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No Donald Trump Is Above the Law

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Ted Rall

            In the United States, no man is above the law, not even the President—if his name is Donald J. Trump.

            A decade before 1884, when he was elected to his first term, Grover Cleveland fathered a child with Maria Halpin, a widow. Thing is, she testified under oath that Cleveland had raped her. Ambitious and wealthy, Cleveland did what any rich mean 19th century dude would do: he arranged to have the baby sent off to an orphanage and the mother committed to an insane asylum. (It didn’t take. They let her go.) For good measure, he had her smeared in the press as an alcoholic slut. As it happened, Halpin turned out to be an upstanding churchgoer with a good reputation.

            No charges were ever filed against Cleveland.

            Ronald Reagan’s best-known scandal was Iran-Contra, in which his Administration violated its own sanctions and sold weapons to Iran and broke federal law by spending the proceeds on right-wing death squads in Central America. He wasn’t new to this sort of thing.

            Worried that the American embassy personnel who were seized as hostages by Iran might get released before the 1980 election, thus allowing Jimmy Carter to win reelection, three top Reagan officials—campaign manager and future CIA director James Casey, former Texas governor John Connally and Connally’s protégé Ben Barnes—promised the Iranians to sell them arms in exchange for their promise not to release the hostages until after the election. True to their side of the deal, Iran sent them home a few hours after Reagan took the inaugural oath. Reagan reneged on the weapons.

            Reagan was never charged.

            The Gipper may have been inspired by the Chennault Affair, then-GOP candidate Richard Nixon’s scheme to undermine incumbent Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to achieve peace in Vietnam and thus deny the White House to Hubert Humphrey.

            Two weeks before the 1968 election, things were looking up for the Democrats. Worried about a Nixon victory because we was rabidly anti-communist, the USSR ordered North Vietnam, its client state, to agree to a peace deal. LBJ agreed to stop bombing the North. All that remained was getting South Vietnam—America’s client—on board.

            So Nixon used back channels (Mrs. Chennault) to ask South Vietnam’s president to boycott the peace talks, promising continued military and economic support after he won. The South Vietnamese leader scuttled the deal, Nixon won and the war ground on seven more years, killing hundreds of thousands more people. “This is treason,” LBJ said when FBI wiretaps revealed the plot.

            Nixon wasn’t charged.

            Executive Order 12333, signed by Reagan, states: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” It’s still the law of the land.

            Reagan didn’t follow his own rule. He ordered a hit on Lebanese cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in 1984; Fadlallah escaped unscathed but 80 innocent bystanders were killed. In 1986 he bombed Moammar Gaddafi’s home, killing the Libyan ruler’s infant daughter.

            No charges there.

            George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden murdered thousands of people in drone strikes—each and every one of them by definition a political assassination (a person killed “for what he represents politically”). Obama ordered the murder of Osama bin Laden and Trump murdered Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian general.

            No charges.

            Actress Heather Lind accused George H.W. Bush of groping her at a 2014 photo-op. Juanita Broaddrick says Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, when he was Arkansas attorney general. Tara Reade claims Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993.

            No charges have been filed in any of these cases.

            Richard Nixon received a presidential pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford, whom he had appointed. So he was immune from prosecution for Watergate.

            Bill Clinton paid $25,000 in order to avoid being prosecuted for perjury in the Paula Jones case.

            From Andrew Jackson, who killed a guy in a duel in 1806—dueling was already illegal at the time—to Bush, Obama and Trump, who all presided over Guantánamo torture camp—the U.S. is a signatory of the Convention Against Torture, which makes it a treaty obligation and thus carries the full weight of federal law—no president or former president has ever faced criminal charges.

            Until now.

            Merciful and easygoing by nature, the American people can easily turn a blind eye to a run-of-the-mill political assassination—or a thousand of them. Who of us can say we haven’t killed a man in a duel? Rape is unpleasant for the victim, but think how much worse it would be for the rapist if that rapist were a president or former president—better to move on.

            Conspiring with a foreign country to manipulate a presidential election strikes one as gauche, even tacky—especially when they mean extra-long wars or extra time spent for a hostage. But going after a president or former president over such things seems excessive. Best not to think about such matters, much less act upon them.

            Even in America, this most permissive of countries if you’re rich and white and powerful, there are limits. And that limit is: falsifying business records in order to violate federal campaign finance laws in the course of paying a former mistress to shut up. Donald J. Trump has crossed that hard line.

            And he must pay.

            If Trump, the worst president America has ever had and ever could have, and the worst person the human race has ever produced, doesn’t go to prison for the maximum five years over paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, it will send an awful message:

            Anything goes.

            Can’t have that!

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Corporate Crap That Doesn’t Kill Bernie Just Makes Him Stronger

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Ted Rall

Sanders supporters before a campaign event in Des Moines on Monday.

            On January 19th the New York Times oddly co-endorsed Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two days later, the key New Hampshire primary showed Warren down four points. Bernie Sanders’ surge continued. What happened?

            To the extent that they ever did, the editorial boards at corporate-owned media outlets no longer seem to be helping the candidates they support. But I think it goes further than that. In a Democratic Party increasingly dominated by insurgent progressives, authenticity (or the perception thereof) is a politician’s most valuable asset. The approval of “mainstream” establishment entities has become a curse. The imprimatur of an officialdom widely seen as hopelessly corrupt dilutes a candidate’s reputation for authenticity, independence and the voters’ belief that he or she will stand up for we the people over the powers that be.

            Much to the frustration of ruling elites, Bernie Sanders keeps gaining support despite repeated attempts to sandbag him. It began, of course, with a well-documented campaign by the Democratic National Committee to cheat Sanders out of a fair shot at the nomination in 2016. Though less brazen, the sympathies of the DNC, still dominated by Hillary Clinton allies, remain evident in the current cycle. As in 2016, Democratic-aligned media outlets rarely mention Sanders other than to frame him as an elderly fringe wacko. The “Bernie Blackout,” featuring graphics of TV polls where Sanders’ name had been excised, became so ridiculously obvious that it got its own Reddit.

            The last few weeks have been especially instructive. There was the infamous sandbagging of Bernie Sanders at the hands of a CNN moderator. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” became, seconds after Sanders issued a categorical denial, “why did you tell Elizabeth Warren that you did not believe that a woman could win the election?,” a statement that wouldn’t be sexist if he said it and that runs counter to everything he has said and done over the last 40 years.

            Next came the bizarre New York Times two-fer endorsement of Warren and Klobuchar, which included the demonstrably false claims that Bernie Sanders is hard to work with in the Senate and refuses to compromise. This was quickly followed by the news that Hillary Clinton, the nation’s least popular political figure, told a Hulu documentarian that “nobody likes” Sanders, the most popular, and that he’s a “career politician.” As opposed to herself and her husband?

            In the bubble-wrapped imaginations of ruling elites like Clinton and the editors of the New York Times, the hoi polloi care deeply about what they say and think. They think we take their lead.

            Reality is quite opposite.

            It’s not that we don’t listen. We do. We pay attention to what Those In Charge say and what they want us to do—so that we can do the exact opposite.

            Contempt for our “leaders” is one of the key reasons Donald Trump won the presidency. “To the extent that people are using Trump as a way of venting about their general unhappiness, trust is irrelevant,” Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina observed during the summer of 2016. “They’re just trying to send a message that they’re tired of being taken for granted and screwed by both sides.”

          People wanted to send another message, albeit a childish one, to the elites: we hate you. 14% of Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the news media. Congress’ approval rating is 27%. Last time Gallup bothered to check, Hillary was at 38%.

            Americans’ disdain for their masters was placed in sharp relief by polls that showed that many Trump voters would have voted for Bernie Sanders had he been the Democratic nominee and that one out of ten Bernie Sanders’ primary supporters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the general election. Trump and Sanders were the change candidates in a change year. And 2020 is even changier.

            We are witnessing political jiu-jitsu. The more viciously that neoliberals attack Bernie Sanders, the higher progressive estimations of Sanders’ authenticity rises.

            Many on the left, me included, have held doubts about Bernie Sanders. We worry that he isn’t far left enough, especially on foreign policy. After all, he’s OK with drone assassinations, was pretty much silent about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, praised the illegal assassination of Osama bin Laden that denied justice to 9/11 victims, and has not proposed specific numbers by which he would cut the Pentagon budget.

            Even on domestic issues, Sanders’ forte, he is weaker than we would like. The $15-an-hour minimum wage he is pushing for now would have been OK when he started working on it years ago, but due to inflation $20 or $25 an hour would make more sense now. By global standards, Sanders is no radical. He’s a garden-variety liberal—the Democratic Party under FDR.

            Fortunately for him, reactionary goons like the New York Times remind us that whatever his shortcomings Sanders is still the best game in this very right-wing town, the farthest left Democrat to have presented himself for our consideration in the last 40 years.

            If Hillary Clinton and CNN and MSNBC hate Bernie so much, maybe he’s all right.

            It is increasingly likely that Bernie Sanders will become the Democratic nominee and perhaps President of the United States. If and when that happens, when this “democratic socialist” takes the oath of office, he ought to give a shout-out to the clueless enemies who made his victory possible.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

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