Law of Diminishing Returns
During the first Trump term, my dad (who lost his entire family in the Holocaust, before joining the partisans and fighting against the Nazis) often said America needs fewer norms and more laws. During the second Trump term, it’s unclear that laws will be enough. Trump, along with what increasingly looks like his personal Justice Department, has gone to great lengths to dispute legal rulings, delay reactions to judicial orders, and even call for the impeachment of judges who issue decisions he doesn’t like. I’d say this is a slippery slope, but it feels more like a near free fall. Don’t take it from me, take it from Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of ‘How Democracies Die’ and ‘Competitive Authoritarianism.’ “‘Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it…We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,’ he said. ‘These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.’ There are many examples of autocratic leaders constraining the power of the judiciary by packing courts with compliant judges, or by changing the laws that give them authority, he said. But it is extremely rare for leaders to simply claim the power to disregard or override court orders directly, especially so immediately after taking office.'” NYT (Gift Article): Trump’s Judicial Defiance Veers Beyond the Autocrat Playbook.
+ One of the key cases in which Trump is attacking a judge involves the administration’s decision to deport a group of Venezuelan men—not to Venezuela, but to a notoriously brutal prison run by a dictator in El Salvador. So let’s take a look at What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced in this extension of American justice. “Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again. After being shaved, the detainees were stripped naked. More of them began to whimper; the hard faces I saw on the plane had evaporated. It was like looking at men who passed through a time machine. In two hours, they aged 10 years. Their nice clothes were not gathered or catalogued but simply thrust into black garbage bags to be thrown out with their hair. They entered their cold cells, 80 men per cell, with steel planks for bunks, no mats, no sheets, no pillow. No television. No books. No talking. No phone calls and no visitors. For these Venezuelans, it was not just a prison they had arrived at. It was exile to another world, a place so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten. Holding my camera, it was as if I watched them become ghosts.”
+ You might be disturbed at this harsh treatment being meted out to people who haven’t been convicted of any crime. But this form of justice developed in El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele is not frowned upon by all Americans. It’s being celebrated and even emulated. NY Mag: This Is Fascism: What Trump’s affection for El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele reveals about the fallen state of American democracy.
+ Meanwhile… Trump suggests sending Tesla vandals to El Salvador prisons. I guess this draconian law and order is required in a nation being overrun by crime. Oh wait. NORC’s Live Crime Tracker Shows Major Crime Declines in 2024. “The 2024 decline across multiple crime categories reflects a five-year trend of unparalleled change in crime in the United States compared to historical norms.”
+ Trump isn’t just attacking the judiciary, he’s going after lawyers too. And some of them are ceding ground. NYT (Gift Article): Law Firm Bends in Face of Trump Demands. (If you just look at the nuts and bolts of the deal, Paul, Weiss — one of three law firms targeted by President Trump as part of his retribution campaign — didn’t really agree to all that much. But Newton’s law of inertia applies to ceding ground to autocrats. An object in motion remains in motion.)
