Contempt has always been Trump’s brand. But it doesn’t have to be ours.

U.S. Sens. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., listen as former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media outside Manhattan Criminal Court on May 13, 2024, during his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Is anyone above the law?

Those who have followed Donald Trump’s criminal trial know the answer is a qualified one. Trump is not above the law, because he sits before a jury in a federal courtroom in New York, but he is more equal under the law than most of us.

Trump has been found in contempt of court 10 times for violating the gag order in the case, behavior that would get you or me thrown in the tank, but for which the former president has been fined $10,000. That is real money for most folks, but for Trump it’s chump change.

In social media posts and public comments violating the gag order, Trump has questioned the integrity of the jury, verbally attacked witnesses, and suggested the trial was politically motivated. This is the kind of thuggish behavior we’ve come to expect from Trump, who has consistently acted more like a two-bit hoodlum than a former commander-in-chief. There have been comparisons to Tony Soprano, the fictional New Jersey crime boss in the 1999-2007 HBO series, but the Donald is … well, he’s no don.

In explaining his May 6 decision on the 10th gag order violation, Judge Juan Merchan lamented that he did not have the statutory authority to impose stiffer fines and suggested that jail time might be in order if Trump continued. Previously, in an April 23 post, Trump had called Merchan “highly conflicted” and said he was presiding over a “kangaroo court,” comments which sparked calls for violence from his followers.

Although Merchan mentioned the possibility of jail time, he also displayed an amount of deference that no other defendant would receive.

“Mr. Trump, it’s important you understand, the last thing I want to do is put you in jail,” Merchan said. “You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well.”

Such deference is proof that Trump’s attacks are having their desired intimidating effect. It is difficult to imagine another scenario in which a judge, in finding a defendant guilty of contempt of court for the 10th time, would mention not only the offender’s previous job, but his further political aspirations as well. Merchan needed only to say, “Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.”

It wasn’t as if Merchan did not know the seriousness of Trump’s actions. He said Trump had “mounted a direct attack” on the rule of law and had “raised the specter of fear” for the safety of the jurors and their families.

The hush money case is the only one of four criminal cases Trump is facing that has yet made it to trial. The others are classified documents and election cases. In the New York criminal case, Trump is accused of falsifying business records about hush money allegedly paid to an adult film star to mislead voters prior to the 2016 president election.

Trump is the first American president to be charged with a crime in state or federal court, although Richard Nixon might have been first had it not been for his 1974 pardon. Although Nixon was never charged, he did face impeachment for abuse of power in connection with the Watergate scandal. David Frost interviewed him in 1977 for a televised special, in which Nixon claimed, without foundation, that he had immunity from prosecution: “Well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.”

Such thinking reveals a contempt for the rule of law, both then and now. It also harkens back to a time, apparently longed for by some Americans, in which rulers were thought to have been placed in positions of power by divine authority.

The idea that no person can hold themselves unaccountable to the law is a cornerstone of American democracy. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights refined an idea that had been kicking around for 600 years, since the Magna Carta, which placed limits on royal authority. Simply put, it said the law is a power in itself, denied the divine right of kings, and paved the way for modern representative democracy.

Humanity had made previous attempts at democracy, most famously in Athens during the fifth century. That experiment lasted only 180 years and had some misfires, including the state-sanctioned poisoning of Socrates for encouraging his pupils to distrust authority. A later and more romantic example were the pirates of the Spanish Main, who elected their leaders and shared equally in the spoils. Of course, whether under the Greeks or the founders Washington, Jefferson and Adams, to be a vote-casting citizen you had to be white and male.

But not if you were a pirate. Really.

Putting daydreams of plundering distant shores aside, the reality of the Trump era is that American democracy is being tested as it has only a few times before in our relatively short history. It survived the last Civil War, but filmmaker Alex Garland thinks it may not withstand the next. His dystopian view of the immediate future — or perhaps an alternate present — is an America torn into four factions. In the film “Civil War,” we see events unfold through the lens of a young photojournalist, Jessie, who has been taken in by her reluctant mentor, a veteran combat photographer who is slowly unraveling. The images Jessie captures are stark: tortured men dangling by their hands from a car wash, strangers shot because they’re from places that don’t sound “American,” mass graves. We don’t know why the country has split apart in the movie, but we see the result.

In Garland’s movie, America is obviously a failed state.

Nations fail, according to Robert I. Rotberg, president of the World Peace Foundation, because they are convulsed by internal violence and can no longer provide positive political benefits to their inhabitants.

“Their governments lose legitimacy,” Rotberg wrote for the Brookings Institute, “and the very nature of the particular nation-state itself becomes illegitimate in the eyes and in the hearts of a growing plurality of its citizens.”

We are not at that point. We are, thankfully, free of the chaos and violence depicted in Garland’s film. But our government — our institutions, our courts, our elections — have become illegitimate in the eyes of a significant fraction of Americans who follow a former president and presumed presidential nominee who stokes such fears.

Contempt has always been Trump’s brand. Before he became a politician, he showed contempt by defrauding those who enrolled in his real estate “university.” His contempt for women was captured when he bragged about groping them on the “Access Hollywood” tape. And he continued to indulge his general contempt by mocking the disabled, using demeaning names to refer to his rivals, and making more than 30,000 false or misleading claims while in office.

Nobody knows the future, but the Trump trial gives us some disturbing insight into just what might eventually undo us.

Contempt for the rule of law is the poison within.

That contempt is the defining feature of Trump and his cult-like following. It goes far beyond disdain for a New York courtroom and is foundational for the election denial on which Trump, and his Republican party, have staked their hopes. To be part of a functioning democracy, one must be willing to accept that sometimes you lose and engage in the peaceful transfer of power. Instead, the GOP remade in Trump’s image has broken this social contract by repeating his election lies and sending party leaders on pilgrimages to the courtroom.

Those who have genuflected at Trump’s altar include Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican and current House speaker; Tommy Tuberville, a Republican senator from Alabama whose specialty has been legislative obstruction; and J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and Ohio senator whose appearance in the courtroom was an audition to be Trump’s running mate.

The problem is not so much whether these influential figures really believe the hot air that blows from Trump’s direction, but what their appearances signal to a swath of the American public: That Trump truly is the victim of political persecution, Merchan is indeed running a kangaroo court, and it’s all part of a deep state plot to keep Trump out of the White House, which he won in 2020. There is, apparently, no longer any sense of shame in the gravel pit of conservative politics.

Such are the politics of grievance. Any institution, any process, any law that blocks the path to power is deserving of contempt. And Trump and his ilk have contempt not just for the rule of law.

Their contempt is for the rest of us.

Adherence to the rule of law is necessary for a democracy. Volumes have been written on the nature of law, but it really comes down to a society choosing to obey established limits on power. Some of our laws change — those from Congress and state legislatures, for example — but the founders considered some so important that they put them in the Constitution, a document thankfully difficult to change. It is our Magna Carta, our bedrock for the rule of law.

Trump claims it’s his constitutional right to comment on the hush money trial. But his posts and comments amount to witness intimidation, speech that is unprotected by the First Amendment. Being the target of Trump’s public invective would be chilling for any witness — or judge, juror or prosecutor — in any case he’s involved in.

Trump could restrain himself, but he won’t, because it meets his political goal of creating a false narrative of persecution. If Merchan attempts to restrain Trump by sending him to jail, the former president will be treated with a level of deference and protection no criminal defendant has ever enjoyed. It might even burnish his street cred in the eyes of his followers and lend support to his false claims of persecution. With the Secret Service to protect him, what would Trump really have to fear?

Nothing, and that’s the problem.

Merchan’s in an impossible position in regard to Trump. There is simply no way to deal with his contempt that doesn’t involve treating him with more deference than any other defendant.

After all, when you’re a star they’ll let you do anything.

In the years since Trump rode down the golden escalator to announce his candidacy, we have become desensitized to assaults on democracy. Phrases such as “rule of law” and “peaceful transition of power” have been used so much that they are in jeopardy of losing their power, if not their meaning, through the process of semantic bleaching. Remember when literally meant, well, literally?

Trump’s use of language is not to convey ideas but to project power. His word chipper of insults, slurs and lies in posts and public utterances are calculated for effect, not meaning. He claims freedom of speech for himself but would deny it to others, including the porn star whose silence he attempted to buy.

The antidote to Trump’s assault on the English language and his contempt for the rule of law is thoughtful and careful speech. It will take courage and imagination to reframe the argument for democracy in a way that will reach those who have become disenchanted with liberal society. It will take dedication to a system of law and the institutions that administer it, even if imperfect, to have any chance of navigating these dangerous waters.

It will also take small acts of civic responsibility.

Go see “Civil War,” but take it as a cautionary tale and not a prediction. Become an informed member of your community, take your civic responsibilities seriously, and encourage others to do the same. And if you get a summons for jury duty in the mail, don’t try to get out of it. Do your duty.

Every case is important to the rule of law and that, ultimately, may be the greatest equalizer between Trump and the rest of us.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

The post Contempt has always been Trump’s brand. But it doesn’t have to be ours. appeared first on Kansas Reflector.