Judges and Prosecutors, Targeted by Trump, Will Not Be Intimidated
They are the latest democratic heroes of Lucid
As you know, I’ve been concerned about the concerted effort by Trump and his Republican enablers to turn Americans away from democracy and cause them to lose faith in democratic institutions, from the courts to the press to elections. In case you missed it, here is my essay from a few weeks ago about this attempt at delegitimation, which involves Republicans sowing distrust and hostility and modeling contempt for the rule of law and the notion of accountability.
No one is off limits to being targeted, as the episode of Trump sharing a video that featured president Joe Biden tied up as though he were a hostage indicates. It struck me that this life-size image depicts Biden as having experienced some kind of authoritarian takeover that has left him a prisoner. So I made a brief video, which you can see here. It has over 1 million views on Twitter/X.
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Today’s post continues these reflections, focusing on the unprecedented wave of threats to American judges. An in-depth Reuters analysis, which draws on interviews with 18 judges (14 in service and four retired) found that threats against federal judges alone have more than doubled since 2020, when over 60 judges (many Republican-appointed) turned back challenges to the validity of the 2020 election.
Trump has become even more focused on targeting judges as his criminal and civil cases have escalated. As the Washington Post recently reported, Trump has gone after federal judges and their families 138 times since 2022.
Authoritarianism involves arranging government to keep the leader safe from prosecution and allow him to commit crimes and corrupt acts with impunity. That means judges and prosecutors are always among those harassed and persecuted, along with lawyers who defend dissidents or don’t fall into line with the government.
In Turkey, the 2016 coup attempt by the military led President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to institute a wide-ranging crackdown that placed over 1,200 civilian prosecutors and judges in pretrial detention and purged over 4,000 prosecutors and judges in the following years. The International Bar Association recently issued a report on the use of unfair trials and arbitrary detainment and imprisonment to target lawyers in Turkey, who are also increasingly accused of terrorism by the government.
The threats to judges and prosecutors in the United States are a metric of the rising assault on democracy. “We had never even contemplated that one of us could get killed in this job,” said U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who was interviewed for the Reuters article. Judge Lamberth had been harassed by drug dealers and gangsters, but was unprepared for the volume of hatred from another kind of thug: MAGA loyalists. “I couldn’t believe how many death threats I got,” he said.
Judge Lamberth refuses to be intimidated: on April 3, while sentencing a Jan. 6 rioter for multiple crimes, including assaulting a police officer, the judge condemned the “normalization” of Jan. 6 and warned that the contestation of future election results could manifest as widespread “vigilantism, lawlessness, and anarchy.”
Then there is Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump’s hush-money criminal trial. Trump has made recourse to one of the oldest weapons in the authoritarian playbook –go after the target’s family-- labelling the Judge’s daughter as a “Rabid Trump Hater” and posting photos of her to facilitate harassment by his followers.
Merchan has responded with an expanded gag order on Trump as a counter to this “threat to the integrity of judicial proceedings.” It covers his family and the family of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who found himself a target in 2023 when Trump posted a composite picture of himself holding a baseball bat next to DA Bragg’s head.
Propaganda is not only about getting people to believe individual falsehoods –say, that you won the 2020 election—but creating associations in people’s minds that can lead to action. Denounce judges as evil day after day, declare yourself a victim of their machinations, and show your followers pictures of them and their families: it doesn’t require much to get someone to act in defense of their idol.
“Happy Easter to all, including crooked and corrupt prosecutors and judges that are doing everything possible to interfere with the presidential election of 2024, and put me in prison,” Trump posted on Easter Sunday, making sure his followers see hatred of these professionals as essential to securing his own safety.
Every judge has dealt with the threats and other menacing behavior in his or her own manner, but there is no escaping the intent of Trump and his supporters to discredit the democratic justice system as a whole. That is why U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton recently went on CNN to remind Americans that judges should be able to carry out their duties without the threat of physical harm. Inciting violence against judges is “an attack on the rule of law,” said Walton, who now faces an ethics complaint, filed by a Trump ally, for his television comments.
All of this is why the latest democratic heroes of Lucid are Judge Walton, Judge Lamberth, Judge Merchan and all judges and prosecutors who are enforcing the rule of law and legal standards by holding transgressors of our laws accountable, whether they are ordinary individuals who assaulted people on Jan. 6 or the former president of the United States.
It's such a pleasure to be able to access historians ,intellectuals and thought leaders . Thank you for giving of yourself for the good of not just this community or the Country but by extension...dare I say, the world! ♥️ You rock! (As does this whole community)
THANK YOU for speaking out about the image of President Biden and its meaning. I see the Orange Turd as escalating his hate attacks as he becomes more and more convinced that he HAS to get elected, no matter who dies in the process. He has to convince himself, as the psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian asshole he is, that it's inevitable that he should win and avoid ever being punished for doing wrong, because that would mean that he's a LOSER. Maybe if his mommy had punished him sometimes in childhood he wouldn't be such a TURD now. I don't want to see this country, or me, dragged into hell because of his ego and the egos of his enablers. Stephen Hawking said that the two biggest problems with our species were greed and stupidity, and I think he's right.
THANK YOU for standing up so courageously to all the threats and poisonous disinformation.