and oppression. It is also about returning the two-party political system to some kind of bipartisan normalcy before the democratic republic can get around to hopefully reforming itself from a representative democratic minority into some kind of multiparty democratic majority.

Even if there were not a host of political, economic and ideological courses of action to be wrangling over as part of the upcoming November elections, policy issues with the exceptions of those connected to civil, reproductive, voting, climate and migratory rights have taken a backseat to the negative feelings or emotions of pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame and grievance.

Additionally, there is a huge mistrust in government that Trump, for the past eight years, has been disconcertingly cultivating throughout society. On the other hand, the corrupt MAGA Supreme Court and several of its controversial decisions have also rendered confidence in the Supreme Court to an historic low.

Until one month ago, when President Joe Biden abandoned his flagging reelection bid, the suppressed, positive emotions of joy, hope, love and reconciliation that were previously enjoyed by the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 had laid dormant. The absence of those positive feelings has now returned to the Democratic Party with much gusto, relief and reinvigorated energy.

The bipartisan majority of the American people who support constitutional democracy and law and order — who are also against the Trumpian chaos, danger and lawlessness — have needed somebody in whom they could put their faith. They needed somebody who could take down the former president, with his torrent of ogres pretending to be God-fearing victims of a “deep state” conspiracy. These fascist wannabes are also on some kind of phony mission to allegedly save America from the so-called radical socialists and Marxist communists of the Democratic left. (In reality, hardly any Democrats identify as radical socialists or Marxist communists.)

This is why we have been witnessing independents, undecideds, white dudes, evangelicals, young people, old people, Never Trumpers and many other “racial and gender identity groups, venture capitalists, and even Deadheads” getting on board the Harris-Walz train toward victory — heartened by the retiring of the Biden-Harris train, which had been headed toward all-but-certain defeat.

This is not necessarily because non-Democrat voters have suddenly joined the Democratic Party. Rather, these folks understand how terrible Trump has been and how worse he would become if America gives him another opportunity to lead our nation.

So as the saying goes, they are “putting country over party” this election.

Presenting herself as a pragmatic leader who could unite the American people during her acceptance speech as the Democratic candidate for the 47th presidency of the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris stated: “With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past. A chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”

At this particular moment, the contrasting negative and positive emotional tropes of Republican “doom and gloom” versus Democratic “hope and joy” are comprised of two clashing populist movements.

The former movement has been metastasizing like a cancer since late 2015. It arrived with the rise of Trumpian disparagements, anguished grumblings and grievances galore that call for cruelty and other means of divisiveness. This MAGA movement has successfully killed the GOP traditions of both Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Republican presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush are certainly turning in their graves over Trump’s GOP takeover.

The latter movement of “reconciliation” has been captured and unleashed by Harris and Tim Walz, her vice presidential running mate, with a vision that has at least temporarily mended intra-party Democratic divisions and seeks to overcome their urban-rural antipathy. This episodically reoccurring organizing on behalf of the good of the commonwealth consists of generational warmth, love and recovery with the potential for realignment, restoration or rapprochement.

Accordingly, on the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we heard from former Democratic President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent. But we also heard from Republicans such as Mayor John Giles from Mesa, Arizona, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Republican political strategist Ana Navarro.

Other Republican officials spoke as well on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The thrust of their comments all revolved around their negative experiences working with Trump and about how terrible he had been during his term as president.

Neither of these populist movements – one vile and the other sublime — can be detached from their antithetical narratives or from the paradoxical currents of the past and present social injustices within the United States. When taken together, these human indignities and lost or unrealized freedoms are at the heart and soul of this nation’s unfulfilled promises.

Because President Joe Biden decided that he would not be running for re-election and would be endorsing Vice President Harris as his replacement to take down his former rival as well as the “grand old party,” this political contest now feels completely different from what it felt like only five weeks ago. Going as far back as the political dust settling after the 2022 midterm elections, and less than two weeks later when Trump announced his third candidacy for the presidency as a means of trying to prevent, or at least delay, his four criminal indictments from materializing.

The recent changes in feelings away from Democratic party angst and resignation to Democratic party optimism and eagerness were only intensified after Minnesota Governor Walz became Harris’ running mate. During the week of the DNC, those positive feelings and expectations were further heightened and solidified because of a collective sense of empowerment.

This emotional high was a function of Democrats “leaning in” to who they really are and what they value or stand for. Not since the days of President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s and the rise of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s has this been a part of political reality. So what was wonderful for this old political junkie was watching and listening to former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as well as former first lady Michelle Obama being their real selves rather than their suppressed selves from the past when they mostly played defense and treaded lightly.

In other words, this unexpected campaign season dropped on the Democratic Party at the last possible moment has been liberating and exhilarating not only for the Democratic Party, but most importantly, for the Harris-Walz ticket allowing them to be themselves. As the Minnesota governor and former defensive high school line coach stated during his acceptance speech for the vice presidency: “So let me finish with this team. It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And, boy, do we have the right team.”

Overnight, the popping and TikTok-savvy dynamic duo changed the public spirit and common geist. Not only because they read the mood of most Americans but also evangelizing a vision of present-day hope and change that’s now being sung across television and TikTok and Taylor Swift fan chats in ways impossible just six weeks ago. They also possessed the skill sets to out-meme and out-troll Teflon Don as no other aspiring presidential candidates – Democratic or Republican -- had ever been able to.

For example, how cool it was when Harris-Walz, on day two of the Democratic National Convention, simultaneously rallied live at the filled-up Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee — where the Republican National Convention nominated Trump the month before — and beamed it live to a capacity Democratic convention crowd at Chicago’s United Center. The split screen of the two events was equally striking as viewed by most Americans.

The Harris-Walz team also can take the attention away from Trump — except for when the former president is making a buffoon of himself, which, lately, is just about every day.

On the same day Harris and Walz did their dueling rallies bit, Trump was addressing a crowd of law enforcers and invited supporters in Howell, Michigan, former home to the 1970s-era Ku Klux Klan.

A meeting hosted by Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy was closed to the public and allegedly in violation of campaign electioneering law. But word quickly spread that Trump promised that he would stop the “Kamala crime wave” if voters returned him to the White House — and if he didn’t become president, Trump warned that “World War III” would be coming.

Trump’s tangible campaign strategies are limited by his old and tired refrains of scaremongering and belligerence. He simply cannot shake his addiction to denigrating his nemeses, real or imagined. Nor can he escape from his pathological deceitfulness and cultural warfare par redux ad nauseum.

In fact, Trump’s obnoxious verbal attacks and perpetual lying have become so stale and pathetically predictable that they are losing the power that they once held. Now they provide his adversaries, the mass media, and everyone else – exceptions being MAGA sycophants, FOX News and other far-right media platforms – with unending grist for mocking and trying to shame the grand old delinquent and his gang of minions as being weird and despicable.

Of course, Trump’s handlers and other allies have all been wishing that the insurrectionist-in- chief would return to or stay on message. Unfortunately for the Trumpists, he has been staying on the MAGA message of mean-spirited missives, race-baiting and conspiracy theories.

As for the rest of America? Fortunately for us, the ex-president’s need to address the concrete issues and policies of the election will never happen.

There are two reasons for this.

First, the Trumpian Republican Party has no policies of merit to speak of on any of the major issues of our time — health care, the environment, the cost of living, infrastructure.

Second, even if the Republicans did have any substantive policies for addressing these issues, we all know that Trump would not be capable of speaking about any of these off the cuff — even superficially, let alone in detail — because he is simply speaking ignorant about them.

Trump today is trapped, frothing at the mouth about his favorite “oldies and baddies,” whether they are relevant or not, truthful or fictional.

For example, without mentioning the serious issues of gun violence or mass shootings with automatic weapons in the United States, the former president falsely rants about nonexistent violent or urban crime epidemics and homicidal killings while the rates for both of these are at 50-year lows. And when it was Trump himself who was shot in the ear and nearly assassinated during a July campaign rally by a 20-year-old man wielding a mass shooter’s weapon of choice, the AR-15, Trump doubled down on his support for unfettered gun ownership. No matter that one of Trump’s own supporters was murdered in the melee.

Trump also rattles on about “high” inflation and a “free-falling” economy when the former is the lowest in the post-industrial high-tech world, and the latter is the healthiest it has been since at least before the Wall Street implosion in 2007.

As the Big Mac-loving Donald and his captured GOP leadership know all too well, they have no life-affirming, freedom-expanding agenda to pivot to. They have nothing of value to sell to the American people. There’s no beef for their “nothing” burgers let alone any seeds for their “impossible” versions — both of which they are serving up to American consumers with plenty of Trumpian packets of “secret sauce” word salads.

Absent from their daily toxic menus of trickle-down “leftovers” is any mention of huge deficits, costly tariffs and tax breaks for the uber-wealthy, or the plethora of deregulations for corporate monopolies — all subsidized by average American taxpayers and at the expense of a sustainable environment for all.

As enumerated in Republicans’ dueling policy platforms – one from the “official” 2024 GOP Platform consisting of 20 promises and the other from the “unofficial” Project 2025, otherwise known as Trump’s 2025 Presidential Transitional Project – the MAGA agenda for America is dangerous and negative, the stuff of repression, authoritarianism and anti-democratic constitutionalism.

These kinds of deceitful tactics have always been the former president’s go-to modus operandi, from the alternative realities of Republican disinformation to the election denying of Biden’s victory in 2020 to the early preparation by the GOP as in Georgia and elsewhere not to certify the 2024 election should Harris defeat Trump.

In the current Republican Party’s alternative world order, there is Trump’s continuing fictional portrayal of election interference by his adversaries rather than by his own 2020 non-fictional fake electors and their coast-to-coast efforts of election interference for which these individuals are being criminally prosecuted.

There is also Trump’s uber-fake issue of threatening hordes of migratory criminals invading our nation and savaging the American people. These are little more than fabrications, as border crossings are lower today than when Trump left office. Besides, migrant rates of crime, while not zero, are nevertheless much lower than non-migrant rates of crime, as numerous studies have revealed over the past decade.

In stark contrast, the defining Democratic issues of the Harris-Walz political campaign is standing up for the rule of law and for American democracy.

Former federal prosecutor and chief assistant city attorney for San Francisco Dennis Aftergut has, for example, reduced the political race in 2024 to a matter of the “defenders of the rule law working against Trumpist attempts to erode it.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic agenda of Harris-Walz – focusing on lowering the price of groceries and prescription drugs, the costs of housing, child tax credits, paid leave, and expanding health care — are constructive and meaningful add-ons when juxtaposed with the harmful agendas of the Republicans.

Moreover, implementing most of this Democratic agenda would help the United States catch up with most of the rest of the world’s developed democratic nations, which have been providing these services to all of their citizens for decades.

In other words, there’s nothing “radical” about what Harris is proposing. This is not “communism,” as Trump incessantly brays. And, there’s nothing here that the majority of Americans don’t support, such as the rights of girls and women to reproductive health care.

During her nearly 40-minute acceptance speech at the United Center in Chicago, Harris not only hit it out of the arena on domestic policies but she also nailed it on foreign affairs.

From the importance of NATO for world security to her positions on the Russian-Ukraine War to Israel and Gaza: “I will not cozy up to tyrants and terrorists, like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump.”

Throughout her acceptance speech, candidate Harris did a masterful job of prosecuting the case against Trump and why he should never again be anywhere near the White House. She also made it crystal clear why the future of American democracy is on the line and why this is one of the most critical elections in the life of our nation.

As for those skeptics questioning whether the Democrats are experiencing a “sugar high” or if Harris has the “chops” going forward, let me remind everyone that it only took Kamala 48 hours to “seal the deal” on her nomination after Biden announced that he would not be running again.

And by the end of August, or after six weeks since securing the nomination, she will have likely raised more than $600 million across her presidential campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee and other closely aligned political committees.

As far as Harris sitting down with the press to do interviews and her upcoming debate with Trump on Sept. 10, both will be putty in her politically enlightened hands.

By the end of this abbreviated political campaign season, “Kamala Harris, for the People” and her platform of economic populism and social justice for all, as contrasted with the former president’s kleptocratic alternative for the few both at home and abroad, should provide more than enough currency to carry the day on Nov. 5.

Emotionally speaking, there is another more profound and more troubling reason that Trump must be defeated by Harris this fall.

It concerns a question asked by Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, when she was 78 years old.

“What kind of son have I created?” Trump’s mother asked her soon-to-be ex-daughter-in-law Ivana Trump.

We now know the answer all too well. Trump is the kind of son who would become the president of the United States and go down in U.S. history as bringing out not only the worst in the greatest number of Americans but also an even more significant number of U.S. citizens and others suffering from severe bouts of post-traumatic Trump syndrome.

As Harris herself has declared in unison with so many others, the correct decision for America is clear: “We’re not going back.”

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Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Criminologist explains why remaining Trump cases may never go to trial

Over the course of the past year, the relationships between law, politics and justice in our contemporary democratic republic have been torn open. We’ve all witnessed firsthand how each of the criminal indictments of former President Donald Trump have struggled to be adjudicated in their respective jurisdictions.

In effect, these criminal cases have all demonstrated just how arbitrary and capricious the rule of law can be when subject to the decisions of unprincipled and unscrupulous jurists of the highest courts in the land. Or, more pointedly: When legal conflicts are resolved by corrupt political hacks trying to pass themselves off as neutral umpires calling balls and strikes as they interpret constitutional law, we’re in for some serious civic trouble.

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More than a year removed from the last of Trump’s four criminal indictments, only one of these has gone to trial.

One might argue that in the interim, Trump’s criminal justice and substantive crimes have been hijacked from the American people by the Supreme Court, which this year granted Trump significant presidential immunity rights. You be the judge of whether the high court’s ruling came down for the primary purpose of making Trump’s alleged criminal wrongdoing disappear.

In fact, it is now quite likely that Trump’s three pending criminal cases and straightforward violations of the criminal law will never go to trial.

Say even one or more of these remaining cases eventually finds their way to trial. And say that Trump is found guilty of felonies.

That may very well not be the final resolution of these matters as we have learned from Trump’s Manhattan hush money case. This is because an anti-democratic alliance of Boss Trump, the GOP and the MAGA majority of the Supreme Court has worked to ensure that justice for Trump is delayed indefinitely, no matter the evidence against him and no matter what a jury of his peers determines.

Anyone who believes no president is above the law should recoil: The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of presidential immunity — and against the Constitution in order to protect the insurrectionary and treasonous behavior of Trump — is to date the most radical expression of weaponizing the law this nation has seen in decades. Or beyond.

Where do Trump’s cases stand?

At this point in time, only the first of these criminal indictments has gone the distance and was decided by a jury of Trump’s peers — or so we thought.

After a New York jury this past spring issued guilty verdicts on each of Trump’s 34 falsification of business records counts — each stemming from his interfering in the 2016 presidential election by paying hush money to a porn star with whom he allegedly had an affair — I more than suggested that “Justice delayed is not always justice denied.”

Boy was I wrong.

At the end of the 2023-24 Supreme Court term, the MAGA majority of justices had ruled to the surprise of virtually every knowledgeable person on Earth that Trump enjoyed presidential immunity from criminal prosecution whether he committed his offenses during, after or even before his presidency.

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Who knew? Certainly not the authors of the Declaration of Independence or the fathers of the U.S. Constitution – the only “originalists” if there ever were any.

As a result of this “unconstitutional” decision, Trump’s scheduled sentencing for July 11 was delayed until September 18 — after the earliest of early voting ballots will have already been cast in the 2024 presidential election.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, Trump’s “lawyers are urging the judge in the New York hush money case to overturn his conviction and dismiss the case.” In addition to other legal arguments, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has responded that the immunity ruling has “no bearing on this prosecution” because the lawsuit was about conduct and events that occurred before Trump became president.

Even if Trump’s lawyers are correct about this new law after the crime, the case should still be immune from the decision. Just as a person cannot face criminal punishment except for an act that was criminalized by law before the act was performed – the principle known as “no crime without a law” — a person should not be exonerated or exempt from criminal punishment because of a “new law after the crime.”

Judge Juan Merchan has told the parties that he will issue his decision by Sept. 6. I am confident that he will rule against Trump and that sentencing should be on schedule for Sept. 18. However, I am also confident that Trump’s legal team will appeal that decision. And, even if that appeal does not delay sentencing, Trump's attorneys will file additional appeals to overturn the sentence — prison time remains a possibility, even if it’s unlikely — as well as to toss the case out for a second time.

A courtroom sketch by the artist Jarvaland of former President Donald Trump and Justice Juan Merchan at the former president's criminal hush money trial. (Courtesy of Jarvaland)

Meanwhile, in the election interference case in the District of Columbia, Judge Tanya Chutkan will soon be reclaiming jurisdiction to assess whether the charges brought by the special counsel Jack Smith fall within or outside of the new guidelines of presidential immunity.

Of course, if Chutkan rules in favor of the prosecution, Trump will appeal that decision as well.

Based on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ separate opinion in the immunity ruling and her concerns about the legality of the special counsel’s appointment, Judge Aileen Cannon on July 15 dismissed the “slam dunk” classified documents case in Florida.

Smith has appealed this ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and has not yet asked the 11th Circuit to expedite this case. Thus, in all likelihood, a hearing before Cannon will not occur before sometime in the middle of October. Some time afterwards she will undoubtedly rule in favor of Trump. Then, the special counsel will appeal her decision.

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And so it goes: “Procedural justice” at work delaying and stymying “substantive justice.”

None of these appeals will ultimately be resolved for months if not years after the November election. The same can also be assumed should Trump file an appeal to toss out the Fulton County Georgia RICO case — this time for prosecutorial immunity rather than as he has previously done for the violation of his First Amendment rights.

So we now find ourselves in a situation where long before justice delayed is no longer justice denied, the American voters will decide.

As former U.S. prosecutor for the Southern District of Alabama and distinguished professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, Joyce Vance, has written: “Trump now faces prosecutors both in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion, where voters will decide whether to send a felon” — or, instead, a prosecutor in presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris — to the White House.

In a nation that has seen the value of the rule of law diminished by the MAGA Supreme Court, the choice seems rather clear.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

I wrote books on Trump's crimes — but did not see the Supreme Court immunity ruling coming

While writing Criminology on Trump (2022) and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024), I had never imagined that even this extreme Supreme Court supermajority would rule in favor of Donald Trump’s quest for presidential immunity.

Alas, after the Court’s outrageous decision on July 1 that eviscerated the Constitution and confirmed Trump is not subject to the criminal law, I know that the wannabe dictator — Teflon Don — has been feeling legally, if not politically, vindicated. I also know that our Founding Fathers, informed that a president of their democratic republic had been granted the status of a king, would spin somersaults in their graves.

Because of the long-coming decision of this Supreme Court’s Christian nationalist MAGA majority, justice in Trump’s four separate criminal cases have been delayed, and possibly, eliminated altogether. More importantly, the justices’ legal chicanery has retroactively allowed a former president and all future presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions by untenably conflating “private interests” with “official duties.”

In very different words, these Supreme Court justices have “nullified” Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

Ideally, a decision of this magnitude should have been a unanimous one — 9-0 — with justices across the ideological spectrum speaking with a unified and principled voice.

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Instead, the three justices that Trump nominated “cemented a 6-2 conservative majority that pushed the court further right, not only in embracing a broad view of presidential immunity, but also on an array of other topics – most notably, reducing the power of federal agencies, a long-favored target of conservative lawyers and legal scholars,” in the words of former Supreme Court litigator Amy Howe.

Certain justices themselves agreed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for one, wrote in her powerful dissent, the Supreme Court has made “a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law,” noting that the Court gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

As she opined, we should all fear for our democracy.

The question for this criminologist became: “How or why did crime and criminality – specifically a criminal conspiracy to overturn a presidential election – become the official business of a constitutionally empowered president of the United States?”

To find out how the Supreme Court avoided the answer to my question, obstructed justice or impeded due process, and eventually rendered such an absurd and perverted decision, you will have to read their convoluted logic for yourself and attempt to make sense of text that stubbornly defies logic, legal foundation or conservatives’ beloved principle of “originalism.”

Or, less painfully, you can read about it from Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama who’s now a distinguished professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama School of Law. As she wrote in Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance: “Presidents are kings” in the Supreme Court’s estimation.

To summarize Vance’s key takeaways:

The Supreme Court's decision “signals that they believe it’s more important to create a powerful presidency … then it is to be concerned with how a president could abuse that concentrated power, including to try and overturn an election.”

This was “a long decision with lots of moving parts” because there were five separate opinions written. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote a concurrence, as did Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “who joined most of Justice Roberts’ majority opinion, but not all of it.” Sotomayor wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who also wrote a separate dissent.

As Vance underscores, “the opinion itself is hard reading, even for appellate lawyers or those used to contemplating constitutional issues.” It is not law “written for the public, and that is an abdication of the Court’s responsibilities. Speaking of abdication of responsibility, both Justice Thomas and Justice Alito participated in the decision, an ongoing sign of the ethics dysfunction at the Court.”

Once more, the “Court has frittered away public confidence in its integrity as a democratic institution just when it’s needed the most, as the 2024 election, which like the one in 2020” may also end up in the courts.

The issue that the Supreme Court agreed to decide — which it never should have after trial judge Tanya Chutkan and a three-judge appellate panel had ruled unanimously that Trump could be prosecuted for actions undertaken while in the White House and in the run-up to Jan. 6 — was this: whether, and to what extent, Trump enjoyed “presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

As Vance writes below, the conservative supermajority issued a fairly direct answer finding that there were “three different categories of presidential conduct, and a different rule about immunity applies to each one,” as follows:

1.) “A former President has immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken with his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority — his official authority stemming from the Constitution and our laws. This is for the exercise of his core constitutional powers.”

2.) “He had presumptive immunity from prosecution for other official acts, unless the government establishes that permitting them to prosecute will not create a danger of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch. The Court calls this the ‘Twilight Zone’ of official acts, which includes areas where a president has shared immunity with Congress.”

3.) “There is no immunity for unofficial acts. [However,] there may be an issue about how to decide whether conduct is official or unofficial, but if it’s the latter, no immunity.”

Vance notes that had President Richard Nixon known he had this type of immunity, “he wouldn’t have resigned” from the presidency in 1974.

It also turns out that Nixon, during one of his exclusive 1977 interviews with David Frost, foreshadowed the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling 47 years in the future.

In response to Frost’s query about him having broken the law in relation to “a president believing that something is in the best interests of the nation,” Nixon legendarily replied: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

The three dissenting Supreme Court justices, Vance and this criminologist are hardly alone in our dismay. When I hunted through Google News for any commentaries that concurred with the Supreme Court’s pro-MAGA decision, I could not find any — save for Fox News, New York Post and several pro-MAGA publications.

Here are representative samples of what I did find:

From The Bulwark: “The Supreme Court is protecting the president from you. It should be the other way around.”

From The Washington Post: “Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling poses risk for democracy.”

From the Los Angeles Times: “We should all dissent from the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and not respectfully.”

From CNN Politics: “The Supreme Court just gave presidents a superpower.”

From PBS: “A President could pocket a bribe for a pardon, stage a military coup to retain power, order the killing of a rival by the Navy’s SEAL Team Six – and be protected.”

From Project Syndicate: “The US Supreme Court has now ruled that the Constitution entitles former President Donald Trump to “presumptive immunity” from criminal prosecution for actions related to his efforts to overturn the November 2020 election.”

From Talking Points Memo: “The Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to American democracy.”

From Slate: “In its awful immunity ruling… benefitting Donald Trump, the court seems so worried about future threats to democracy that could come from the possibility of bogus future criminal prosecutions of former presidents [that have never happened before in US history] that it is willing to let a legitimate election prosecution over a current threat against democracy go by the wayside.”

From The New York Times: “The Supreme Court creates a lawless presidency.”

From Salon: “The Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump can be a dictator.”

From Politico: “The Supreme Court gave Trump a stunning Gift – and rewrote the Constitution.”

From Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid: “Raise your hand if you remember learning about the separation of powers, and the fact that we have a democratically elected President with limited powers, not a fascist empowered dictator with unlimited powers?”

From Mother Jones: “The Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution is only guaranteed to fuel Democrats’ fear of a second Trump term and its impact on everything from the justice system to immigration to LGBT and other civil rights.”

Last month, in another assault on constitutional democracy, a 6-2 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts for the Supreme Court concluded in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine is dead, and that the era of executive branch agency rule is effectively over.

Elie Mystal, writing for The Nation, underscored the danger of this anti-scientific decision by detailing how it represents the unifying mission of The Federalist Society, Project 2025 of the Heritage Foundation, Trumpism and the Supreme Court supermajority.

“We just witnessed the biggest Supreme Court power grab since 1803,” Mystal lamented.

Mystal, a constitutional scholar, was referring to the fact that the Supreme Court “has given itself nearly unlimited power over the administrative state, putting everything from environmental protections to workers’ rights at risk.”

One might say that the “deconstruction of the administrative state” dreamed of and advocated by Steve Bannon, the once pardoned and now federally imprisoned advisor to the former president, is well on its way — especially should the felon and corruptor-in-chief return to the White House this coming January.

After all, the ideologically driven and anti-constitutional Supreme Court supermajority has now transformed itself and the presidency into imperial powerhouses. In the process, they have abandoned any semblance of legal principle and cultural tradition while setting both the First Amendment and stare decisis on fire.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

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Justice delayed is not always justice denied

As the 12 New Yorkers began deliberating Wednesday and Donald Trump had to stick around the courthouse with nothing to do but wait, he erupted before news cameras and on social media:

"It was weaponization”

“Mother Teresa could not beat these charges”

"KANGAROO COURT"

"I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE CHARGES ARE IN THIS RIGGED CASE"

"Sham Trial”

“Very Dangerous Day for America"

By the end of Thursday afternoon, the jury had found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a bid to conceal from the voting public an affair with a former porn actress. With or without the assistance of Trump, the aftermath of the first trial of an American president will continue to be litigated in the court of public opinion well beyond the November presidential election — one that Trump may very well win.

Some would wrongly conclude, because Trump “has finally been subjected to the rule of law,” that the systems of justice are working with equal protection for all. And that no person, not even a former president of the United States, is “above the law.” Although that remains to be seen, as Trump may still escape from the rule of law with respect to his failed coup d’état on Jan. 6, 2021, and for having stolen classified documents on his way out of the White House a couple of weeks later.

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Regardless of the unanimous verdict, this trial is not over. According to a recent PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, “45 percent of Americans overall say these investigations are unfair and designed to obstruct his 2024 presidential campaign.”

Trump cultists believe that our systems of justice — civil and criminal – have been so corrupted and weaponized by the Biden crime family, radical leftists and global elites that they will still prefer an antidemocratic-authoritarian dictator and convicted felon as their head of state.

Before Trump became president in 2017, and over the course of three decades, he was arguably the greatest litigant of all time. Certainly, Trump was among the most litigious people in U.S. history. Whether he is the plaintiff or the defendant, Trump uses the law as a means of bullying and punishing his adversaries regardless of who they are.

Between 1986 and 2016, Trump was involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits according to James Zirin, author of The Plaintiff in Chief. In about 60 percent of these personal and business clashes, Trump was busy using the law to sue an array of individuals and entities. His defendants included personal assistants, celebrities, mental patients, prisoners, attorneys, businesspeople, family members, unions, governments and the media.

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Trump sued for fraud, for breach of trust, for breach of contract, for violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for government favoritism, for libel, and for misappropriation — pretty much for all of the illegal things that Trump specializes in.

Trump also sues for all kinds of reasons: for sport, to achieve a sense of control, to make a point, and as a means of destroying or silencing anyone who has crossed him.

As a defendant, Trump has been sued for racial and sex discrimination, sexual harassment, fraud, breaches of trust, money laundering, defamation, stiffing creditors, defrauding students, defaulting on loans and misusing his own charitable foundation to further his political and business interests.

Trump’s win-loss record is an impressive one, winning 451 times and losing only 38 times. In some 500 cases, judges have dismissed plaintiffs’ claims against Trump; hundreds of other cases ended with the available public records unclear about the resolution.

Whether as plaintiff or defendant, what is important to underscore is that neither facts nor laws matter much to Trump, despite his laughable claim that he will “never lie.” As Zirin has written:

Whether he was entitled to the benefit of the law, or
whether he could support his positions with evidence, or
whether his claims stated a cause or action, or whether
he was really damaged was irrelevant to Donald Trump.
What was important was to use the lawsuit to attract
attention, to exert economic pressure, and to prove he
was the kid on the block not to be messed with. And his
adversaries largely gave way during his rise to celebrity
and power.

Once he became president, Trump began weaponizing the Department of Justice against his enemies and on behalf of his criminal allies. After the GOP took control of the House in 2023, Trump’s weaponizing of justice continued from the House controlled subcommittees.

Meanwhile, as Trump’s criminality escalated after the 2020 election, there was still an unwillingness or reluctance by law enforcement to go after him with its full authority and celerity.

Throughout Trump’s professional career, he has always been at war with legal standards and normative rules that he regards as made to be broken or avoided at all costs. Besides, the only people who abide by the rules are the suckers and losers — unlike winners and smart people who team up with scoundrels and mobsters to accomplish their objectives.

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Moreover, Trump’s lifetime of adjudication is found in a lengthy background of litigation accompanied by a pathological pattern of lying in which Trump’s particular style of intimidation evolved and morphed into one courtroom episodic drama after another — somewhat like his reality TV show, The Celebrity Apprentice.

Unfortunately, because the Manhattan trial for conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 presidential election was not televised, the majority of Americans were not paying much, if any, attention to the day-by-day proceedings.

Speaking of lies, pathological or otherwise, I found it both rich and amusing when Todd Blanche during his summation for the defense dubbed Michael Cohen a G.L.O.A.T., or the “greatest liar of all time.” After all, his client is in a league of his own in this category with false or misleading claims during his four years in office totaling 30, 573, according to the Washington Post.

It should not have surprised anybody familiar with Trump’s legal history that when he became president that “he would seek to weaponize the justice system, use his power to bend the law, attack his enemies and critics, and claim victory when there was none” as Zirin, also a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has written.

For example, the former president used his time in the White House to stave off the prosecution by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D). Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg, ultimately did the job.

Trump did the same with New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) until such time as the Trump Organization and its CFO Allen Weisselberg — but not CEO Trump — were arraigned and later convicted on multiple criminal charges alleging a 15-year tax scheme that was still in progress as of June 30, 2021.

Straight out of the Roy Cohn-Trump playbook, the Trump Organization released one of its classic assaults on the prosecutors rather than an affirmative defense of the indicted CFO or itself. As quoted by David Frum in The Atlantic:

Allen Weisselberg is a loving and devoted husband,
father and grandfather who has worked for the Trump
Organization for 48 years. He is now being used by
the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched
earth attempt to harm the former President. The District
Attorney is bringing a case involving employee benefits
that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would
ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics.

Trump’s remarks regarding this criminal prosecution of his CFO and company like his four criminal prosecutions are always about attacking the prosecutors or the judges as being part of a “deep state,” the “radical left” and for being “rude, nasty, and totally biased.”

With the usual refrain, Trump is always telling us how he is being persecuted and victimized. He endlessly talks of these cases representing the ultimate witch hunt or “crime of the century.”

On Thursday, Trump declared May 30 the “darkest day in American history” — apparently forgetting the day in 1941 that the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the day terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001. He certainly forgot about a certain day in January 2021, when his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in his name while Trump watched from the White House.

Trump fundraising message A fundraising message from Donald Trump's presidential campaign following a jury returning a guilty verdict May 30, 2024, on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels. (Trump campaign)

Always fearing that one of his loyal employees like Cohen may eventually flip on him, Trump routinely underscores how the prosecutors are “in search of a crime” and that they “will do anything to frighten people into making up the stories or lies that they want.”

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Of course, this is simply a part of Trump’s preparation or MO for civil or criminal litigations should they come to that. After all, he and his legal team know that rarely are the laws or the facts on their side. If these were, then Trump and his lawyers know full well that he — a former president of the United States — would never have been charged in the first place.

In most instances, therefore, Trump is always hoping that neither the laws nor the facts will matter as much as the political diversions that he and his team will be attempting to raise both inside and outside the courtroom for the benefit of at least one member of the jury.

Once again, as Frum in his Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020) had articulated when the former president was still in office: “Trump worked all of his life on the theory that law can be subordinated to political favors and political pressures. That theory has carried him this far — and it’s pretty far, all things considered.”

It is indeed, even better than the most cynical politicians could have ever imagined.

Trump as president — and now as former president seeking to regain his lost office — has continued with his theory and practice of weaponizing the law. The convicted felon now also has the political assistance of a Trumpian majority on the Supreme Court as well as a Trump appointed federal judge for the Southern District of Florida slowly walking her adjudication. Ergo, both the January 6 and the classified documents trials that could have been over by now have yet to begin. And most likely they will not occur before 2025.

From the perspective of “justice delayed is justice denied,” it took eight years for his first criminal conviction to happen. With respect to his three other criminal indictments, it will have been at least four years and counting.

But Thursday’s ruling by a jury of Trump’s peers is proof that Trump, for all his money and influence and power, can’t run forever.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Five questions you must ask yourself before voting in November

We are supposedly five weeks out from the first of two scheduled 2024 presidential debates between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

However, within hours of the two men agreeing to debate, Republican operatives — including daughter-in-law Lara Trump, and co-chair of the Republican National Committee — already began downplaying expectations, griping without evidence that the upcoming debates are “heavily rigged in favor of Biden.”

When Biden challenged Trump to two debates earlier this month, he did so with a well-timed zinger, “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays.” Biden also reminded everyone that Trump had lost both of their debates in 2020 and had not debated since – referring to the 2024 GOP primary debates that Trump completely ghosted.

So it was not surprising that Lara Trump immediately trotted out the Trumpiest of Trump tropes: a not-rigged thing being “rigged.”

Nor is it surprising that Trump, who had been saying on the campaign trail that he would debate Biden “anytime, and anyplace” including outside the Manhattan courthouse where his criminal trial is occurring, that his campaign is already looking for a way out of debating Biden if they can do so without losing face.

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If not, then these debates will become no different from his two previous elections – as well as his first criminal trial and three other indictments – “rigged” conspiracy affairs against him by the Democrats, the media, the deep state, noncitizen voters and space aliens.

We also learned last week that in addition to Supreme Court Justice Thomas’s wife and lawyer, Virginia Thomas, having urged the overturning of the 2020 election, that Justice Samuel Alito’s home — days after the failed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — flew an upside-down American flag in solidarity with the “Stop the Steal” movement that had been rejected by 60 lower court lawsuits filed by Trump and company.

Of course, a justice taking any position on a political matter of any kind isn’t just a no-no, it’s verboten, it’s anathema to the very raison d'être of any jurist let alone a member of the Supreme Court.

As ex-federal prosecutor Harry Litman articulated when learning about the Alito flag episode, “announcing a position” on any political issue is deeply disturbing. It’s even more so when it is based factually on “a lie, a fiction.” Alito’s “suggestion otherwise is an absolute treachery to confidence in democracy” especially coming from a Supreme Court Justice who would “be hearing cases involving an offshoot of this very set of beliefs and social turmoil.”

Unfortunately, Stop the Steal 2.0 — or the continuation of Stop the Steal 1.0 — is alive and well. And should Trump lose the presidential election in 2024, the Trumpian revolution will continue to thwart American democracy as Republican leaders have already told us they will only accept the election as legitimate if Trump wins.

Like all of Trump’s biggest lies and attacks on democracy and the rule of law, they are being financed and “promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.”

All of this déjà vu is occurring amidst the new propaganda wars being waged globally by autocratic nations against constitutional democracies, their rules of law, transparencies, and accountabilities. Once again in 2024, like in 2020 and 2016, this war of narratives is being driven by Russian disinformation and by colluding members of the Trump campaign.

In addition, assistance this time around is also coming from an even more sycophantic GOP than in 2020 and a Supreme Court that has already weighed in in favor of the insurrectionist-in-chief and presumed Republican nominee.

As Anne Applebaum has written so incisively about the new propaganda war in the June issue of The Atlantic magazine, “Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common ground with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.”

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Having abandoned the Constitution and the rule of law, and having sanctioned that Trump and his ilk are, indeed, above the law, the Supreme Court has irresponsibly left the verdict of the former president’s insurrectionary lawlessness not to a jury of his peers where it belongs — Trump faces 88 felony counts across four criminal trials — but to a voting body politic where the ultimate decision made will have little to do with either the facts or the law.

Worse yet, in April, a New York Times/Siena College survey taken from 1,000 voters across the country found that when asked about the one thing voters remember about Trump’s presidency, “only 5 percent of respondents referred to Jan. 6, and only 4 percent to Covid.”

Meanwhile, on the 2024 campaign trail in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Trump has been falsely claiming to Republican officials and supporters alike that he won states which were not even close in 2020.

These are not only lies, but they are part of his “campaign strategy.” For when Trump loses in Minnesota as Republicans have done consecutively since 1976, he will call it another “rigged” vote counting. It is not at all surprising that the corrupt Republicans are not calling Trump out on these lies. But neither are the Democrats who are merely regarding it as another example of Trump the fraudster being himself.

Last and not least of all, Trump and his campaign earlier in the week tried to fundraise off of the false claims that Biden authorized the assassination of the former president during one of the searches for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago by the FBI.

With all of this in mind, I have reduced the 2024 elections to five questions that I believe people should ask themselves and need to answer before casting their votes this fall:

  1. Why do you trust one of these two presidential candidates and parties over the other with the keys to the White House?
  2. Even if you are not a woman, which of these two presidential candidates and parties are you willing to bet your life on?
  3. What kinds of “personality traits” are you looking for in the next commander-in-chief, and what types of human beings are you looking for that will also be in sync with the cabinet selections and the rest of the members of his administration?
  4. What exactly are the things that you think you will be gaining should your candidate and party win, and conversely, what exactly are the things that you think you will be losing should your candidate and party be defeated?
  5. Why is the well-being or future of American democracy and the rule of law more important than all of the other issues or concerns at stake in this election?

I will now explain why the stuff or substance of the first four questions are subject to whether we become an illiberal democracy or an autocracy, remain a liberal democracy, or become a multicultural democracy.

At least in the short run, the election will decide whether the United States will remain a democratic and constitutional republic as we have known for 250 years. If it does not, it will become an illiberal democracy or an autocracy as in a “new” fascist America.

As Thomas Zimmer from Democracy Americana has revealed in his May 22 substack on the “fascism debates” and Donald Trump, American fascist: The former president “has a fascistic way of describing the problem” as a “country in decline. It is threatened by outsiders – immigrants, invaders who are ‘poisoning the blood’.” The nation is also “threatened by the enemy within: Un-American forces of radical leftism and globalist elites.”

Trump offers a fascistic solution: To MAGA the nation has to be purified from without and the enemies from within purged. Trump has “repeatedly promised to round up and deport 15 million people – a deportation operation of unprecedented scale, explicitly targeting non-white immigrants.”

More explicitly: Should Biden and the Democrats prevail, will the U.S. remain a tyranny of a minority — a representative or democratic kind of tyranny — with its rule of law and constitutional balance of powers striving to call the shots? Or will our government, should Trump and the Republicans win out, become a tyranny of an authoritarian oligarchy?

If Biden is returned to the Oval Office – and despite the enduring Trumpian revolution — then the electorate or the people will have a third option other than a tyranny of a minority or a tyranny of an autocracy. This refers to a yet-unrealized struggle to build a new tyranny: one that's fully democratic – with direct rather than indirect representation of, by, and for people – a multicultural, if not a multiparty, majority to replace our antiquated, dysfunctional and polarized tyranny of a minority.

If voters return Trump to the White House, then the third option will be off the table until the American people rise up against the illiberal democracy — and who knows, if and when, or how long that would take — to overturn the reactionary and repressive tyranny of the autocracy.

Looking back, looking forward

Because the Founding Fathers were concerned about their envisioned democratic republic collapsing, they contemplated the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchies and empires.

They knew — as Aristotle had warned — that inequality brings instability. And, as Plato believed, demagogues by exploiting free speech may very well install themselves as tyrants.

Accordingly, the authors of the Constitution sought a document to avoid what the ancient philosophers referred to as tyranny or the usurpation of power by one individual or group or faction or party.

To hopefully avert their birth of a democratic nation from coming to its own demise and going the way of the ancient democracies, our founders came up with a political architecture whose encroachment of power they hoped would be protected by a system of checks and balances and the rule of law.

Similarly, during the Constitutional Convention the founders were determined to prevent what James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.” So they opted for a “tyranny of a minority” constructing a democratic republic exemplified by the establishment of a bicameral congress and an Electoral College as a means of not selecting our president through a direct, one person one vote, majority-take-all.

In addition to the unresolved democratic issues of inequality and instability or of demagogues exploiting free speech, societies both democratic and autocratic have been dealing with the unresolved issues of globalization since the beginning of the 20th century.

Responding to globalization, modern democracies after World War I and World War II came and went in Europe and elsewhere as they dissolved into authoritarian or fascist dictatorships.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, democracies materialized in Eastern Europe, and within a relatively short period of time, several of these countries, such as Hungary and Russia, reverted back to authoritarianism..

Today, there are also the fascist, communist and authoritarian legacies of the rule by disciplined party elites with monopolies over reason or objective truth.

These elites call all the shots on behalf of the people. Undeterred by the interests of the people, domestic or global, they are always working against democratic rule and on behalf of authoritarian rule. In other words, against the interests of the vast majority of the people and on behalf of the interests of the oligarchical few and their minions.

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Since Trump began colluding with the Russians before the 2016 presidential election and took the sides of other illiberal democracies or dictatorships during and after his administration, he has also succeeded in capturing the entire GOP. Another Trump presidency would bring our system of checks and balances, rule of law and even the Supreme Court to the end of their constitutional ropes, so to speak.

In sum, should Trump and his minions and all of their corruption and lawlessness triumph in the fall, then the United States will have crossed over — temporarily, at best — to the other side and joined forces with our heretofore anti-democratic opponents or enemies with their abundance of human repression and lack of individual freedom.

On the other hand, should Biden and his democratic defenders of law and order, liberty and justice score a victory over Trump this fall, then the American people will have the opportunity – as difficult as it will be – to fix the things that are wrong with our current democracy such as the Electoral College or the Supreme Court, and to deliver a legally reformed and more fully inclusive democratic republic.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Inside the Trump Crime Syndicate and MAGA kitchen cabinet of knaves and rogues

Before Donald Trump criminalized the White House, Republican Party and perhaps the Supreme Court, he was the CEO of the Trump Organization — a fraudster, racketeer and patriarchal Boss of a family owned and operated criminal enterprise. He spent five decades in New York and beyond avoiding charges and prosecutions for sexual harassment, tax evasion, money laundering and nonpayment of employees.

If this wasn’t enough, Trump also busied himself by allegedly defrauding tenants, customers, contractors, investors, bankers, attorneys, students and charities, not to mention making use of undocumented workers.

In retrospect, Trump’s lifetime of lies and lawlessness appear to have prepared him for the fateful moment in which he now finds himself — in a court of law, answering for the first 34 of 88 felony counts that stem from alleged crimes he committed immediately before, during and after his presidency. Trials involving Trump’s alleged 2020 election interference and illegal retention of national secrets loom.

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As the fraudster-in-chief and Benedict Arnold of our time, Trump continues to maintain his innocence and blames everybody but himself while attempting to make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

In light of Trump’s defiance, and the potential for more illegal Trumpian interference during the 2024 election, in which he is almost certain to be the Republican Party’s nominee, now is a good time to go beyond Trump and explore the criminal culpability of Trump Crime Syndicate lieutenants and Trump’s kitchen cabinet of MAGA knaves and rogues.

These are the people who have aided and abetted Trump, and continue to assist him in his single-minded quest to become the most powerful man in America.

They are worth your attention precisely because of the danger to democracy that they represent.

Criminalizing the power of the pardon with the intent to defraud

At the federal level, a gaggle of powerful Republican actors were deeply involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. These include — and are not limited to — Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

At the state level, dozens of Republican fake electors and Trump stakeholders have been criminally indicted in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada.

All of these criminal indictments for election interference like Trump’s indictments are “basically telling the same story of corruption and venality” except for their “different charges” according to Kenneth F. McCallion, a former Special Attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney with the DOJ who also worked for the New York attorney’s general office as a prosecutor on Trump-related racketeering cases.

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But before proceeding further with this examination of presidential crime, politics and accountably, it is important to highlight Trump’s unprecedented usage of the pardon power, which facilitated the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021, as well as Republican electioneering of 2024.

Prior to Trump, the presidential power of the pardon had always been about showing mercy and compassion. It was most certainly not a tool for rewarding criminal loyalty and weaponizing criminal conduct.

Excluding Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” and former “partner in crime,” the Boss pardoned several of his other loyal associates, especially those within the Trump Crime Syndicate.

For example, in relation to Russian election interference in 2016, Trump pardoned his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Revealed for the man he is in the 1992 Center for Public Integrity report The Torturers’ Lobby, Manafort in 2019 was found guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia of two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one count of failing to disclose an offshore bank account.

Manafort also pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and to witness tampering in the federal District of Columbia. Most of these crimes were connected to his lobbying work in Ukraine.

Then, just days before his longtime friend and campaign adviser Roger Stone’s 48-month incarceration was scheduled to begin for seven felony convictions, including impeding a congressional inquiry, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence.

And when Trump was literally leaving the Oval Office and almost out the door, he granted clemency to his former chief political strategist Steve Bannon who had defrauded Trump donors out of more than $1 million to allegedly help build the border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Trump also pardoned retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the only one-time White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russian investigation carried out by special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

In the cases of both Stone and Flynn, Trump’s “forgiveness” came after Bill Barr, Trump’s third of five attorneys general, failed to shut down these investigations on the spurious grounds that these two perpetrators, Stone and Flynn, had been the victims of witch hunts and overzealous prosecutors.

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We have also known for nearly two years since former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before a House select committee that the pardon power does not prohibit preemptive pardons. Nine members of Trump’s kitchen cabinet requested them in the wake of Jan. 6, demonstrating their full knowledge and intent of criminal wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Manafort, Stone, Bannon, and Flynn are back supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign as they did in 2016 and 2020. And, Trump and Putin are closer than ever. The Russian president has even publicly endorsed him this time round . It didn’t hurt that Trump seemed to have Putin’s back most, if not, all the time since he took office. Trump opposing NATO as well as Ukraine helped as well. Trump’s pardoning his own men involved in the 2016 interference seemed to condone it. His illiberal authoritarian and anti-democratic credo was another plus.

Trump’s minions began their election interference in 2015 and never stopped

Let’s begin with the criminal prosecutions related to the 2016 Russian election interference investigated by Mueller.

Mueller’s investigation led to the indictments of 34 individuals and three Russian companies. Five Trump associates and campaign officials were convicted of felonies including those mentioned above. Mueller’s final report, while finding insufficient evidence of a Trump-Russian conspiracy, did conclude that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, and expected to benefit from Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Key players in the 2016 Russian collusion affair

Cohen and David Pecker are two of the key, among, many witnesses from Trump’s inner circle testifying against their former Boss in the New York presidential election interference case.

By contrast, defendant Trump has no witnesses on his behalf. He also has no family or friends except son Eric who showed up in court on April 30 for the first time. Otherwise surrounded by only his attorneys who are devoid of any facts and some twisted law, maybe, if they are lucky.

And through testimony on Friday the defense had scored no points during cross-examination that so far could create reasonable doubt.

2020 Election Interference as part of Trump’s Kitchen Cabinet

Turning next to a review of three of the 2020 Trump election interference cases. I do so without concern with the consequences for or accountability of the fake electors because none of these individuals were either affiliated with the Trump Crime Syndicate or members of the former president’s kitchen cabinet.

Although a number of them were or are elected state officials and high-ranking members of the Republican presidential campaigns of 2020 as well as 2024.

  • Jeffrey Clark, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia
  • John Eastman, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia and Arizona
  • Rudy Giuliani, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
  • Jenna Ellis, convicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
  • Sidney Powell, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia
  • Kenneth Chesebro, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia
  • Peter Navarro, convicted and in prison
  • Steve Bannon, convicted and out on appeal
  • Mark Meadows, DOJ witness, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
  • Boris Epshteyn, unindicted co-conspirator in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
  • An unidentified political consultant is also a DOJ unindicted co-conspirator

Nixon’s Watergate was ‘much ado about nothing’ compared to Trump’s failed coup and insurrection

To put Trump’s minions in perspective, a brief examination of President Richard Nixon’s henchmen is required.

In response to the criminal cover-up of the crimes involved in the attempted burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. Nixon was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" on March 1, 1974, by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia. This was a wide conspiracy case that sent some of Washington's biggest names at the time to prison.

Compared to Trump’s failed coup, Nixon’s Watergate break-in and cover-up was no big deal; it certainly was not an existential threat to democracy and the rule of law. There was no violence toward the Capitol or danger to members of Congress and the vice president.

Forty federal officials were indicted or jailed in the case. These included Nixon's highest-ranking officials such as the former Attorney General and chairman of his 1972 presidential campaign John Mitchell. Along with the disgraced Mitchell there was John Dean, White House legal counsel, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Halderman (White-House senior staff), Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, and James McCord, Security Director of CREEP. They were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in the January cover-up trial of 1975. All of these men carried out orders that, directly or indirectly, originated with Nixon himself.

What stands out as a huge difference between the Watergate crimes responsible for forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency of the US and the Jan 6 insurrection was that Nixon became an unindicted co-conspirator while still in office. And he received his comeuppance after only a little over two years since the crimes occurred. At the time, Nixon had been president for the better part of six years.

Trump after eight years of election interference and four years as president has yet to receive his criminal comeuppance. Even if he is convicted later this month on 34 felony counts in Manhattan, his appeals could delay his well-deserved imprisonment from occurring for at least another year or two.

By contrast, three years after Jan.6, and the violent assault on the Capitol building there have been 749 convicted and sentenced offenders. At least 467 rioters have been incarcerated in either jail or prison for an array of offenses including assaulting law enforcement officers, felonious obstructing, impeding, or interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder.

More than a dozen members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy were convicted of the serious charges of seditious conspiracy. Additionally, 53 persons have been indicted as fake electors, many of whom have been high ranking Republican officials in the states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona.

Compared to racketeering, Trump and company’s very complex and organized election interference that included more than 2000 rioters besieging the Capitol on Jan. 6, and hundreds more working away in seven swing states including Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump sits with his attorneys Emil Bove (L) and Todd Blanche (R) as he attends his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 3, 2024 in New York City. Trump was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records last year, which prosecutors say was an effort to hide a potential sex scandal, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. Trump is the first former U.S. president to face trial on criminal charges. (Photo by Mark Peterson - Pool/Getty Images)

Paradoxically, it may seem strange given the reaction of the Republicans and the Department of Justice to Nixon and Watergate, that Trump and his election interference crimes have been given a free pass by the Supreme Court.

With respect to Trump’s inner circles, a few have already pleaded guilty and many more will be held to account regardless of whether Trump is, although this is certainly a reflection on a man who boasted of surrounding himself with the “best and brightest” the nation has to offer.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

Trump’s Manhattan trial could determine whether rule of law survives: criminologist

Now that the Supreme Court appears to be agreeing, at least in part, with former President Donald Trump in his un-American quest for unlimited presidential impunity, the threat to American democracy just got worse.

And Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial, now fully underway, just became more critical to the very survival of the rule of law.

Until the first criminal trial of Trump began two weeks ago — a case that could have been prosecuted and tried some two years ago according to the account of insider lawyer Mark Pomerantz — the United States was among those nations worldwide that had never charged or prosecuted a former president.

Since the 1980s, according to Axios, “around half of the world’s countries have had at least” one leader tried and convicted, “not counting impeachments or coups.” Meanwhile, from the beginning of the 21st century, at least 78 nations have jailed or prosecuted leaders who have left office.

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This type of criminalization of former presidents has also occurred in many democratic-constitutional nations, such as Argentina, Brazil, France, Israel, Italy and South Korea.

Unless one counts the United States v. Jefferson Davis, when former Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis faced treason, Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan is unique in presidential history.

Nearly three decades before Davis’ trial, in an 1838 public speech, Abraham Lincoln told a group in Springfield, Ill., that the perils to U.S. democracy would come from within and not from outside: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Abraham Lincoln A head-on photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken on November 8, 1863 (Wikimedia Commons)

Of course, Lincoln was not only prescient with respect to Jefferson Davis, but also with respect to our very own insurrectionist-in-chief who served as president from 2017 to 2021.

Like Lincoln, who was also concerned about the Taney Supreme Court particularly around the Dred Scott Decision and the court’s interpretation of his wartime usage of executive power, we, too, should be concerned about the threat to democracy coming from inside the SCOTUS.

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This is precisely what occurred last week when the majority of the justices danced around and failed to address Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021.

At this historical moment, what could be the one and only criminal trial of a former president with the full benefits of due process and equal protection under the law has become critical to the very survival of the rule of law in this nation — especially should Trump return to the White House in 2025.

To not have prosecuted Trump with all of the publicly known evidence against the former president before the 2024 election would be politically akin to the ways in which authoritarian systems of law enforcement work. Think China. Or Iran. Or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where neither the facts nor the laws have anything to do with criminal justice. Just ask Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, an American who’s been jailed in Russia for more than a year awaiting trial on bogus charges of espionage.

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Thus, the procedure-based evidentiary trial of Trump in Manhattan is critically important to the rule of law because it demystifies how the administration of criminal justice is working — not to persecute Trump, but rather, to prosecute him using standards that apply to all criminal defendants. The same of course should also hold true when the other criminal indictments materialize into trials. With or without convictions of the former president, they would demonstrate why these criminal charges were brought in the first place.

Most importantly — unlike the bogeyman rhetoric of Trump and the assumptions of the Supreme Court majority — these trials would demonstrate that the indictments had nothing to do with President Joe Biden, fake news, witch hunts or conspiracies of a “deep state,” of any kind.

Quite the contrary. They were all the products of Trump’s insidious creativity, the manufacturing of fake news and election interference. Once again we have another case of Trump projecting and doing precisely what he is always accusing others of doing to him.

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As the first witness in the Manhattan trial, David Pecker, revealed during his testimony, the 34 felonies counts brought against Trump were based primarily on a modus operandi of conspiracy, fake news and the fraudulent efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

Of equal importance, each of the other criminal trials — should they come to fruition, especially before Election Day — will also demonstrate why the former president’s guilt or innocence cannot be left to the majority of the Supreme Court’s justices, three of whom Trump nominated, and a fourth “on the take” justice whose wife is also a MAGA activist.

Nor should Trump’s criminality be left to politics, or whether more votes are cast for or against him in 2024.

Trump’s accountability for his 88 alleged felonies should be exclusively up to juries of his peers.

Regrettably, this is not happening because of the Supreme Court’s prospective obstruction of justice. May they find the wisdom between now and their ruling to do the right thing.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

A criminologist explains how Americans achieve a post-Trump democracy

Now that the first criminal trial of Donald Trump is underway in a New York courthouse and is potentially the only one that will be decided before people start voting around Labor Day, there are two political objectives that I believe are necessary to implement if the United States is ever to “fix” what ails or troubles our American democracy:

  1. Defeat Trump’s third attempt to become president and re-elect President Joe Biden to a second term of office. This will require aggressive election campaigning and coordination by anti-Trumpers, never Trumpers, Democrats and independents and has everything to do with saving our multiracial pluralistic democracy from its imminent demise should Trump and his minions retake control of the White House.
  2. The second goal involves changing the anti-democratic elements of our political system, such as the Electoral College, which have been in the works since after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat. These political efforts will have to be expanded and more organized than they have been up to now. They are also predicated on the defeat of Trump and possibly the implosion of the Republican Party.

By no stretch of the political imagination will these objectives be easy. The first of these will be comparatively a lot less difficult to achieve than the second. However, the second of these will be impossible to accomplish without achieving the first.

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Regarding the 2024 election: To counter Trump and to establish a blue wave this fall, Biden and his re-election campaign should pivot and lean into anti-establishment populism that has increasingly attracted blue-collar workers. Much of the legitimate anger felt by such Americans has been captured by the propagandistic America First/MAGA movement. In turn, most of this anger has been successfully misdirected at the rule of law, the Democrats and Biden.

This same anger was also captured by the genuine ways in which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) did so in the Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020. Unlike Trump and his cronies, Sanders was not gaslighting his constituents to win them over.

If “Middle Class Joe” can successfully recapture this anger like Bernie did, then the anger can be redirected back at Trump and GOP, where it justifiably and overwhelmingly belongs.

‘Make ends meet’

Most people in our body politic — Republicans and Democrats — understand that neither our political or economic systems are as healthy or as fair as they could be. At the same time, most Americans of both parties do not understand why these unhealthy and unfair realities still persist in the richest country with the strongest economy and the lowest inflation worldwide.

Similarly, because average Americans are better off today than they were four years ago according to the available measurements, many voters do not appreciate that millions of Americans are still suffering.

For example, millions of people — from families, to the elderly to single men and women experiencing homelessness — are struggling to “make ends meet.” And they are being stymied, paradoxically, by the relatively higher wages in more than a generation coupled with the higher costs of student debt, childcare, rent, mortgages, food and so on. Higher costs of entertainment, leisure activities and even going out for dinner factor in, too.

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On the one hand, Biden and the Democrats need to confront these realities. They need to explain what they have been doing to improve these social conditions such as canceling student debt. They must also explain what they’ll continue to do to improve these social conditions should Biden be re-elected, like establishing universal childcare for all families.

On the other hand, the Democrats need to emphasize what the Republicans have never done and will continue not to do to address these social conditions. In fact, it is Republicans’ lack of policies and resistance to improve these social issues in the past, present and foreseeable future that will continue to exacerbate them.

As political scientist Damon Linker wrote in an April 8, 2024, opinion piece for The New York Times, “Biden needs to meet the people where they are.” Because if America is not exactly broken as Linker claims, or is only half broken as I argue, there are still plenty of legal reforms that need to be realized across the political economy of the United States.

Hence, Biden — the idealist, the institutionalist, and middle of the road centrist — should continue to celebrate our vibrant economy as well as those bipartisan accomplishments during the first two years of his administration.

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That includes the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law in November 2021 that has already funneled billions of dollars into blue and red states alike. And the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law in August 2022, the most comprehensive climate legislation in U.S. history.

It must also include repeated mention of the bipartisan foreign aid bill passed by the House for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan over the weekend.

At the same time, Biden should also be underscoring all the negativity, chaos and counterproductive activities of the do-nothing and obstructionist Republican majority since they recaptured control of the House back in January 2023.

For example, Republicans have not passed any legislation whatsoever to run on, as Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) put it. Moreover, as obstructionists, House Republicans even tanked the toughest bipartisan bill in decades on “border security” introduced by the Senate earlier this year — for no other reason than Trump wanted it unaddressed so that he could have one issue of substance to talk about.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are forming yet another circular firing squad in what could lead to their third House speaker in seven months if the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) get their way.

Highlight Trump's idea void

To re-accentuate: Whether we are talking about lowering the costs of education, childcare, and medicine; protecting the rights of ordinary workers, consumers, or women’s reproduction; or expanding the basic necessities of health care and social security for all, Biden should be stressing what he has been doing. And what he intends to do when re-elected by focusing attention on a concrete Democratic platform with a reform agenda to address the broken parts of our political and economic systems.

The Biden campaign should further emphasize how neither Trump nor the GOP have ever had any ideas whatsoever, let alone an affirmative platform — recall that the Republican National Convention of 2020 had no new party platform at all — to address even one of these anti-establishment populist grievances. Besides deregulation of all things and tax breaks for corporations and the richest Americans, they have no other agenda other than feebly trying to cut medicare and social security for all.

With or without Trump, Republicans do have Project 2025. This not-very-covert authoritarian agenda to control the government Trump-style recommends repealing both the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

And should the insurrectionist-in-chief, who is facing 88 felony counts across four criminal cases, be elected to POTUS for a second time, both the agendas of the far right and the Supreme Court majority of gutting the Constitution of many of its checks and balances will continue as they have been doing officially since at least 2010.

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In sum, with a soon-to-be-criminally-convicted Trump back at the helm in the White House, corruption and lawlessness will run rampant. With a strongman presidency, the nation will become a legal oligarchy creating a nearly bullet-proof immunity for the morbidly rich, fuller personhood for corporations and less-than-equal rights for individuals.

Post-Trump, but not post Trumpism, there are several efforts that are already underway with the goal of countering the anti-democratic and rule of law authoritarianism. If incorporated as a whole, then they would transform our democratic political system from a “tyranny of a minority” to a “tyranny of a majority.”

This is the only way to overcome the duopoly of political power in the United States that is at the root or heart of what currently ails and threatens American democracy.

Institutionally, and in no particular order, these aspirational reformist changes include:

  1. Doing away with the undemocratic Electoral College, political gerrymandering and all forms of bicameral filibusters.
  2. Overturning Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, privately financed elections, Supreme Court decisions that facilitate political and economic corruption, and those parts of our legal infrastructure that are increasingly enabling, for example, regressive taxation, the lack of universal health care and the inadequate ecological protocols, debt relief, and international humanitarian engagement.
  3. Expanding the number of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the eight U.S. territories.
  4. Employing the same types of dynamic practices of change, revision and innovation characteristic of the 50 state constitutions as a means of reforming our U.S. Constitution which comparatively has been largely static, if not stagnant, and which has not been meaningfully amended for more than one-half of a century.
  5. Establishing a multi-party and proportionately representative democracy to replace our antiquated two-party or bipartisan representative democracy.

A tyranny of the majority — or direct rule by the people, which has nothing to do with mob rule or rule by the masses — in conjunction with the other constitutional and legislative reforms would expand the democratic representation of the people at the federal level not unlike at the state level. Where, for example, people have direct rather than indirect representative power by way of referendums and initiatives.

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To not institutionalize these political and economic changes, or to remain a tyranny of a minority as we have been for the last 250 years, will only perpetuate the dysfunctionality and extreme partisanship that has become synonymous with American democracy and its body politic.

If not countered or checked, our tyranny of a minority will also allow for future wannabe authoritarian presidents to pursue any of their uninhibited dreams of an illiberal democracy, at best, or a fascist regime, at worst.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

A criminologist explains why Trump’s Manhattan trial is the biggest threat to his freedom

Donald Trump has always been terrified by the thought of going to prison. At the same time, his fear of imprisonment has always been mitigated by his Houdini-like ability to evade the administration of criminal justice.

Ergo, Trump’s myriad repeated motions — legitimate and illegitimate — to delay or dismiss his four criminal trials from ever coming to fruition.

Most notable is whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution on charges of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Although the oral arguments before the Supreme Court are to be heard on April 25, we probably will not have the answer until the end of the current session in late June or early July.

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These tactics have always been motivated by Trump’s shamelessness and dogged determination to keep his never-ending lawlessness and scamming alive. In order to do so, he must keep his derriere unincarcerated and/or return to the White House as the 47th president of the United States.

Trump has also been more afraid of the Manhattan criminal case than the other criminal cases slated for courtrooms in Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

This is because Trump has correctly or incorrectly believed that, in those cases, there would likely be one juror or more out of 12 that would emerge to prevent guilty verdicts — remember: they must be unanimous — from materializing.

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Up until now and before the selection of the criminal jury begins on Monday in The People of the State of New York vs. the former POTUS, did Trump ever have to seriously confront the reality of criminal imprisonment for one day, let alone, for the rest of his life.

According to New York law, if convicted of the 34 criminal counts each subject to as many as four years of imprisonment to be served consecutively, Trump could be looking at as many as 136 years of captivity.

Realistically, that would never happen to Trump — or anyone else for this type of election interference, campaign corruption and financial criminality. For any other average person convicted on all of the counts, the sentence would probably be from two to four years, served concurrently.

But I suspect that Judge Juan Merchan, who was recently sued by Trump over his handling of the case, will at maximum impose a sentence of home confinement rather than any formal type of criminal incarceration.

This penal leniency in sentencing will come from a judge who has endured months of Boss Trump railing against him and repeatedly attacking his daughter. This unseemly behavior finally resulted in a “gag order” from the judge to protect his offspring. It also resulted in another frivolous denied motion to an appellate court by one very desperate Trump hoping for a stay or looking for any kind of delay.

Juan Merchan Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan in 2011. Marc A. Hermann/New York Daily News/TNS

My reasoning about Merchan’s leniency is twofold:

First, Merchan — like Judge Scott McAfee in the Fulton County, Ga., case against Trump and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan overseeing the Jan. 6 case in D.C. — have all been adjudicating fairly. They have also been bending over backwards on behalf of Trump for a variety of reasons.

(This is in stark contrast to Judge Aileen Cannon overseeing the Florida stolen classified documents case who has been acting unfairly on behalf of Trump and with malice against the prosecution.)

Second, unlike Trump’s three other criminal cases I cannot imagine any judge sentencing a former president to prison for the Manhattan crimes.

But home confinement — however luxurious — would nevertheless mean Trump loses his freedom.

Up to now most thinking people have supposed that the Manhattan trial would be the least significant of the four criminal trials Trump is facing as he runs for president here in 2024.

ALSO READ: Revealed: What government officials privately shared about Trump not disclosing finances

Compared to the three other trials – two about Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and one for allegedly stealing classified documents and obstructing justice – the charges, on balance, don’t seem as legally or politically fraught.

However, the significance of the Manhattan criminal trial both legally and politically is about to make history.

There are several reasons for this.

For openers: time.

The misleading “hush money”-labeled criminal case has become not only the first but possibly the only criminal trial of Trump to be resolved before people start voting, which in some parts of the country will be in September.

Unlike the other three criminal matters that occurred during or after his presidency, the issues at play in the Manhattan trial occurred in 2016. They took place just weeks before the 2016 election and immediately after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, which revealed Trump making lewd and obscene comments about women.

Although the former president’s falsification of business documents and his fraudulent payments for services rendered continued like monthly clockwork during the first year of the Trump administration.

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Importantly, unlike the three other criminal indictments that were “speaking indictments,” or went beyond the elements of the charges, the Manhattan indictment following New York law did not. It only provided the minimal identification or listing of the 34 counts against Trump.

For example, without the lengthy and detailed indictments laying out the evidence in greater detail, most Americans do not understand why the misdemeanor crimes of paying off one porn star and one playboy bunny to keep them silent about their sexual liaisons with Trump became felony crimes.

Similarly, this case also involves election interference and campaign fraud – the kind that may have helped Trump get elected president in the first place, in 2016. In other words, this case is not merely about falsifying business documents and tax records.

Trump’s interference in the 2016 presidential election was not limited to the burying of negative information that at the time would have been detrimental to his campaign victory, but it also includes evidence of Trump paying his then-”fixer” Michael Cohen to hire an IT firm to rig early CNBC and Drudge polls to favor Trump in 2015 — and then stiffing RedFinch Solutions $50,000 for its services rendered.

Not unlike the House Select Committee’s public hearings on January 6, where all the witnesses who testified against Trump were from the former president’s inner circles, the same will essentially be the case in the Manhattan trial. At this trial, we can expect several of the witnesses testifying against Trump to be part of the conspiracy to cover up his sexual affairs from wife Melania as well as the general public — a general public that may have voted differently had they known Trump was cheating on the future first lady with an adult film actress.

Unlike the House Select Committee hearings, which were televised but paid attention to by about 23 percent of the electorate and changed few opinions about Trump’s culpability, the untelevised criminal trial in Manhattan will be followed much more closely by most Americans.. And whether convicted by a jury of his peers or set free by a hung jury, Trump stands to suffer significantly from some six weeks of gavel-to-gavel news coverage of his criminal behavior.

As the Manhattan trial is about to get underway, there does seem to be some poetic justice at play. Just as District Attorney Alvin Bragg was the first to bring a criminal indictment against a former president of the United States he has also become the first law enforcement official to criminally prosecute the 45th president of the Untied States.

It is also worth noting that Bragg had no problem with any of the other criminal cases going ahead of his trial as he has always regarded the 34 felony criminal counts in the Manhattan case as ordinary or garden variety white-collar crimes. Rather than the more serious crimes involved in Trump’s three other criminal prosecutions.

On the one hand, I am feeling good that people will finally learn all about election interference and the “catch and kill” scheme that is at the heart of the Manhattan trial. Not to mention the collaboration between Trump and the National Enquirer news organization.

On the other hand, I am disappointed that Bragg’s team of prosecutors had not investigated deeper, or if they had done so, that they had decided not to bring additional counts against Trump involving another type of election interference.

Specifically, I am referring to candidate Trump’s collaboration with the National Enquirer to manufacture scathing front-page stories about two of Trump’s most competitive opponents in the 2016 presidential race. Namely, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

To recap where we are with respect to legal accountability and the administration of criminal justice for the 2024 presumptive nomination for president:

  • In the short term, as the Manhattan trial finally begins, the Liar-in-Chief and his lawyers' efforts to delay, disrupt, and discredit one of the four criminal cases against Trump have at long last been exhausted.
  • In the longer term, at least for now, Trump and the GOP’s repetitive attacks to delegitimize the justice system and rule of law as a whole, as well as their efforts to spread fear throughout those institutions tasked with holding Trump accountable for his anti-democratic behavior, are still alive and unwell.

Hopefully, the Manhattan trial will begin to turn the tide against Republican lawlessness, corruption and authoritarianism.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

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