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Turns Out Appeasing Trump Only Emboldened Him -- Ryan Cooper - The American Prospect
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-trump-prosecution-law-felonies-fascism/During the Biden administration, there was a years-long debate on the left about whether or how Donald Trump should be prosecuted. On the one hand were people like Ankush Khardori, Elie Mystal, and myself, who argued that Trump must be held accountable, ideally for his attempted putsch on January 6, but by any other possible case that could be drummed up if not. On the other were people like Elie Honig, Lawrence Lessig, Samuel Moyn, and Jonathan Chait, who argued that any legal action against Trump must be handled with extreme diligence and the smallest hint of political persecution must be avoided.
The latter camp largely won out. Biden appointed a milquetoast moderate, Merrick Garland, as attorney general, and as The New York Times and Washington Post reported in detail, he initially refused to prosecute Trump on his globally televised sedition and insurrection, instead attempting a traditional organized crime roll-up that went nowhere and ate up months. It wasn’t until the January 6th Committee made Garland look like an idiot that he finally got moving in November 2022—eighteen months after Biden took office—and it was special counsel Jack Smith who actually put the cases together, relatively quickly. These years of delay allowed Trump’s cronies on the Supreme Court to successfully delay the resulting trials out past the 2024 election.
When Trump repeatedly refused to return classified documents he had stolen from the National Archives, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago only with extreme reluctance, and did not arrest him. When the Colorado Supreme Court threw him off the 2024 ballot in that state, the national Supreme Court quickly put him back on.
In short, the American law enforcement apparatus, egged on by many prominent liberal and lefty academics and commentators, bent over backwards to provide the appearance of due process—which is to say that Trump got to get away with outrageous things no other defendant would have, like refusing FBI requests during a legal search, or repeatedly violating a judge’s order not to attack the judge’s daughter on social media. (Needless to say, this is the opposite of due process: It is letting a powerful person violate the rules.)
We now see the results of granting Trump his second, third, and 50th legal chances: He is attempting to turn the United States into a fascist dictatorship. Immigrants and other enemies of the regime are being kidnapped off the street by ICE goons with no due process, and stuffed into concentration camps Trump is opening around the country, like the Alligator Auschwitz in Florida, or sent to slave labor camps in foreign countries. Already, people are starting to die in the cramped and unsanitary conditions. Senate Republicans just passed a bill that, among other things, would balloon the ICE and deportation budget up to $175 billion—giving it more money than the Marines or indeed any military save that of China and the U.S., and giving Trump his own gestapo. Now Trump is openly threatening to strip people of their citizenship and deport them, including Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who recently won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary.
. . .
The latter camp largely won out. Biden appointed a milquetoast moderate, Merrick Garland, as attorney general, and as The New York Times and Washington Post reported in detail, he initially refused to prosecute Trump on his globally televised sedition and insurrection, instead attempting a traditional organized crime roll-up that went nowhere and ate up months. It wasn’t until the January 6th Committee made Garland look like an idiot that he finally got moving in November 2022—eighteen months after Biden took office—and it was special counsel Jack Smith who actually put the cases together, relatively quickly. These years of delay allowed Trump’s cronies on the Supreme Court to successfully delay the resulting trials out past the 2024 election.
When Trump repeatedly refused to return classified documents he had stolen from the National Archives, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago only with extreme reluctance, and did not arrest him. When the Colorado Supreme Court threw him off the 2024 ballot in that state, the national Supreme Court quickly put him back on.
In short, the American law enforcement apparatus, egged on by many prominent liberal and lefty academics and commentators, bent over backwards to provide the appearance of due process—which is to say that Trump got to get away with outrageous things no other defendant would have, like refusing FBI requests during a legal search, or repeatedly violating a judge’s order not to attack the judge’s daughter on social media. (Needless to say, this is the opposite of due process: It is letting a powerful person violate the rules.)
We now see the results of granting Trump his second, third, and 50th legal chances: He is attempting to turn the United States into a fascist dictatorship. Immigrants and other enemies of the regime are being kidnapped off the street by ICE goons with no due process, and stuffed into concentration camps Trump is opening around the country, like the Alligator Auschwitz in Florida, or sent to slave labor camps in foreign countries. Already, people are starting to die in the cramped and unsanitary conditions. Senate Republicans just passed a bill that, among other things, would balloon the ICE and deportation budget up to $175 billion—giving it more money than the Marines or indeed any military save that of China and the U.S., and giving Trump his own gestapo. Now Trump is openly threatening to strip people of their citizenship and deport them, including Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who recently won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary.
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