As a private rule, I don’t normally write recaps or evaluations of TV information applications. There’s a whole machine for the 24/7 information machine to amplify itself and to which I don’t want or wish to contribute. However in that seemingly limitless firehose of reports content material the place one “disaster” flows into the cacophonous noise of the subsequent, is it any marvel that a big proportion of Individuals inform pollsters that they’re exhausted by politics and present occasions? There are vital moments which can be misplaced and that matter in ways in which even the hosts, producers and writers could not understand or perceive.
A current episode of MSNBC’s “The Final Phrase with Lawrence O’Donnell” was one such instance.
In an try and evade duty for his many crimes towards democracy and society, Donald Trump and his attorneys are claiming that he’s above the regulation. Per their arguments and fantasies, Trump can order his political opponents – and anybody else for that matter – murdered with out being held accountable below the regulation. Additionally they declare that Trump can promote pardons and have interaction in different corrupt acts with out concern for being arrested or held accountable by the regulation. Of their fascist and autocratic reasoning, one way or the other, to be held accountable below the regulation like another particular person in American society would make it not possible for a president (which means Donald Trump and his Republican fascist successors) to do their job.
O’Donnell’s public educating on his Tuesday present additionally signaled to what political scientists and different consultants know from public opinion information, focus teams, and different analysis concerning the values and beliefs which can be driving Trumpism.
These claims should not simply authorized maneuverings. Trump, as proven by his guarantees to be a dictator on “day one” of his presidency, channeling Hitlerian threats, claims that he’s chosen by god and Jesus Christ to be a kind of prophet of MAGA vengeance and restoration does imagine this stuff. Public opinion polls have constantly proven, together with a brand new one from the UMass Amherst, that a big majority of Republican and different Trump voters endorse Trump’s claims to dictator standing and need him to take such energy when/if he wins the 2024 election.
In his 8-minute-long monologue and act of public educating, Lawrence O’Donnell described the decision as a thundering endorsement of Choose Tanya Chutkan, who’s presiding over Trump’s trial in Washington DC for crimes associated to the Jan. 6 coup try and the bigger plot to finish democracy:
However the proof that Choose Chutkan bears no judicial prejudice towards Donald Trump by any means got here as we speak, within the type of a courtroom of appeals opinion in an order that affirmed each single phrase Choose Tanya Chutkan wrote in her 48-page opinion, in December [in response to] Donald trump’s declare of immunity for any crimes he dedicated whereas president. Choose Chutkan’s opinion mentioned that the presidency, quote, “doesn’t confer a lifelong get out of jail free move.” There have been many winners as we speak, when the courtroom of appeals opinion was issued. Particular prosecutor Jack Smith and his sensible authorized crew, the framers of the Structure with Alexander Hamilton being particularly quoted within the opinion supporting legal prosecutions. The American individuals who imagine within the rule of regulation had been very large winners as we speak, and the individuals who imagine in Donald Trump had been as soon as once more, like Donald Trump himself, large losers as we speak. However, the person largest winner of the day was choose Tanya Chutkan, whose work was studied line by line and phrase by phrase by Donald Trump’s attorneys, who tried to tear it aside in arguments to a 3 choose panel of the courtroom of appeals, and every of these judges, together with a conservative Republican appointed choose, who has employed regulation clerks who’re members of the Federalist Society — unanimously agreed that Choose Chutkan was proper in each phrase she wrote, each phrase.
Trump’s authorized battles are additionally a lot higher than deciding if a corrupt ex-president can be held accountable for his crimes: these proceedings (and the 2024 election) are a nationwide civics lesson and take a look at of how enduring America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy can be and the way a lot progress now we have made in direction of being a real we the folks democracy or if as a substitute the nation will collapse backward into a brand new Jim and Jane Crow plutocracy and system of pretend democracy and aggressive authoritarianism. Finally, the American democratic challenge is an experiment, an ongoing one, and can it endure or not?
Within the literal personhood and symbolic energy of Choose Chutkan (and the opposite black and brown members of regulation enforcement and the courts who’re holding Trump and his MAGA cabalists accountable for their apparent crimes – together with the Capitol cops on Jan. 6 who saved the nation from Trump’s MAGA assault pressure) – we see a black particular person, a black girl, an immigrant from Jamaica who not too way back in American historical past could be written out of the polity as a kind of anti-citizen and Different, the idea upon which and towards and upon white (male) citizenship and white herrenvolk democracy and the racial state could be outlined.
For these of us who imagine within the American democratic experiment and its promise and potential, particularly the kids and heirs of the Black Freedom Battle and civil rights motion and different rights revolutions and activism of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, to see Choose Chutkan on this position is exhilarating even because the stakes concerned for our security and futures are terrifying.
For Trump, his MAGA folks, neofascists, authoritarian populists and the bigger “conservative” motion and white proper and people others who’re in that orbit, that is all so disturbing and enraging. For them, it’s an impossibly fallacious factor (each as expressed consciously, i.e. “we imagine in conventional values,” and within the unconscious and semi-quiet ideas that function the actual root of their resentment and rage at “political correctness” and “these folks” “who don’t know their place” and no matter different myriad varieties pissed off white entitlement and privilege could take) to see a white man like Trump (who of their minds is one way or the other a stand-in for folks like them) being held accountable by those that they deem to not be “actual Individuals” and “patriots.” As a result of what does MAGA “Make American Nice Once more!” actually imply if not “What America White Once more!”?
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Lawrence O’Donnell spoke to this within the following manner:
Donald Trump has many dangerous days forward of him, as legal defendant Trump. None can be extra painful than the times he spends in Winston Chutkan’s daughter’s courtroom. Winston Chutkan advised the New York Occasions that when he gained a scholarship to go to highschool in Jamaica, quote, “I wore sneakers and skilled indoor plumbing for the primary time in my life.” Winston Chutkan labored very onerous, did very effectively in highschool. He went on to change into an orthopedic surgeon, one in every of Jamaica’s most distinguished physicians.
When his daughter Tanya arrived in Washington from Jamaica at age 17 to attend George Washington College, she fell in love with town, and has lived right here ever since, apart from her for 3 years as a distinguished scholar on the College of Pennsylvania Regulation Faculty, the place she was an editor of the regulation evaluation. Tanya’s youthful sister and brother each adopted of their father’s footsteps and have become physicians.
Tanya Chutkan served as a public defender in Washington D.C., the place she married one other public defender and had two kids. She then turned a extremely compensated member of a giant Washington regulation agency. President Obama appointed Tanya Chutkan to a federal judgeship in 2014. Her opponent was confirmed by america Senate, 95 to nothing. She advised her sister then, “I’ve by no means been so excited to obtain a pay lower.”
Tanya Chutkan is aware of that Donald Trump thinks her blood is poison, and that her kids’s blood is poison. Donald Trump says that immigrants like Tanya Chutkan are poisoning the blood of America, a phrase that Donald trump has lifted immediately from Adolf Hitler…..
O’Donnell’s public educating on his Tuesday present additionally signaled to what political scientists and different consultants know from public opinion information, focus teams, and different analysis concerning the values and beliefs which can be driving Trumpism and the bigger neofascist motion and international proper in its marketing campaign towards multiracial pluralistic democracy. These components embrace hostile sexism, racism and white supremacy (in fact), racial resentment, nativism, social dominance habits, and a kind of collective nervousness about social change within the type of demise anxieties (what social psychologists have termed “terror administration concept”, the darkish triad of private varieties, and collective narcissism and different types of mass pathology.
Right here O’Donnell takes these ideas and personalizes them by describing Trump’s thoughts and feelings, which for the corrupt ex-president should be like a real-life horror film he can not escape:
So, the day goes to return when Donald Trump stands trial, in Choose Chutkan’s courtroom, the place day by day he can be wanting up at a choose, who he has publicly and personally insulted by calling her a racist and hurling different insults at her.
And he can be wanting up at a choose who he has accused, together with each different immigrant who Donald Trump did not marry, of poisoning the blood of America. And day by day Donald Trump sits in that courtroom, wanting up at Choose Chutkan, he can be her with raging hatred that he is not going to be allowed to specific in that courtroom. And he can be her in abject concern, which he’ll admit to nobody….
4 weeks in the past, Donald Trump sat within the courtroom of appeals listening to room, wanting up on the three ladies judges who heard this case. Choose Karen Henderson, Choose Florence Pan, and Choose Michelle Childs. There was no authorized cause for him to be within the room. Donald Trump is in fact profoundly silly, however nonetheless not silly sufficient to suppose that his eyes or his hair or his make-up or his pink necktie would intimidate these judges. And certainly, the darkish, twisted coils of Donald Trump’s mind had been nonetheless capable of course of the apparent proven fact that these three ladies had full management over him, on this continuing.
America’s mainstream information media has largely failed within the Age of Trump and past in its tasks and obligations to have interaction in sustained pro-democracy journalism that educates, informs, and empowers residents by holding the highly effective accountable after which telling the general public not simply what’s vital and the way they need to give it some thought however then what to do about it.
Lawrence O’Donnell’s commentary on Tuesday was a vivid exception to that sample of failure (as was his dialog a number of days in the past with historian David Blight about Trump being disqualified from workplace per the Structure). Because the 2024 election approaches the American folks want extra of this sort of information coverage-public civics training and educating. However given how the information media and bigger consideration economic system has skilled the American folks to spectacle and distraction, do sufficient of them even have the capability to know and the eye span essential to course of it? The reply to that query and what it reveals about America’s civic tradition and democracy (and what it calls for of them) will weigh closely on Election Day after which what comes subsequent.
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