Newsweek: The Rule of Law Is More Important Than How You Feel About Trump
Newsweek
The Rule of Law Is More Important Than How You Feel About Trump
Published Jul 15, 2024 at 10:38 AM EDT
Thomas Moukawsher
Following the failed assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump, Americans have a lot to think about. Trump’s supporters can rejoice that he was not killed or more seriously injured, but his opponents have something more difficult to sort out. Are they secretly sorry Trump wasn’t killed? If after mature reflection, Trump’s opponents even secretly harbor this feeling, they have something to be sorry about indeed. Their minds are headed down the road to lawlessness.
Law and order must work on both sides of the street. It’s easy to want justice for our friends, but unless we sincerely want it for our foes as well, we have ceased to be a country of laws and not men. There are worrying signs from both the left and the right that violence rather than resort to the ballot box or the courts has become acceptable to some Americans.
Let’s talk about the sins of the left first. Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin murdered a black citizen named George Floyd in May of 2020. Floyd was no model citizen. He had faced serial arrests for robbery and drug charges and was in the midst of another crime when Chauvin stopped him. Floyd was no hero, but Chauvin choking him to death with his knee was the opposite of law and order. Worse still, the Floyd incident was part of a deeper problem of racism in law enforcement that we have rightly tried to come to grips with.
But not by rioting, looting, burning and chaos, yet that’s what we got. Democratic politicians didn’t excuse the violence but many excused the protesters as doing nothing more than fairly reacting to an intolerable oppression. What we ultimately got from anti-police posturing was the destruction of civic life in cities like Portland and a hands-off attitude toward petty crime that has dramatically undercut the quality of life in cities like San Francisco and New York. When only certain laws are enforced against certain people you’re not living under the rule of law.
Having a just cause in a democracy doesn’t excuse violence. But engaging in violence for an unjust cause surely deserves double damnation. The Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the United States Capitol was the single biggest attempt to defeat the rule of law in United States history. This wasn’t about looting a store or tipping over some cars. This was about attempting, first through fraud and then through violence, to overthrow our democracy.
In George Floyd’s case, there were legal means in court to address the injustice done. Derek Chauvin was tried, convicted, and imprisoned. Donald Trump claimed the 2020 election was stolen. There were legal means in court to address his claims of injustice. Some 60 lawsuits were filed, but 60 times judges, including judges Trump appointed, found the election was not stolen but was fairly won by President Joe Biden.
Yet the violence we all witnessed on television followed. As many as nine people died and hundreds were injured. Because there was no just cause to fight for, Republicans who excuse—or worse glorify—the rioters are worse than Democrats who excused the George Floyd rioters. They don’t just threaten our way of life in some places in the country, they threaten it everywhere.
Many Americans alive today can remember unhappily the last time violence and disorder dominated the American scene. Most of the disorder in the 1960s began from the left as outrage over the Vietnam War—a good part of it justified, but it resulted, not in electoral change, but in unjustified riots in the streets and protests on college campuses across the nations. Our foundations shook so much that assassination became a regular occurrence in American life with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy both gunned down in the months before the contentious 1968 presidential election.
Today, we don’t have anything like a good excuse for violence. We aren’t at war. Unemployment is low. The stock market has rocketed upward. Our courts dealt with Chauvin and—glacially—are dealing with charges related to Jan. 6. The courts found our electoral system worked in 2020, and, whatever disagreements some of us may have with our current Supreme Court, it is lawfully constituted. Its members were duly appointed. Their personal peccadilloes may warrant censure, but nothing they have done warrants any form of violence. For now, we remain under the rule of law.
As Democrats and Republicans reflect on the Trump assassination attempt, they should look to whether their own increasing acceptance of violence contributed to it and to whether it’s time to work for the health of our institutions rather than working to undermine them with lawlessness. Get well soon Donald Trump—and that goes for the rest of America too.
