Punish crime / Bury vice

Today: Gabriel Snyder, Editor and Publisher at The Fine Print; and Anna Merlan, author of REPUBLIC OF LIES: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. 

Issue No. 57

Law Is Bigger Than Politics
Gabriel Snyder

To Be There When the Lights Go Out
Anna Merlan

Law Is Bigger Than Politics

by Gabriel Snyder

As Donald Trump’s first criminal trial opens, a certain conventional wisdom holds that the criminal indictment alleging payments of hush money and business records falsifications addresses the “least” significant of the crimes he’s been accused of; and that being so, the reasoning goes, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has risked devaluing the weightier prosecutions Trump faces, and may have made a critical mistake in charging the case at all.

This is hokum. First and foremost, it catastrophically conflates law and politics, and a bedrock of our democratic system is that politics and the law should be kept separate. This is also the core of the danger Trump has represented to the rule of law ever since he stumbled from reality TV into electoral politics. Way back in January 2016, he told us: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" From there, it’s a very short trip to claiming “absolute presidential immunity” for ordering the assassination of a political rival, as his lawyer recently argued in court on his behalf.