Wrong is Wrong: On Lawlessness, Cruelty, and Clarity

We're living in a new era and it's on us to look at the world with a new set of eyes

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I oppose Donald Trump because he is wrong.

It would be easier to list all of the things he isn’t wrong about. His entire worldview is wrong. How he treats people is wrong. How he comports himself, who he associates himself with, how his very existence as a man and as a political leader represents what can go so very wrong with a human being if they are given everything, never forced to consider who they are or how they behave. It is stunning to find, in one person, a collection of instincts and beliefs and behaviors that are so demonstrably awful and wrongheaded.

Before Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, I had a casual awareness of him in pop culture and when he appeared on a screen or in a news story I felt, within myself, a repulsion. I think most of us did. Then, when began creating the Make America Great Again Movement, I walked among his rallies, talked to his supporters, observed a growing, worsening sickness, and I knew, with sobering clarity, that what was building was a wrong thing that fed upon itself, strengthening in feedback loops between this utterly dangerous person and legions of people who felt enabled and empowered by his gravity of awfulness. And that, though hard sometimes to communicate or quantify, is what has led us down this path.

On Monday, I watched Trump, as president, welcome Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele to the White House and felt nauseated. Trump is Trump, a venal, incurious, lazy, racist, sexist, fascist man, and that is under the “best” circumstances. When he associates with others, often slavish sycophants and leering creeps, you see Trump bask in their adoration and subtly abuse and manipulate them with a practiced, almost bored energy. This is what he does and what he has always done. And then, when he meets with fellow autocrats, bullies, and dictators, something flashes alive in Trump because, in essence, this is what his lifetime of cruelty has always been chasing: the scaling of his abuse and hatefulness to another level buttressed by the foundation and backing of state level power. In Bukele, who has turned El Salvador into a vamping prison state, Trump recognizes himself and, with glee, was quick to form a partnership that represents the closest thing he could ever find to intimacy. And, to boot, the way in which he treats Bukele reflects an adoration for him that is father-like as he sees in him something reflected back that is more true and honest in that hollow cruelty and ambition than what he has with his sons, who have been hobbled by Trump’s abuses.

That partnership is predicated on the things Trump values most. Profit seeking actions. The suppression of humanity and, in turn, the aggrandizement of himself. This plan to outsource a system of concentration camps outside the borders of the United States is simultaneously an authoritarian power grab and a means of doing business. It was soul killing to see Bukele and Trump shrug over the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an innocent man slung into one of Bukele’s hellish prison, both doing their best halfhearted song and dance to gloat over their unwillingness to do anything to save his life or show a shred of compassion for him, his family, or an ounce of respect for the law.

On the subject of the law, the Supreme Court of the United States told Trump to bring Garcia back and he is flaunting his disobedience. I want to discuss this in terms that are both complicated and simple because what is happening now, in the midst of this crisis, requires a change in how we move through the world and how we view it. That change is a long time coming. It isn’t comfortable. It isn’t pleasant. But it is necessary and, I hope, it is freeing in a way that makes the fight for a better future more powerful and more possible.

First, Trump should return Garcia to America because it is the right thing to do. He never should have been sent to El Salvador to languish in this hell. That is because he has protected status, because he was wrongly disappeared, but also because this never should have happened to anyone. We do ourselves a disservice when we play authoritarian games by authoritarian rules. We have seen this for decades now as the road to authoritarianism was paved by normalizing brutality and lawlessness and cruelty. We never would have arrived here, with this crooked system and its endless corridor of loopholes and strategies, had we not seen the War on Terror and moments of accepting violence and autocratic actions against others. Fascism is when the horrors of empire return home, and now this parsing out of who is “innocent” and who is a “criminal,” who deserves protection and who is a “terrorist,” only adds to the crisis and gifts more and more power to these creeps.

Second, I do not respect the authority of the Supreme Court. Since the Founding, the Supreme Court was established to protect the fortunes and power of a white and wealthy ruling class at the expense of the rest of us. It’s time to give up delusional notions that Trump is an aberration and that our Founders were benevolent and would be shocked by what he is doing. In fact, Trump is behaving so much like John Adams, one of the beloved Founding Fathers, that it makes the mind reel that this comparison has been largely missing from our discourse. And that, quite frankly, is because people want to get past this era, return to a time in which we don’t have to face these uncomfortable facts, and just get back to “normal,” even though normal was terrible and it brought us here.

The times at which the Supreme Court helped progress - including rulings like Brown v. Board or Roe v. Wade - were the aberrations. Throughout its existence the court has done its job in enabling the wealth class to the detriment of the country and its people. This incarnation, as transparently corrupt as it is, operates in the grand tradition of the institution. During Joe Biden’s presidency we would have all been better served had he the courage and temerity to undermine their legitimacy and even ignore their rulings. Here we are, the day after Trump signaled he had no intention to honor their ruling on Garcia, and the sun rose. The stock market opened. We’re still going to work and going about our days. What Trump has revealed is the artifice of our institutions and, to some extent, we should be grateful for that fact even as we are disgusted and repelled by what he has done.

Garcia should be returned because it is right. Trump should be opposed because he is wrong.

The frameworks that surround these facts like so much faulty scaffolding are the things that keep us from birthing a better world. They are meant to pen us in, to keep us from achieving victories to force us forward, just as they were designed to do by the Founding Fathers, who enjoyed a one-party rule they envisioned lasting forever until democracy pried power from their hands. That is the true story of America and politics in general. Operating within systems built by the powerful to protect and expand their power is a losing pursuit. The system is designed to scuttle us and if you read the actual writings on the design and the intentions, it was never hidden. The American system of government was sketched and realized for this very purpose.

This is why I get so frustrated with influencers and personalities who base their opposition to Trump on the law. This is why all these narratives about stewards of institutions like Robert Mueller, James Comey, Jack Smith, any number of politicians or political maneuvers saving us from Trump are so dangerous. They are selling a fantasy that the world is something that it is not. The institutions are rotten and they are built on rotten foundations. And continuing to keep our minds chained to any notion other than that is self-defeating at best and ruinous at worst.

In this mindset, we are invited sometimes to sort through history and occasionally grant exceptions. Yes, the Civil Rights Movement broke laws, but that part of the story is muted in favor of rhetoric and institutional cooperation. Civil disobedience was a bedrock of that movement and that isn’t comfortable when you’re looking for the easy dichotomy of “criminals” versus “the innocent.” Same goes for revolutions and decolonization movements. The American Revolution was illegal and involved mass violence, but its victory allows a transubstantiation of those facts into something “worthy” and “good” and “divine.” Same goes for other revolutions and movements, whether it’s the people of Vietnam or Algeria throwing off the yoke of colonial oppression or so many others, all of whom were labeled terrorists and evil and dangerous because they worked outside the laws as they were given and dictated and enforced.

None of this is comfortable, but it is nonetheless true. What we feel now is a state of crisis in which many of the old comforting truths are shaking and threatening to crumple. Doubtlessly you have felt it. Perhaps you sensed it or even saw it in full view as Trump came to power, as he flaunted his corruption, as earned impeachments failed or even as the system itself failed to hold him legally accountable following his exit from the office. Perhaps you felt it as Biden refused to push back against the court or tired, racist institutions like the filibuster or, god, the dreaded parliamentarian. Perhaps you felt it as you watched people torch Teslas in protest to Elon Musk carrying out an obvious coup.

We are in a fascinating and uncomfortable place. In Trump’s actions, with Bukele and his endless corruption and his cruelty and the refashioning of the American order, you likely sense we are in a true dichotomous position of conflict between Right and Wrong. And, in that, you are correct. That is the moral, central chord of your humanness sounding out loud and clear. That is clarity. We oppose Trump because he is wrong, not just because what he is doing is illegal, because the law has been shaped and then contorted in order to make room for these wrong actions. In this relationship with Bukele, we saw an unmistakable glimpse of how the War on Terror and all its legal contortions created this nightmare. They can make an argument that this is legal because the law, as designed and implemented, can make avenues to do so.

At best, the law should restrain people like Trump from doing the wrong thing. At worst, it can aid them. And our situation is possible because it has been focused on the latter.

To realize something better, something fairer, something more human, we are going to have to change. We will have to realize that even though it is legal to exploit men, women, and children around the world through slave labor so that we can have cheap goods, it is wrong. We will have to realize that even though it is legal for corporations to keep us impoverished and sick and on the verge of constant ruin, it is wrong. We will have to realize that even though it is legal for the state to limit a woman’s reproductive rights, it is wrong. We will have to realize that even though it is legal for the wealthiest individuals to exploit the planet, its resources, and plunge us into disastrous climate change, it is wrong. And, as our protests and movements clash against this authoritarian regime, we will have to realize while it is legal, or that it will be legal, to brutalize us and kill us and imprison us and ship us to El Salvador or whatever concentration camps they turn to next, that it is wrong.

We have a long road to walk down, my friends. I imagine that road is becoming clearer every day. We have a journey ahead and it begins with recognizing things that are both difficult and also, at times, troubling because they fly in the face of what we have been taught and what has been drilled into us since the day of our birth. But we have a compass inside of ourselves and it is true. It tells us the way forward. All we have to do is have the courage to trust it.