“No one is above the law.” For the first time in America’s history, former president Donald Trump is putting those words to the test.
Last month, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said it, but he may have to prove it. No longer an assumption, an understanding that goes without saying, or “a gentleman’s agreement,” it will need to be spelled out explicitly.
The case is Donald Trump vs. The United States of America, and it is named rightly. Not Democrats versus Republicans or conservatives versus liberals, Trump is under investigation for alleged violations of the Espionage Act.
Lead by example, from the top down, or lose any chance of holding other Americans to account for their actions. Even a former president who previously held the highest office in the land is not above the law – or is he?
Some are arguing that Trump should not be prosecuted. “Yes, we need to protect our democracy but also the reputation of the office of presidency. It would not be a good look for the leader of our nation to go to jail,” the argument goes.
But, what’s good for America’s citizens is good for America’s president, yes? If you break the law, then you should be punished, right?
If not, then it will be an undeniable admission of privilege. Executive privilege, white privilege, an abuse of privilege, call it what you will but then call off any search for adoring fans of a democracy that cared more about the appearance of justice than is application.
The twice-impeached former president said in 2016, “I could … shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” But, his statement is not just about how highly he thinks of himself. It is revealing of how low some Americans are willing to go to maintain power and control.
Trump, considered “a law unto himself,” ironically ran as the “law and order” candidate. “We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country, 100%,” he said during a speech in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In this same speech, he praised law enforcement officers.
Fast forward a few years, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, often referred to as his “winter White House,” was raided by the FBI during a search for classified materials. Some Republican lawmakers called for the FBI’s defunding as a result, which sends a mixed message.
Because when social activists and community organizers were protesting in the summer of 2020, calling for the defunding of the police, The Guardian reported, “The president and his allies are trying to turn national debate over racism and policing against the [Democratic] party and its 2020 nominee.”
It looks like it depends on who is on the receiving end of the law when we call for order. There is no “both sides” argument to be had here.
Without actual checks and balances as promised by the three branches of American government, American democracy is left out on a limb. Either they are three separate but co-equal branches of the government as established by the U.S. Constitution or all that America claims to be is up in the air because those three branches are now shaky.
This is not about your political persuasion or mine. Frankly, as a registered Independent, I don’t have a donkey or an elephant in the fight. It’s an issue of morality for me. Are we going to allow some people to do wrong or are we going to do right by everyone?
“Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose, they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said.
If the law is not going to be followed, then there can be no justice and thereby, no justice system.
Or, as American scholar of cognitive science Douglas R. Hofstadter suggests in his book Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order – and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
Maybe Trump’s behavior is in response to the laws that America was founded on, laws that protected socially colored white landowning men.
Because there are some things we cannot simply amend. No, we will have to look at the social order established by our laws. If not, there is at least one person who might be able to rise above them.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
