It is a long-running rap of Trump apologists that while the Donald may be a little rough around the edges, substantively (which is what counts, of course) he’s done little more than enact the standard Republican menu of tax cuts, increased defense spending, and, best of all, conservative judges!
Well, we can pass over (for now) the fact that Trump’s “fabulous” tax cut was simply a giveaway to the rich and that our defense budget was massively bloated even before Trump’s grotesque increases took effect, and concentrate on what may well be called the “crown jewel” of Trumpian apologiae, the appointment of conservatives judges. For the good news (for conservatives) is, they have an array of appropriately learned, appropriately conservative judges to enforce the law. The bad news is, there is no law left to enforce.
Back in the day, President Obama was widely, and correctly, criticized for his observation at a White House press conference in May 2013 that military personnel who commit sexual assaults should be “prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged,” on the grounds that it constituted “unlawful command influence”.1 Imagine how they would have reacted had Obama repeatedly intervened in court martial proceedings, both privately and publicly, in the cause of individuals accused of the severest crimes, including murder.
Well, you don’t have to imagine how they would react if Donald Trump had done so, because he has done so, in spades, in the case of Naval SEAL Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher and others, as New York Times Dave Phillips explains in “The Navy Wants to Push Out Problem SEALs. But Trump May Get in the Way.”, though the “correct” headline should read “The Navy Wants to Push Out Problem SEALs. But Trump Is Constantly Getting in the Way.” As the article demonstrates, Trump has essentially taken the position that “our boys” can do no wrong. “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” the president recently tweeted, “commenting” on the case of a U.S. Army officer charged with a murder committed in Afghanistan. And the reaction on the right has been silence—except on the very far right, where, of course, the reaction has been thunderous applause.
Trump has already established the “principle” that a president may fire the head of the FBI and lie about it for the explicit purpose of halting a criminal investigation that he considers politically inconvenient, and his defenders have enunciated the obvious corollary, that he can order the attorney general to pursue criminal investigations that he, as president, finds politically beneficial.2 His minions have also taken the position that the president, not the House of Representatives, decides when and how impeachment proceedings are to occur, despite the Constitution’s black letter law on the subject—that there is no law, essentially, other than the president’s will.
Afterwords—more on Gallagher
Gallagher was found innocent of murder in a trial earlier this year, largely because the prosecution’s lead witness announced at the trial that it was he rather than Gallagher who had committed the killing. (The trial is discussed in the Times article.) Earlier this year, David French, at the National Review, wrote an article on the trial and its lead-up, “Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher’s Acquittal Reminds Us to Never Rush to Judgment”.
Prior to the trial, there were reports that President Trump was considering pardons for Gallagher and several others. French praises Martin Dempsey, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for tweeting “Absent evidence of innocence or injustice the wholesale pardon of US servicemembers accused of war crimes signals our troops and allies that we don’t take the Law of Armed Conflict seriously. Bad message. Bad precedent. Abdication of moral responsibility,” praising in particular the phrase “absent evidence of innocence or injustice.”
I’ll go out on a limb and say "wholesale pardons" are a dubious idea in and of themselves and that a president who plans a pardon before a trial is entirely irresponsible, regardless of "evidence of innocence or injustice", and that any publicity allowed regarding such plans is “unlawful command influence” in the highest degree, an issue that seems to escape both Dempsey and French entirely. (In fact, the legal process involved in issuing such pardons almost invariably telegraphs the president’s intentions.) In his article, French’s Trump-friendly approach leaves a very poor taste in the mouth. The New York Times overturns a number of the stones that French aggressively ignores.
Appropriately enough (I guess), today’s lead story in the National Review features one-time baseball great Ted Williams, who, as an Air Force pilot, bombed the Chinese Communists during the Korean War. Those were the days, right! Impeachment, you say? Sorry, we’re fresh out of peaches! Come back tomorrow! Maybe!
1. President Obama displayed a rather cavalier attitude to such old-fashioned niceties as “due process”, an attitude that, one sadly suspects, is rather de rigueur at the Harvard Law Review these days. It was, of course, his administration that issued the notorious “Dear Colleague” letter to America’s colleges and universities encouraging them to ruin young men’s lives on the basis of “preponderance of evidence” obtained via administrative proceedings that aggressively reduced the rights of the accused. The Trump administration deserves credit (yes, you read that right) for reversing this "friendly advice".
2. “There’s nothing wrong or unusual about a United States president asking foreign leaders to provide information useful to his attorney general in a duly constituted investigation,” “explained” the National Review’s Rich Lowry.
