Trump's total lawfare

LONDON: US President Donald Trump’s total war on his political opponents, announced with his paper-thin indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, has revitalized comparisons between his rule and the fascists of the 1930s. After all, Adolf Hitler famously came to power legally and then used the law to construct the Nazi dictatorship.

But, unlike Hitler, who served in the trenches of World War I, Trump, a brash New York real-estate tycoon, could never sell himself as a representative ordinary man. While Hitler was wounded at least twice in the trenches, Trump claimed he suffered from osteophytes (bone spurs) to evade military service (which he sees as something that is only for “suckers” and “losers”).

Moving from Queens to Manhattan, Trump traded up from running his father’s sordid rental empire (one tenant, the folk singer Woody Guthrie, wrote a song about his landlord’s notorious racism) to playing Monopoly with luxury apartments, hotels, and casinos. His obsession with celebrity led him to reality television, and his show, The Apprentice, gave him national notoriety.

A product of the television age, Trump has made no small contribution to the general coarsening of US culture. Now, even Ryder Cup crowds behave like MAGA hooligans. Apart from narcissistic braggadocio and the ability to construe history’s most prosperous society as a victim, Trump’s political success is based on a clever inversion of identity politics. America’s white Christian majority is now the downtrodden constituency, and South Africa’s white Afrikaners are the only “refugees” welcome in Trump’s US.

But with his public appearances now degenerating into stream-of-consciousness monologues, even some of Trump’s diehard supporters must be concerned about his current state. Hitler at least confined his rambling to the wartime Table Talk, a record of his musings jotted down by Martin Bormann’s shorthand secretaries. Over tea and cake, the Führer would hold forth to his captive court about the ancient Spartans’ favourite soup. Before crowds of thousands, Trump ruminates about birds and whales being harmed by offshore windmills.

More to the point, Trump never forgets the smallest slight. His most recent targets, beyond Comey, include George Soros, who is (wait for it) supposedly funding domestic terrorism. The fact that Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was a long-time Soros employee doesn’t seem to register. And though he has confined his threats of execution to General Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during his first term, his utterances about the use of state violence nonetheless have become more frequent.

Of course, Trump has long practised the “lawfare” now being brought to bear on Comey. A vexatious litigant, he was involved in some 4,000 cases between 1973 and 2016 against business and personal rivals, the tax authorities, and for personal defamation. He seems to revel in the drama of litigation, changing lawyers – who must sue to get their fees – as frequently as others change their shirts.

Much of this serial litigation involved attempts to weasel out of paying small contractors, like painters and plumbers. The tactics are always the same: Entangle the opponent in costly and lengthy litigation until he goes bankrupt and runs up the white flag. Several eminent law firms and distinguished universities have found themselves subject to government extortion for representing the wrong clients or employing dissident professors.

Trump is still trying to overturn his felony conviction in New York state courts in May 2024 for falsifying business records. But the Supreme Court’s outrageous 2024 ruling granting former presidents “some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during [their] tenure in office” amounts to a writ of impunity. The way Trump (and perhaps the Court) sees it, such acts include inciting the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In many ways, Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision is serving the same function as Hitler’s infamous “Enabling Act,” essentially putting the leader wholly above the law.

Already, Trump is flouting the autonomy of the states by deploying troops to Los Angeles, Portland, Memphis, and other cities against the wishes of their democratically elected mayors and governors. Migrant workers, without whom the fruit, vegetable, and meatpacking industries cannot survive, are being rounded up by masked federal agents and deported – sometimes to an offshore gulag in El Salvador, but also to war zones like South Sudan and to Iran, with which the US does not even have diplomatic relations. Rounding up Iranian converts to Christianity and delivering them into the hands of the Islamic Republic puts the lie to the administration’s supposed commitment to defending Christian values.

Even though US Immigration and Customs Enforcement now has a budget that makes it the world’s 17th-largest defence force, Trump wants America’s regular armed forces in on the action. That was the central takeaway from the recent bizarre gathering of America’s entire military general officer corps in Quantico, Virginia. Secretary of Defense, or rather of “War,” Pete Hegseth told them to lose weight and shave their beards, though his real audience were the absent junior field officers whom he was effectively inciting against their allegedly “woke” superiors. While Hegseth is issuing illegal orders, evidenced by the summary execution of passengers on alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean, Trump’s rambling follow-up speech defined a new “mission” against domestic critics and protesters in US cities.

This lawlessness is also animated by the spirit of grift, something the austere Hitler eschewed (unlike covetous henchmen like Hermann Goering). Trump has made no secret of the fact that he is using the US state to rake in huge sums of money for himself, his family members, and his cronies.

Trump-backing oligarchs like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, for example, have derived vast riches from public-sector contracts. Meanwhile, the ex-developer Steve Witkoff, Trump’s unqualified special envoy for Russia and the Middle East, has taken his son along on diplomatic trips to the Gulf to secure huge investments in their property funds. Alex Witkoff is also a partner, with Eric Trump, in the World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency business, which the United Arab Emirates has backed. Even the nearly mute Melania Trump will get $28 million from a pusillanimous Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, for producing a documentary about her life.

None of this very visible venality seems to trouble Trump’s voters. For everyone else, the most pressing question today is this: Will I collaborate with Trump’s efforts to uproot America’s democracy and the rule of law, or must I speak out while there is still time?  

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
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