Betting on the American courts to rein Trump in will be a disaster, and the real ugly fight is on the horizon
Trump doesn’t care what the courts decide. And he’s counting on the naïve and the foolish to bet their hopes on the “last guardrail of democracy.”
Way back when Law & Order was still a great show before it jumped the shark and became frustratingly mediocre, the pit bull prosecutor hero Jack McCoy argued in front of an appeals court, “Man has only those rights he can defend.” (For those obsessive over details, it’s in the climactic scene of episode 24 of Season 10 titled “Vaya Con Dios.”)
It’s a great line, indeed a profound line, and it’s both ironic that the episode has to do with chasing a foreign dictator for murder (because surely an American president can’t be a dictator) and sad that this line doesn’t come from an Enlightenment philosopher or an historian. But if television is what it takes to get through to folks—because so many don’t read today—so be it.
Gawd knows, mainstream media has missed the point.
In the space of a handful of days, they have predictably, disappointingly written up stories on how Trump and his wind-up soldier brigade of fascists are dealing with the courts. CNN, the unfailingly dim problem child of American journalism, “there have been subtle signs that the [Supreme Court] justices, in private, have been wringing their hands.” It then wasted more paragraphs recounting how last year the court made Trump a virtual king with presidential immunity and recounted cases that ruled against him… as if they really mattered.
Forbes went one better and headlined , “Court Rules Against Trump’s Appeal On Birthright Citizenship: Here’s Where Trump And Musk Are Winning—And Losing—In Court.”
As if it mattered.
While The Atlantic noted it “isn’t a crazy fear” that Trump might ignore the courts, to its credit, NBC News published on its website that documented how the administration has been stonewalling, sidestepping, and using the tedious wait times before decisions on appeals to get its way.
Two weeks ago, the CBC’s correspondent in Washington Alexander Panetta about America’s “breakdown of constitutional democracy.” He pointed out how Trump has already had independent watchdogs and a crucial inspector-general fired.
But even as Panetta mentioned Musk’s idea of impeaching judges, he still ducked the point.
Because as Law & Order once warned us, “Man has only those rights he can defend.”
The closest Panetta came to the crucial issue is to ask a law professor in the States if US marshals would side with Trump over a court order, and his chosen talking head replied with evasive, downright irresponsible silliness. “I don’t think we’re anywhere near that.”
But of course, Americans are. And so is the rest of the world, held hostage yet again by American stupidity in embracing a despot. You have thousands thrown out of work illegally, thousands more being hunted down like criminals over their immigration status, and a bloated, failed real estate mogul in the White House threatening Panama and my homeland, Canada, with invasion. Now is definitely the time to talk about if law enforcement officers will do their jobs.
A little diagram with Panetta’s article is meant to help us all understand “How U.S. democratic institutions keep each other in check”—and it still gets things wrong because it forgets to mention that Congress can overturn a presidential veto. But more importantly, none of these discussions seem to bring up that crucial issue of enforcement.
Back in Richard Nixon’s second term—and trust me, I remember this vividly—there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that after his threatened impeachment would come a trial, and after a trial that was sure to find him guilty, he’d find himself in a cell. It was only thanks to his idiot successor Gerald Ford granting him a pardon that he was saved from the disgraceful status of “inmate.”
But as everyone is now aware and no recap is needed, the basic necessary respect and belief in the impartiality of institutions has been eroded. Trump’s whole “I’m being persecuted” narrative, the sales of his mugshot T-shirts, his pardon of January 6 insurrection thugs—they’ve all been interpreted again and again as playing to his base. But there was another painfully obvious purpose to these actions… to invalidate the institution of the American justice system, paving the way to dismantle it.
So, it’s beyond infuriating to watch the news media—along with its usual caravan of soundbite suppliers—do a vigil on the courts. And then to repeat twaddle that “we’re not there yet” in terms of using police officers to carry out partisan political commands.
Trump doesn’t care what the courts decide. And he’s counting on the naïve and the foolish to bet their hopes on this supposed “.”
It’s going to be a disaster, and he and his gang, from smug Elon to skin-crawling sycophant Stephen Miller, know this.
And this is where I have to bring up the Third Reich, but don’t worry, I’m not going to make one of those now exhausting comparisons between Trump’s Nazis and the original Nazis. I have something better, honest. While everyone was scrambling to create Internet memes comparing the Reichstag Fire with the 2021 attack on the Capitol, few bothered to read up on the efforts at resistance.
Surprise. Germans bet on their courts. And lost big. It’s worth quoting Peter Hoffmann’s History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, which understandably is enjoying renewed popularity.
“People naively hoped that the government could be held in check by parliamentary methods and by the checks and balances enshrined in the constitution…For the Social Democrats in particular, adherence to legality had become an idée fixe.”
“‘Legal resistance’ about which many cudgeled their brains, was an illusion,” wrote Hoffmann, who argued that “legal methods and procedures could achieve nothing against the ostensible legality of a dictatorship which was in fact violating both the constitution and the law.”
As much as folks like to bring up the Reichstag Fire, they also miss the whole point here, too. What few know or remember was that the Nazis put on a show trial, only they hadn’t filled the courts yet with loyal and cowardly dupes. Though it made headlines around the world, the incredible story of the trial has been mostly forgotten, and yet most of the defendants were actually acquitted, including future Bulgarian prime minister Georgi Dimitrov.
The Nazis ignored the court decision and tried to hold on to the prisoners anyway.
It was only thanks to pressure from Stalin and the Soviet Union that the Bulgarian prisoners were allowed to leave Germany on a plane, while an unlucky German Communist was stuck in a cell despite his acquittal, and a half-blind Dutch idiot named Marinus van der Lubbe, the perfect fall guy, was found guilty and beheaded.
The incompetence of the early Nazi regime delivered Hitler a humiliating reversal. And right now, the Trump administration’s parade of fools who think they can run a government like a corporation have made it a laughingstock. But we all know it’s still dangerous.
And that is because his real power has always come from those who simply don’t care about courts, about laws or even about basic human decency. It is “democracy” interpreted as mob rule, and what makes a mob happier than victims on which to inflict cruelty?
In late January, the Oklahoma State Board of Education before they could enter classrooms. It didn’t seem to matter to the board that the US Supreme Court already decided in 1982 that states can’t deny children a public education because of their immigration status. The mob has invented a new rule, a fig leaf that hardly disguises its real intention.
If the courts can’t and won’t help, this means that people will have to start getting serious about an effective resistance, not just in America but around the world. Because an inarticulate dictator with a ludicrous orange “tan” and bad hair doesn’t want to respect international law any more than he wants to respect the laws at home.
But again, it’ll mean those who are supposedly our “best minds” in media will have to do some harder thinking. Journalists noted with justified alarm that Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos are now all on board with Trump’s regime, yet few critics—and more importantly, public resisters—are delving into what this means for the struggle ahead, which is going to be ugly.
Because Musk has Twitter/X, and in spite of Bluesky’s progress, it’s still no threat to Musk’s bully pulpit. I can attest myself to the fact that the shadow-banning many of us experienced on Twitter before Musk came along (which got absolutely no proper coverage from the leftwing media) still continues. Others have noticed how the global platforms of these Tech Bros .
And it’s absurd to the point of tragic that while news outlets jumped on , no one is ringing the alarm bells that this guy is the de facto Tsar of access to pretty much all the books on Earth. If he decides he doesn’t like you, Amazon can kick you out. Sure, you can perhaps sell your books on Barnes & Noble or Indigo. You can sell your books on a street corner—good luck with that.
How long before “inconvenient” criticisms of Trump in book form, or Elon or anyone else in their good graces, mean a lifetime banishment for the authors?
If we are going to survive and defeat the new order, we’re going to need to get creative and invent some new methods for the resistance and new institutions to believe in, not simply put our faith anymore in those institutions stolen from us and corrupted.