Trump indictment is one night of ‘karma’ in a nation of injustice

On a memorable yet bizarre night in U.S. political history, it somehow ended up that former Vice President Mike Pence — the guy who’s more or less stood by Donald Trump, even knowing the man sent a lynch mob after him on Jan. 6, 2021 — made the most insightful comment about Trump’s indictment Thursday by a Manhattan grand jury.

Unintentionally, of course.

Pence told CNN in response to the Trump charges — the first time ever that an ex-president has been indicted, in the case tied to his hush money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election — that “this appears to be just one more example of the kind of two-tiered justice system that the American people [have] had enough of.”

Give Pence partial credit, because Americans are indeed sick of unequal justice — even if the Trump charges are the exception that proves the rule. Trump, who has skated above the law for decades while he stiffed his Atlantic City contractors, defrauded the marks who bought into Trump University, and oversaw a lawless administration that ended with that attempted self-coup against the U.S. government, has been the avatar of a two-tiered justice system that bows to the rich and powerful, from Wall Street to the White House.

Indeed, nowhere has two-tiered justice run amok more obscenely than Manhattan, Trump’s home borough for most of his adult life, where famously, in 1989, cops forced false confessions from five Black teenagers then convicted by prosecutors in the high-profile rape of a Central Park jogger. That prompted then-developer Trump to make an early foray into politics with a full-page ad in New York newspapers calling for restoration of the death penalty.

On Thursday night, one of the five exonerated teens, Yusef Salaam, tweeted his reaction to Trump’s indictment in one word: “Karma.”

On Tuesday afternoon, if initial reports are to be believed, Trump will be booked, fingerprinted, and photographed for a mug shot in the same complex where Salaam and his codefendants were falsely convicted. The case against Trump is being prosecuted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who won election in 2021 promising to reduce incarceration among the powerless by not prosecuting certain nonviolent minor crimes — and who is now charging the formerly most powerful man in the free world with felonies.

No wonder so many Americans who, to borrow Pence’s phrase, have had enough of two-tiered criminal justice in this nation felt on Thursday night that Trump’s indictment was a reason to celebrate. In a land where the classroom pledge of justice for all has become something of a joke, where the world’s highest incarceration rate somehow didn’t include the bankers who blew up Wall Street or the cops who kill unarmed Black men, where millionaires can run over everyday folks with their cars or even their skis and get away with it, Trump’s criminal presidency has stood as our ultimate monument to brazen, elite lawlessness.

It’s been a long slide into criminality at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Richard Nixon walked away from the Watergate cover-up so that Ronald Reagan could run with the Iran-Contra scheme, so that George W. Bush could blow up Baghdad on a bed of lies, so that Donald Trump could detonate decency and then democracy from inside the Oval Office and then escape to Mar-a-Lago with his documents, a few missing gifts, and his freedom, even after orchestrating a coup seeking to block the lawful transfer of power to President Joe Biden.

For the last seven years, Trump has taunted us as the living embodiment of Nixon’s 1977 challenge that “when a president does it, that means it is not illegal” — until Thursday’s indictment arrived like a rope tugging on a dictator’s shaky statue. That a Black, progressive prosecutor is challenging this false idol, in a land where the injustices that landed in 1619 have too often trumped the democracy founded in 1776, with a tough Black woman in Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis right behind Bragg, feels like ... dare I say it: karma.

» READ MORE: U.S. presidents and their crime spree since 1968 | Will Bunch Newsletter

No wonder the forces of elite impunity and white nationalism that have coalesced under the soiled banner of the Republican Party and hector us nightly from the bullhorn of Fox News started having a meltdown as soon as the New York Times posted its first headline about the grand jury vote, shortly before 6 p.m. Thursday.

The leaders of the GOP reacted to one small step for the rule of law by threatening to end the rule of law. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a White House wannabe in the awkward position of begging for votes from people angered by Trump’s indictment, made an empty and hopefully unnecessary promise not to extradite Trump from Mar-a-Lago, a direct challenge to the U.S. Constitution. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised to use Republicans’ slim margin in the lower house to “hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account” — a vow that in itself is an unprecedented abuse of congressional power.

But it was left to bottom-feeder pundits on Fox News and its clones like Newsmax to give voice to the authoritarian right’s real message: that a Trump indictment is the first cannon blast of a second Civil War. The felon and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich — a creature from the same reality-TV swamp as Trump — told Fox’s Tucker Carlson that “this is probably ... the most threatening thing to our republic since South Carolina fired shots at Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War.”

No one who believes in justice and the rule of law should yield to this bullying. The GOP arguments hold no water. The only prosecutor who “played politics” around Trump’s unlawful campaign hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels was not Bragg, but Trump’s handpicked attorney general, William Barr, who squelched a federal probe even after Trump’s coconspirator Michael Cohen went to prison for the same crime.

Make no mistake: Trump’s looming arrest on Tuesday will not be the end, but merely what Winston Churchill once called “the end of the beginning.” But if America is to be a nation with liberty and justice for all, then the law that applied to Cohen needs to apply to Trump.

The battle against American injustice doesn’t only mean freedom for the thousands of aggrieved Yusef Salaams, but also accountability for the criminals at the top. The late John Lennon was brilliant, but he was wrong about one thing. Karma is never instant. We have to fight for it.

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