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In a series of editorials, New York Times opinion writers find that a second Trump presidency would put a strain on American democracy and help unleash a number of trends that are more than a little disturbing.
Spencer Bokat-Lindell, staff editor of the section summarizes the findings in the paper's Opinion Today newsletter. Focusing on The Times' most recent editorial pieces about the 2024 election, with election day set for tomorrow, Bokat-Lindell writes:
On Tuesday, in her last major speech before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris closed the argument of her campaign against Donald Trump by casting him as a singular threat to American democracy, a “petty tyrant” “consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.”
At Times Opinion, we’ve published a wide range of editorials, columns and guest essays that accord with that judgment. But they also complicate it, by placing Trump in the context of broader political forces that he has both harnessed and been harnessed by. After all, the man wouldn’t be much of a threat if he were acting alone.
When Trump was indicted by a Manhattan jury last March, for example, the columnist David French wrote about how Trump’s defenders used apocalyptic language to sow corrosive distrust of the justice system, “priming his supporters to reject the rule of law, root and branch.”
In a guest essay last year, the lawyers George Conway, J. Michael Luttig and Barbara Comstock argued that the conservative legal movement has also been complicit in Trump’s assault on the rule of law. While there were a few lawyers in the Trump administration who refused to participate in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, “more alarming is the growing crowd of grifters, frauds and con men willing to subvert the Constitution and long-established constitutional principles for the whims of political expediency,” they wrote. “The actions of these conservative Republican lawyers are increasingly becoming the new normal.”
Another, especially alarming aspect of the new normal, as David Austin Walsh detailed in May, is the growing presence of neo-Nazi and other far-right elements within the Republican Party’s rank-and-file. That month, Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video of mock headlines about his re-election, one of which predicted that “what’s next for America” was the “creation of a unified reich.” The campaign claimed that the video was posted by a staff member, which underscores a problem “that goes far beyond Mr. Trump,” Walsh wrote. “A generation of young Republican staff members appears to be developing terminal white nationalist brain. And they will staff the next Republican administration.”
These pieces and other coverage we’ve gathered clarify the stakes of tomorrow’s election.
Here at Legal Schnauzer, we will have more in the next two days on The Times' analysis of a possible second Trump term and the danger it poses for our democracy.
Why are these editorials particularly important? Let's briefly review the trends that Bokat-Lindell spotlights -- and we think you will see, without the need for further explanation, why we view the trends as "more than a little disturbing"
1. Sowing distrust of the justice system, priming his supporters to reject the rule of law -- (Note: I started this blog 17 years to spotlight my own distrust of the justice system, which is built on the personal experiences of my wife, Carol [Mrs. Schnauzer] and me in both state and federal courts in two states -- Alabama and Missouri. My research while working on posts for this blog indicates corruption in our nation's courts hardly is limited to those two states -- or to any region, for that matter, although the South and Midwest seem to have particularly ugly brands of courtroom sleaze. We will have much more coming soon on our personal experiences in court -- and many of them involve issues that could upend the lives of many readers. In my view, Trump and his supporters are right to distrust the justice system. But they are wrong to reject the rule of law. We have enough judges who already do that for us. Based on reporting of the facts and law in Trump's various legal entanglements, evidence of his guilt is overwhelming in quite a few of his cases. The problem, of course, is that he can't bring himself to take responsibility for his crimes, even though he recently admitted that he lost the 2020 election -- and he knew he lost it -- but he continues to blame Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and other Democrats for the charges he has faced, even though we have yet to see any evidence that any of those individuals or groups had a thing to do with bringing charges against Trump.)
2. Conservative lawyers have been complicit in Trump's assault on the rule of law, to the point that The Times refers to them as -- "grifters, frauds and con men willing to subvert the Constitution and long-established constitutional principles for the whims of political expediency."
3. The growing presence of neo-Nazi and other far-right elements within the Republican Party’s rank-and-file -- This issue alarmed The Times to the point that it included these words in its summary: "A generation of young Republican staff members appears to be developing terminal white nationalist brain. And they will staff the next Republican administration."
