Opinion: Donald Trump, rattled by investigations, turns to 'stuff of dictators'

Steven J. Burton
Mon, February 7, 2022

The defeated former president, Donald J. Trump, is facing four investigations for wrongdoing. Two, by the Manhattan district attorney in New York and the Fulton County district attorney in Georgia, aim to determine whether Trump and his associates committed serious crimes. Another, by the attorney general of New York, seeks to determine whether Trump or his business, the Trump Organization, committed civil wrongs in its handling of finances before he became president. A fourth, by a congressional House Select Committee, will tell the story of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and how to avoid anything like it happening again.

Four such investigations, each with potentially serious consequences, up to and including convictions for felonies, would weigh heavily on anyone. Trump appears to be rattled. This is evident from three points he made in a disturbing speech at a “Save America” rally in Texas.

First, Trump conceded that he lost the 2020 election after more than a year insisting that he had won. “Mike Pence” he said, “did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power; he could have overturned the election!” Here, Trump supposes that the election outcome needed “changing” and needed “overturning.” Why? Because he lost. He admits he attempted to overthrow the election.


Second, he defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and rioters: “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly, and if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.” Dangling pardons before them could impair ongoing prosecutions as the criminal defendants bet on pardons and clam up.

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Third, the problem with dangling pardons is greater for the future Trump envisions. After calling, without reason, the Manhattan and Atlanta prosecutors “radical, vicious racist prosecutors” who are “mentally sick,” he replayed his plan for Jan. 6, 2021, but on a greater scale:

“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta, and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt,”

Of course, his view of the prosecutors he described is that they could not possibly be fair to him. So, he is threatening mass demonstrations to intimidate the criminal justice processes in those cities, to his advantage. Will the crowds be big? Will they be unruly? Will we see a violent effort to trash the prosecutor’s offices? And more?

This sort of rhetoric is not worthy of America. Laurence Tribe, this nation’s foremost constitutional lawyer, said that, in this speech, Trump admitted to his guilt for seditious conspiracy and other felonies. Jamie Raskin, also a highly respected constitutional lawyer, called it a “smoking gun.” And John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, tweeted, “this is the stuff of dictators.”

Steven J Burton taught law at the University of Iowa for 42 years before retiring in 2019.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Opinion: Trump, facing investigations, turns to 'stuff of dictators'