Recommended Reading: The Rule of Law is King
Recommended Reading: The Rule of Law is King
This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack: Diana Butler Bass, John Pavlovitz, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Dean Obeidallah, Anthea Butler, David Kurtz, and Michael Ian Black
This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack:
writes that “it feels oddly good to live in this America, where even a wealthy, privileged, powerful white man can be found guilty in our admittedly imperfect legal system. At the center of that clunky, often unfair, process, there is still the kernel of a great American ideal: The rule of Law is King.”
writes that “Donald Trump tried to warn America. He’s spent the last eight years inciting violence and degrading women, showing his intellectual ignorance, and broadcasting his hostility toward vulnerable people groups. He often seemed to be going out of his way to intentionally be so incendiary and vile and lawless, that he'd guarantee his failure by disqualifying himself in the eyes of reasonable people. But even he couldn't convince tens of millions of Americans to see him clearly.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that “now Trump has been convicted. While he says he will run for office from prison if necessary to save his followers and America, those grassroots devotees will be feeling very angry and volatile. The GOP elite has talking points ready to exploit those feelings. Since Trump’s sentencing is not until July 11, you will see them everywhere. Many of these talking points build on previously developed narratives in use all the time by MAGA; others are produced for the occasion. That they were instantly adopted by so many GOP elites is further evidence that the GOP is an autocratic entity with a party line and effective rapid response propaganda capacity when a major setback occurs.”
writes that “the question that must be asked is given Trump and MAGA reject our elections, our criminal justice system, the rule of law and our Constitution, what exactly do they support?! The answer is simple: Convicted Felon Trump. That’s it. This is yet another reminder that Trump and MAGA are an American version of a fascist movement. One of the signature traits of fascism is blind loyalty to an ‘infallible leader.’”
writes that “like the gold sneakers and Blacks for Trump, this will be another way to try and pander to the ideal black voter that exists in Republican fantasies-low information, and easily swayed by fake wealth. But hey, now their hero exemplifies all their racial fears. Trump is a convicted felon. It’s funny and breathtaking to watch the meltdown of Trump supporters and MAGA faithful. As Joy Reid so aply put it, it’s amazing to watch even black politicians like Tim Scott abase themselves in order to keep their hopes of being VP candidate for a convicted felon alive.”
writes that “We have certain expectations of the stories we tell ourselves, ingrained from millennia of storytelling around countless communal fires. Chief among them is that eventually there will be justice done to bad people who do bad things. We’ve constructed entire theologies around this notion. If justice is not done here on earth, don’t fret, god will exact eternal justice. It is core to who we are and what we believe, and Trump’s fierce resistance to that narrative arc has shaken many of us to the core.”
writes that Donald Trump’s scandals are “what his supporters like about him. They like that he lives by id alone because it’s the way they wish they could conduct their own lives, clomping through the world without regard for what or whom they might trample in the process. To them, he represents freedom in the crudest interpretation of the word, the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, with whomever the hell you want, for whatever purpose you see fit. It’s adolescent anarchy, the dumbest possible interpretation of the greatest (supposed) feature of American life. If Trump gets spanked now and again in the service of freedom, so what?”
