Two news stories last week confirmed that Trump’s appeal for legal dispensation is not merely another narcissistic flight of fancy. His special pleading no longer even qualifies as idiosyncratic. Immunity from public censure, including the strictures of the law itself, is an operational goal of the anti-democratic movement that Trump leads. Its functional creed is it’s not a crime if MAGA does it.
Thus a famously partisan Supreme Court justice rationalizes his household flying an upside-down distress flag in the aftermath of the violent Jan. 6 assault on the nation’s constitutional integrity, in seeming solidarity with insurrectionists (and with the spouse of another Supreme Court justice, who vigorously cheered the insurrection).
In Texas last week, Governor Greg Abbott extended the parameters of MAGA’s impunity from assault to murder. Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry, a White man who in 2020 drove his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in Austin and gunned down one who approached his car. Both men were legally armed. Thanks to laws backed by Abbott and his GOP allies, virtually anyone, including Perry, who fantasized in writing about murdering protesters, could legally carry in Texas. No witness claimed that the victim, Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old former U.S. Air Force mechanic, had brandished his semi-automatic rifle; it had been pointed at the ground. So, Perry had no legal justification for shooting Foster, and after a public trial, a jury of his peers convicted him of murder.
Perry’s writings revealed him to be a racist who compared BLM protesters to “monkeys.” BLM, of course, is a bogeyman of MAGA, which seeks to bolster traditional racial hierarchy, opposes efforts to mitigate racial discrimination, and portrays White Christians as an oppressed class in a society in which power pools disproportionately among White Christians.
Before he left office in 2021, Trump pardoned an array of criminals, including Paul Manafort, the “grave counterintelligence threat” mired in corruption and Russian intrigue whom Trump had placed atop his 2016 campaign. Manafort refused to cooperate with prosecutors, and Trump rewarded him, as he did MAGA cronies Steve Bannon and Roger Stone.
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Article URL : https://www.centralmaine.com/2024/05/24/opinion-it-isnt-a-crime-if-maga-does-it-2/