19. The Legal Fate of Donald Trump – and What Republicans Really Mean When They Say “Law and Order”

On Saturday, Donald Trump used his social media propaganda platform to urge his followers “TO TAKE OUR NATION BACK” – by which he really meant: Protect him from being arrested, which he announced was going to happen on Tuesday. We dive into the ex-president’s legal trouble (that’s a euphemism) and use it as a springboard for a discussion of some bigger-picture issues: What conservative reactions can tell us about Trump’s status in the Republican Party and on the Right more generally, and what role criminal prosecution can play in solving what is essentially a political problem. – We then tackle what might seem, on the surface, like a weird situation: The GOP has described itself for decades as the “party of law and order,” yet Republicans can’t bring themselves to break with someone who is easily among the most unlawful people to have ever risen to high office in U.S. history. What’s happening here is not that conservatives have all of a sudden turned on what they always pretended was one of their key principles. Rather, it’s a reminder of what “law and order” has always meant on the Right. We discuss the long history of “law and order” as an instrument to entrench and uphold traditional white male dominance against the “threat” of multiracial pluralism, tracing it back to the post-Civil War era. “Law and order” rhetoric has always been closely tied to white backlash politics, very much not a defense of the rule of law but actually opposed to the very principle of treating everyone the same, as equals, before the law. What we are seeing today from Trump and his Republican enablers is well in line with this tradition of “law and order”: A stark differentiation between those who are supposed to be bound by the rules (“Them”) and those who are not (“Us”) has always been very much at the heart of the conservative political project. Conservatives start from the premise that some groups are worthy of protection and deserve privilege - while others are dangerous and need to be kept in check. Once we acknowledge this as the highest principle, the Republican position is entirely consistent.

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This episode was produced by Connor Lynch