Here’s what’s most obscene about GOPers crying ‘injustice!’ over Trump indictment

To echo so many leading MAGA Republicans and even the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, “If the government can do it to William Johnson, they can do it to you.”

OK, we all know that’s not actually what they said.

What Americans on the right side of the political dial were really claiming this weekend is that if the U.S. government can indict Donald Trump, the once and would-be future president, on top-secret documents and obstruction charges, then an all-powerful, “weaponized,” unjust “deep state” can go after anyone. But since MAGA Republicans are all about “no justice, no peace” these days, I’m thinking they might want to learn who William Johnson is.

The government sure seems to have “done it” to Johnson. He was a 24-year-old Philadelphia Black man in 2005 when police charged him with the murder of an off-duty cop. He was convicted and sentenced to more than 30 years after prosecutors introduced a statement from a witness — even though she’d already claimed, in letters to then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham and others, that detectives had coerced false testimony. Abraham and another top prosecutor reportedly never disclosed that letter to Johnson’s lawyers, which this week led a judge to throw out Johnson’s wrongful conviction — only after he’d surrendered 18 long years of freedom.

The allegations of outrageous misconduct by the government in Johnson’s case are hardly a fluke. Here in Philadelphia, roughly 30 wrongful convictions — most for murder, most linked to gross misconduct by prosecutors or police detectives — have been tossed in the last five years, and there are likely more to come. Black suspects like Johnson are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted than white ones.

That’s the leading edge of a shameful era in American history that hasn’t ended yet — the age of mass incarceration led by the most “politicized” prosecution you could imagine, an overcaffeinated “war on drugs” — in which not only the U.S. Justice Department and top federal agencies but local law enforcement were clearly “weaponized” against American citizens who were disproportionately Black and brown.

The Republican politicians who are the heirs to the “law and order” legacy of GOP founding fathers Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and who relentlessly enhanced sentencing guidelines and other laws to fill the jails, are now 2023′s social justice warriors. When hundreds of right-wing zealots were arrested by the Justice Department for their role in 2021′s violent insurrection that injured scores of cops, movement leaders like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene were shocked, shocked to learn that U.S. criminal defendants aren’t jailed in luxury accommodations. Trump and his chief rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seem locked in a bidding war over who can offer the Jan. 6 defendants the best pardon deal — an offer not extended to the suspects charged with federal crimes in the racial justice protests after George Floyd’s 2020 police murder.

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But those were just a warm-up for the screams of “injustice!” that rang out after last week’s stunning 37-count federal indictment that accused Trump of taking top-secret documents — including nuclear secrets and battle plans — with him after he was voted out of office, and then engaging in an elaborate cover-up. Typical was this tweet from DeSantis: “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.”

But the most egregious offender this weekend was arguably the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the bible of unfettered free-market capitalism, which has taken the notion that “consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds” to unprecedented heights. The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that in 2001 argued that Bill Clinton should be indicted over the alleged Monica Lewinsky perjury, thus “upholding the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law,” and which called in 2016 for criminal charges against candidate Hillary Clinton over her emails has had an abrupt change of heart.

“It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent,” the WSJ wrote in an editorial this week. “That seal has now been broken. It didn’t need to be.” The piece turns on its head what was actually unthinkable before this week: that federal laws that are constantly charged against everyday citizens could be applied to an ex-president.

There are three layers of ridiculousness to the idea that Donald Trump is being unfairly persecuted here.

First, Trump’s federal charges are the long-overdue fulfillment of an American promise that until now has only been honored in the breach, which is that no one — not even the nation’s highest office holder — is above the law. Bizarrely, many top officials have continued to proclaim this platitude even after Richard Nixon received a presidential pardon for the egregious crimes of Watergate, which empowered Nixon to tell David Frost the reality that was actually locked into place, that “when a president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Last week’s indictment involved righting a ship that had nearly capsized.

Second, the idea that the law is being applied unequally to Trump utterly collapses when one looks at the history of the law that POTUS 45 allegedly violated, the Espionage Act, during the four years that Trump was in the White House. The best known case involved the whistleblower Reality Winner, who printed out one document and sent it to a news org, acting on her belief of the public interest, and who was denied bail, pressured to plead guilty and spent four years in prison. Nghia Pho of the National Security Agency, or NSA, took home classified papers for work, and was hacked by Russians. He was sentenced to more than five years. But now folks are saying the president during that era, who stored top-secret documents on his stage at a busy resort and showed some of them to randos, should get off scot-free? Really?

Third, I don’t think people are thinking hard enough about what Trump truly represents for many of the 74 million who voted for him in 2020. “In the end, they’re not coming after me,” Trump told supporters in Columbus, Ga., yesterday. “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.” That’s the notion — that Trump’s “I alone can fix it” authoritarianism is the last line of defense for white supremacy, the patriarchy, and Christian-fundamentalist morals now under assault in a better-educated and more diverse America — that animates his movement.

The criminal justice system is where the rubber hits the road for these outdated hierarchies. Simply put, Trump and his people believe the laws exist to rein in people who don’t look like them — whether it’s Philadelphia’s William Johnson and the hundreds of thousands of faceless Black and brown Americans trapped in our national gulag, or desperate refugees at the border. That is exactly what Trump, DeSantis, and all the Republicans out on the campaign trail are talking about when they prattle on about “freedom” — the freedom to dominate other people.

The indictment of Donald Trump is the most powerful symbol imaginable that for some people — but especially the white conservative dudes who love him the most — their obscene notion of freedom might no longer apply. “Equal justice under the law” is their worst nightmare, so of course they are having a meltdown. No wonder that so many of us fear that the last throes of Trump-fried supremacy will be served with a side of violence.

Meanwhile, the rest of us should celebrate a rare win for the idea that no person is above the law. And we should aspire for a truly just America where, indeed, “If they come for Trump, they can come for you” — but only if you and Trump actually broke the law.

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