In his remarks at his Bedminster, New Jersey, residence on Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump insisted that “we’ve gotta get tough” in response to the federal indictment against him and the other potential criminal charges waiting in the wings. “Now that the seal is broken — the seal is broken by what they’ve done; they should never have done this,” he said. “This was an unwritten rule — unless it’s really bad.”
Trump promised that if he is elected president again, he will appoint a “real” special prosecutor to go after President Joe Biden, his family “and all others involved in the destruction of our elections, our borders and our country itself.”
This is absolutely wild on several levels. First, think about how broad that statement was. This was Trump promising to appoint a special prosecutor to target literally anyone who disagrees with him or could be seen as a political rival. That includes people who disagreed with him about whether the 2020 election was stolen, people who stand opposed to his inhumane immigration policy and anyone who in wanting to move America forward is seen as a threat to the people who form Trump’s base.
Justice is not what Donald Trump makes it to be, no matter how much he has attempted to manifest that into reality.
More immediately, by invoking the idea that a seal has been “broken” with his prosecution, Trump is attempting to erase the fact that one of his 2016 campaign’s unofficial slogans was “Lock Her Up.” He has been calling for the arrest and prosecution of his political enemies for years, and there were numerous attempts while he was in office to push his attorneys general to go after the Bidens and the Clintons. It is only because of the professionalism of the people at the Justice Department — a trait that he says does not exist because he is the one now being prosecuted — that none of those calls have been heeded. Even then, multiple investigations were, in fact, opened into the Clinton Foundation, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents.
Justice is not what Donald Trump makes it to be, no matter how much he has attempted to manifest that into reality. In Tuesday night’s speech, he has once again shown that he is more than willing to unleash the full force of the government on the people who disagree with him. As so often is the case with him, he justifies this authoritarian streak through projection, telling his supporters that this is the way of the world and that rather than that his thirst for vengeance is the outlier, he is only responding to the attacks against him.
If a seal has actually been broken with the first criminal indictments against a former president, it is only because he himself loosened it. It is because of his own actions that he is the one facing conviction while his rivals are not. Conversely, it is because of his own onslaught of animus against his enemies that his audience is primed to believe that he is the real victim here.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.