Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Over the weekend, Donald Trump began branding Vice-President Kamala Harris a criminal. “She should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions,” he claimed at one point. At another, he ostentatiously paused his speech while the crowd chanted, “Lock her up!”
It is obviously unsurprising that Trump would conjure up imaginary crimes by his political opponent. In 2016, he made “Lock her up!” a signature campaign chant. In 2020, he branded Joe Biden a criminal. The pretext for Harris’s prosecution is that, as vice-president, she presided over border-enforcement policies that Trump opposes. In 2016, the pretext was Clinton’s violation of State Department email protocol. In 2020, it was disproven charges that Biden profited from his son’s business activity in Ukraine.
Obviously, none of the particulars of these allegations — in Harris’s case, Trump hasn’t even managed to manufacture a pretextual criminal allegation — matter to Trump in the slightest. His view of the law is fully relativist. Actions taken on Trump’s behalf are by inherently legal, and actions taken against him are inherently illegal.
That is why Trump continuously brands his political opponents as criminals. In addition to all three of his Democratic campaign opponents, Trump has called for criminal charges to be brought against a long list of targets, including (but not limited to) Barack Obama, John Kerry, Liz Cheney, anybody who criticizes pro-Trump judges, “lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and corrupt election officials” involved in the 2024 election, among many others.
Just this weekend, he called for charges against Google (for allegedly showing too many negative stories about him in searches) and Nancy Pelosi (for the second time; four years ago, he called for her to be charged for tearing a copy of his speech, and this weekend, he said she should be investigated because her husband sold shares of Visa stock prior to an anti-trust investigation against the company).
It is also why Trump continuously encourages criminal behavior by his allies and defends it as lawful. Paul Manafort did “nothing” and was the victim of a “hoax.” The violent coup attempt by Trump allies on January 6, 2021, was actually a riot by overzealous police officers, and the criminals who carried it out were “hostages.” Trump frequently promises to pardon the J6 criminals, in keeping with his first-term policy of granting mass amnesty to political allies who committed crimes.
Trump’s view of crime, as an activity that definitionally encompasses all political or media activity disadvantageous to him and excluding all activity by him or his allies, is so extreme that few of his allies will defend it on its own terms. Sometimes they insist his personalistic view of the justice system is not a reason to exclude him from office, since his efforts to implement failed more than they succeeded in the first term.
More frequently, they deflect the issue by ignoring Trump’s overt authoritarianism and focusing instead on trumped-up threats of authoritarianism by the Democrats. If you cruise over to the conservative (but still traditional Republican) Washington Examiner opinion page, you will see nothing about Trump’s expanding list of political enemies to be jailed. What you will see is editorials with headlines like “The ways the left is assaulting the Constitution” or “Biden’s selective prosecution of Democrats” (alleging without evidence that New York mayor Eric Adams is facing criminal charges because he questioned Biden’s immigration policy) or “Kamala Harris at war with the Constitution” or “Harris is still an authoritarian gun grabber” or “Harris’s promise to shred our democratic norms should worry you.”
The purpose of these frantic charges is not so much to persuade traditional Republicans that Harris is more authoritarian than Trump as to kick up enough dust to let them call the matter a tie. Trump may be slightly over the top, but Harris is no better, so conservatives can go ahead and vote for the candidate with policies they prefer.
But anybody paying even cursory attention can grasp that, contrary to the warnings of Republicans, the Biden Justice Department has revived the traditional separation of charging decisions from the president, which is why numerous Democrats including the president’s son are facing federal charges. It is impossible to predict how successful Trump would be at turning the Justice Department into an unprincipled weapon of vengeance against his rivals and protection for his allies, but that is undeniably his intent.
