This blog post started out as a video. You can see it here.
Have you noticed that Republicans don’t mind if their leaders break laws? In fact, conviction can be a badge of honor in the fight against “liberal corruption.”
Here I explain why.
This is a big topic, so I’ll break it into parts.
When I talk about the Republican Party, I don’t mean the party of Theodore Roosevelt, or even Reagan. I mean the party of these folks:
PART I: Laws Republicans Don’t Like
This will build on my blog post from last week, so if you missed it, you might want to read that one first, but if you don’t, no worries. There will not be a test!
First, some history for perspective. Stick with me. I promise this is important.
Nineteenth-century American society was a patriarchy: a social hierarchy with White men at the top and Black women at the bottom. Laws reflect cultural values. As the culture changes, laws change. Laws in the 19th century reinforced the patriarchy.
I’ll just give a few examples. A court in North Carolina in 1868 refused to convict a man for beating his wife because the wounds he inflicted were not serious. (61 N.C. 453.) The court said that unless severe injury resulted, it wasn’t the business of courts or government to interfere in family life. The idea was that a man was entitled to rule his family as he saw fit.
Of course, laws allowed for racial segregation. Segregation was abolished by the Supreme Court in 1954, but it wasn’t until the 1968 Fair Housing Act that it was illegal to discriminate against Blacks who wanted to rent, or purchase property, or get financing to buy a house.
I could talk about how outlawing abortion or making obtaining birth control difficult also reinforces the patriarchy, but instead I’ll give the example of rape laws.
For much of world history, rape was a property crime. An unmarried girl was her father’s property. A married woman was her husband’s property. If a virgin was raped, the property damage was to her father. If she was married, the damage was to her husband.
If she wasn’t a virgin and wasn’t married, there was no crime (because the property was already damaged). A man couldn’t rape his wife (his own property) and rape of enslaved women wasn’t a crime.
Sexual assault (meaning the act wasn’t completed) wasn’t a crime because there was no actual property damage.
Rape was seen as natural result of “human nature.” Men were “natural” aggressors, so a woman was responsible for guarding her chastity.
Rapes were evaluated within the context of the hierarchy. A powerful White man accused of rape was of course treated differently from a Black man. It also mattered who was raped. The laws were designed to protect [White] men from false accusation. They weren’t designed to protect women from attack. It was up to the woman to protect the property.
In 1975, scholar Susan Brownmiller argued that rape was not a natural result of human nature. It was a means of asserting patriarchal power.
The way we’ve been getting out of the patriarchy is by changing the laws governing things like racial discrimination and the legal status of women.
Last week I talked about what Heather Cox Richardson calls our second oligarchy: the age of robber barons and business tycoons. We got out of that oligarchy through legislation: the New Deal and the Civil Rights legislation.
These are the laws Republicans don’t like. These are the laws they break.
The New Deal, among other things, made it harder for [White] men to get rich by cheating and taking advantage of people. The New Deal gave us worker protections, minimum wage, and a 40-hour work week. The New Deal also outlawed things like insider trading, manipulating markets, and fixing prices.
The Republicans have been trying for decades to roll back the New Deal.
The Republican Party was the party of law-and-order when law-and-order meant putting Black men in jail. But as soon as the laws started limiting the power of White men and empowering others, watch out. That’s when Republicans began tolerating lawbreaking.
I think it’s obvious at this point that the Republican Party is no longer “conservative.” It’s reactionary or regressive. Republicans want to go backwards to the patriarchy and the age of robber barons. To get there, they have to roll back a lot of laws.
In 2018, Trump said: “All our laws are so corrupt and stupid” What he meant, of course, was that he doesn’t like the laws that get in his way.
Another theory of Republican lawbreaking is that, back when the frontier was open, there was a place lawbreakers could go. People who didn’t like to live by society’s rules had an option. Now there is no more frontier, so such people are stuck with the rest of us.
PART II: Republicans Crimes
The place to start is with the Trump family.
Sources are these books, and this Just Security article:
Friedrich Trump (originally “Drumpf”), Donald Trump’s grandfather, left Germany in 1885. He came to the United States partly to avoid military service. He went West and figured out that “mining the miners” was more lucrative than mining for gold. He ran taverns and possibly also brothels.
After earning a small fortune, he got married, and settled in Queens, New York. He had a premonition that Queens, which was then rural and sparsely populated, would see a building boom, so he bought a few choice pieces of real estate. He died before he could build his real estate empire.
That was left to his son, Fred Trump, who turned a small fortune into a large one when he figured out how to cheat.
He became a builder, and partnered with some of New York’s most powerful crime families. Through his mob connections, he purchased building supplies at bargain prices. He was also able to pay laborers below minimum wage. Through his mob connections, he had access to the city bureaucrats and the most lucrative contracts.
Returning World War II soldiers were eligible for home loans under the new GI bill. This created a need for single family homes. Fred Trump took advantage of FHA loans, which allowed builders to recoup part of their expenses. Fred cheated. He set up shell equipment companies. He rented himself equipment at inflated prices and billed the government for tacked on expenses that he never incurred. When he submitted costs for reimbursement, he added a 5% architect’s fee, even though there was no architect.
He submitted falsely high estimates, did the work for millions less, and pocketed the difference.
When he was hauled before the Senate probe into public corruption, he escaped punishment because, at the time, there were no specific laws against what he did. Now there are. It was clear from Fred Trump’s testimony in front of the Senate that he thought himself clever for finding “loopholes.”
When Donald Trump’s taxes came under scrutiny, he made similar comments about how cleverly he found loopholes and ways to avoid paying taxes.
By the time Donald Trump took over the family business, Fred’s tactics had been mostly outlawed. Trump used them anyway— I suggest because he wasn’t capable of earning money any other way.
In the 1970s, the Justice Department sued Donald Trump, and his father, and Trump Management for racial discrimination. From the justifications they offered, they obviously thought discriminating against Blacks was perfectly cool.
In the 1980s, Donald Trump allowed anonymous buyers to purchase his luxury condos, and he didn’t ask any questions, so he became a magnet for dirty money. (Laundering money means putting money through a series of complicated transactions to hide the origins of the money. This is what crooks and bandits need to do to hide the origins of illegally obtained money.)
This is where Semion Mogilevich enters the picture. He was a Russian con artist who later ended up on the FBI’s ten most wanted list for scams he ran in the United States. In the 1980s he had millions in illegally obtained money that he needed to launder.
When an operative for Mogilevich offered to buy 5 condos from Donald Trump for 6 million in cash, it should have occurred to Trump that a man in the Soviet Union hadn’t come by $6 million in cash legally—but Trump asked no questions.
In the former Soviet Union, the government controlled all the nation’s industries and resources. After the Soviet Union dissolved, and before democracy could take hold, there was a mad scramble as crooks seized control of the nation’s wealth. These new oligarchs needed to launder the money they had essentially stolen from the Russian people. They flocked to purchase luxury apartments in Trump Tower. It was a match made in heaven. Those bandits had money to launder and Trump always needed more.
In 2002, after Trump went belly up in Atlantic City, he was again bailed out by Russians. No doubt, Trump thought he was clever. In 2008, Donald Trump, Jr., glibly said “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of our assets. . . We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
I am not going to offer a complete list of Trump’s crimes because who has that much time?
Given Trump’s history of shady business dealings and mob connections, it’s no surprise that so many members of Trump’s inner circle have been indicted or convicted or pleaded guilty. The list includes:
- Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager
- Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer
- Roger Stone
- George Papadoupolos
- Michael Flynn
- Rick Gates
- George Nader
- Thomas Barrack
- The Trump Organization
- Allen Weisselberg
And no doubt, more indictments are coming.
Also, Rudy Giuliani, another of Trump’s personal lawyers, recently had his license to practice law suspended.
What’s more interesting than a catalog of crimes and lawbreakers is the length to which the Republican Party goes to shield and downplay those crimes. No matter what comes about Trump, they defend him.
Think of how they defended him through both impeachments. A Pew Research poll from January 2020 found that two-thirds of Republicans said Trump definitely or probably did things that were illegal. Of those, 97% said that he should remain in office.
They know he commits crimes and they don’t care.
After the insurrection, Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia actually compared the mob’s breaching of the Capitol to a “normal tourist visit.”
When the right wing insists that the Black Lives Matters protests were as bad as (or worse) than the January 6th insurrection, it’s because to them, they are worse. Black Lives Matters is a direct threat to the kind of America they want, just as the Capitol insurrection was a direct threat to the kind of America progressives want.
Part III: Motives
Why Trump and his Republican pals commit crimes.
Motive #1: They have no other means for achieving wealth.
If they play by the rules, they’ll lose. They’ll be poor. They’ll have no power. The Trumps never added value. They took advantage of situations—and they did so boldly. If any of the Trumps tried to earn money by adding value, they wouldn’t be able to do it. I doubt any of them could hold real jobs. Try to imagine Ivanka living in a tract house somewhere clipping coupons because her job doesn’t cover the expenses of raising children. I believe, for Donald Trump that would be a fate worse than death. It would undermine everything he thinks he is.
Cheating and scamming people is hardwired into Trump. That’s what he does. His supporters are cool with it. They even admire him.
Motive #2: They don’t think the laws should be there.
The laws Trump and the Republicans break were designed to create a multi-racial diverse democracy in which all people have an equal voice.
Last week I talked about the two views of American history. According to the progressive view, the founders started out with a lot of good ideas, but they left out a lot of people. The progressive view is that, as we’ve added rules for fairness we’ve included more people, and as we’ve done that, we’ve moved closer to the founding ideals.
The reactionary or regresesive view is the opposite. According to this view, America started out wide open and free. There was almost no federal government, so [White] men could do as they pleased. The laws that we see as creating fairness, they see as hampering their liberty.
They want to return to the good old days.They want to return to the age of robber barons. They want to return to the patriarchy. Make America Great Again literally says: go backwards.
When leaders break laws, how the people feel about that depends on how they feel about the laws. We cheer Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a White man because the law she was breaking was standing in the way of America becoming the country we want to see.
Republicans are totally cool with Trump getting indicted for tax fraud because they don’t think rich people should pay taxes.
They are breaking the rules they think are destroying America.
This brings me to motive #3, which is related.
Motive #3: They want to destroy
Steve Bannon came right out and said he wants to destroy the “administrative state”—meaning, of course, the agencies and regulations that get in the way of [White men] consolidating power. Another word for these regulatory agencies is “deep state.”
Last week I said that Twitter is a rage-creating machine. This Tweet is a perfect example:
This tweet was in response to the news that the DOJ would not prosecute Wilbur Ross for committing perjury under oath. The tweet went viral.
Ironically. not long after this tweet went viral, the news report was corrected to say that the decision not to prosecute had been made under the Trump DOJ. Also, the very next day, Trump’s advisor and the chair of his presidential inaugural committee was indicted by the Garland DOJ for much more serious crimes.
But the tweet made this person so furious that she asked me to weigh in:
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Problem #1: This tweet quoted above holds Democrats equally responsible for Republican lawbreaking. I hope the error in that is self-evident.
Problem #2: It contains a lie. There are multiple investigations going on and we’ve already seen indictments even though the administration is only six months old.
Finally, and this is probably most important, it sets up a false premise: The idea is that Republicans break laws is because Democrats let them get away with it, so if Democrats put enough Republicans in jail, the lawbreaking will go away.
The Nazis and fascists in the 1930s were brutally punished. They were destroyed. But fascism never went away and now it has come rolling back.
When Manafort was convicted for financial crimes, did Trump say, “Oh no, I’d better clean up my act!” Of course not. None of them did. They fought harder.
Last week I said that there’s a constant push and pull—progressives push forward, reactionaries push back. The way they are pushing back right now is through lawbreaking.
This means we have both a law enforcement problem and a political problem. I hope these guys face criminal consequences, but my point is something else. My point is that criminal consequences will not solve our political problems.
Even if we achieve a fully functioning multi-racial democracy, right-wing radicals will try to undermine it. If that means breaking laws, they’ll do it.
I had an interesting discussion with a frustrated person on Twitter. She said:
Notice the conditional: If X doesn’t happen, the country will fall apart. And X = criminal consequences
I said this:
After some back and forth, someone else told me that the problem is that the punishments have not been harsh enough.
Punishments are set by a judge in accordance with guidelines. Besides they will spin any prosecutions as political– because to them, it is political.
More to the point, people seem to think there is a magic bullet — a punishment so harsh that the kind of lawbreaking we’re seeing will stop.
Believing there is a magic bullet means living in constant a state of anger and frustration—because there isn’t one.
The work of saving democracy is constant. There are no easy fixes.
It’s easy to fire off a Tweet that terrifies thousands of people. I suggest that keeping people riled and terrified is more likely to be harmful than helpful. That’s when fatigue and cynicism set in. When cynicism sets in and fatigue sets in, we can’t do the work we need to do.
Remember, a goal of Russian Active Measures was to get people to lose confidence in democratic processes, because when that happens people give up.
If people are riled up and angry because the magic bullet hasn’t arrived they’re more likely to burn out and give up in despair. If enough progressives give up in despair, the right wing will win.
That’s why an accurate assessment of our current situation is crucial.
