Donald Trump owes his continued freedom — and very likely his second term as president — to the fact that he was allowed to exploit the fundamental American right and hard-won tradition of due process, which is designed to protect an individual from arbitrary, weaponized prosecution and state terror.
But as he celebrates his 100th day back in the Oval Office, Trump and his administration are working overtime to ensure that those very same due process rights are gutted or taken away from everyone who is not named Donald John Trump.
Trump has already shipped hundreds of immigrants, without due process, to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. And he’s argued several times now on social media that America simply cannot give everyone a trial, no matter what the Fifth Amendment says. The irony would be comical, if it weren’t so lawless and sick.
During the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Trump was so worried about the then-very real possibility that’d he be sentenced to prison — in the federal criminal case on his hoarding of classified documents, or in the two different cases regarding his efforts to steal the 2020 election — that he would ask his close advisers whether prosecutors would try to confine him to house arrest for the rest of his elderly life, or make him wear “one of those jumpsuits,” as Rolling Stone previously reported.
That was only a year and a half ago. In the span of the modern American news cycle, those considerations might as well have transpired one million years ago.
In the time since, Trump — along with his expensive armada of criminal defense attorneys — was able to work the refs and delay the planned trials by making all kinds of ridiculous claims and appealing for help from the United States Supreme Court, which he personally stacked with staunchly conservative justices. As the 2024 election season approached the summer, some of Trump’s advisers had privately warned him that polls consistently indicated that a criminal conviction — including in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election-subversion case — before Election Day could prove catastrophic to his electoral prospects, and therefore his ability to remain a free man.
For months, several of Trump’s top lawyers were anticipating the Jan. 6-related federal trial would begin the same summer of the Republican National Convention. His attorneys at first believed they could flood the courts with various demands and challenges, and squeeze Trump’s afforded due process for every drip of trial-delay that it was worth. As the criminal charges came down, they weren’t entirely convinced that they could get him through the summer.
Those attorneys were (to their delight) proven wrong.
Trump and his legal teams’ strategies to deploy delay tactic after delay tactic was an effort drenched in obvious bad-faith, and Trump and his attorneys laid the groundwork to turn his planned Jan. 6-related federal trial into some sort of “MAGA freak show.” But they didn’t need to mount a freak show, because most of his criminal trials (minus the one in Manhattan, over a comparatively trivial matter that Trump’s campaign never thought would be nearly as politically harmful as the other prosecutions) never happened.
Trump was not so much interested in allowing the justice system to run its course, so much as he was concerned with abusing and bleeding it out of self-interest, and for political gain.
But such are in his rights as an American, profoundly cynical as his treatment of those rights are.
No matter how infuriating it was to watch gradually unfold, the twice-impeached, repeatedly indicted president was afforded the capacity to stall and obfuscate, all thanks to our constitutional protections of due process. It is true that most people cannot use their celebrity, connections, or wallet to bend the judiciary to their will, as Trump did. Still, to deprive anyone in this country — even a figure like Trump — of their due process rights would be a greater crime than to allow the moral crime of our vaunted institutions handing him the tools to get away with his most horrendous abuses.
For however much he paid his lawyers, Trump certainly got his money’s worth. His attorneys’ numerous maneuvers to push multiple trial dates to after the 2024 election included salvos that were on-their-face ludicrous, such as demanding the U.S. government permit Team Trump to embark on a classified-documents fishing expedition that seemed designed to do nothing but feed Trump’s rabid conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss and also his other deranged theories about the Jan. 6 riot being an anti-Trump, deep state set-up.
He and his attorneys were also aided by a friendly, Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida, whose recurring delays and balmy treatment toward the soon-to-be reelected president were so appreciated by Trumpland that she earned herself the unofficial title of their “favorite member of the Trump campaign.” And then, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority stepped in to further delay his federal trials, in a move that had some of Trump’s close associates “literally popping champagne.” Months later, the Supreme Court handed Trump a mammoth win, gifting him the landmark presidential-immunity decision.
The court ceded so much ground to Trump that some of his closest associates giddily compared the historic ruling to “Christmas.”
Finally, a plurality of the American electorate had their say in November, sending Trump back to do the one job in the entire nation that could have shielded him from prosecution and his likely federal convictions.
Trump got his get-out-of-jail-free card for these four, long years, and quite possibly the remainder of his days. He owes his return to presidential power and his freedom to the fact that he had the right to exploit the exalted standards and system of due process and stretch it out all the way past Election Day 2024.
Now that Trump got what he wanted, he of course wants to torch due process for pretty much everyone else in the nation who isn’t him, or who isn’t in his protected class of toadies and abetters. Due process is a foundational right that has long been guaranteed (or so we were led to believe) to citizens as well as noncitizens in this country.
If Trump achieves his goals of pulling the guts out of due process for some, he is eviscerating it for all. That’s the deal.
And yet, he and his senior administration officials have been publicly boasting for weeks about how they’re devoting vast resources and time to obliterating due-process rights not just for some, but for many. This is especially true in Trump’s crusade to execute the “largest” mass deportation blitz in U.S. history, to deport and punish as many of these immigrants as possible while stripping them of due process and hurling accusations of gang membership and “terrorist” ties, often without a hint of credible evidence.
“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” the president menacingly posted online last week. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do. What a ridiculous situation we are in.”
Over the weekend, Trump similarly posted: “It is not possible to have trials for millions and millions of people. We know who the Criminals are, and we must get them out of the U.S.A. — and FAST!”
On April 1, in what surely would have been an April Fool’s joke in a saner climate, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote online: “Friendly reminder: If you illegally invaded our country the only ‘process’ you are entitled to is deportation.”
Miller, an architect of Trump’s sprawling ethnic-cleansing fantasies, is hardly the only senior administration official to disturbingly use scare quotes around the term due process.
“To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: What process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors,” Vice President J.D. Vance wrote on X this month. “To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.”
According to the vice president and others in his echelon of Republican power, due process rights should be considered optional, like Casual Fridays.
These deportation operations (which more closely resemble kidnapping and rendition) now prominently feature rounding up scores or hundreds of people to fly them to a brutal El Salvador mega-prison — in partnership with one of Trump’s authoritarian buddies, Nayib Bukele, who runs the Central American nation — and then publicly brag that those “terrorists” are never getting out.
The Trump administration has handled these high-profile cases — particularly that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom he illegally shipped to El Salvador — with such an impassioned disdain for due process and willful defiance of the American courts that the president has triggered a full-blown constitutional crisis. Earlier this month, in a rare unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court’s justices ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to American soil and to make sure his immigration case is given the due process that “it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
Weeks after that happened, the Trump administration is still gleefully defying the high court’s order, daring someone, anyone, to do something about its lawless depravity. There continues to be zero evidence the administration is lifting a finger to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to his devastated family, even though all it would take is a single phone call from Trump. Trump and multiple members of his team have argued that the Supreme Court did not order them to do what the court clearly had ordered them to do, as the Trump White House performs its own version of Bill Clinton’s famous line about how “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” — but for fascism instead of blowjobs.
And if anyone thinks Trump’s mission to dismantle due-process rights will stop at the undocumented, the alleged or imagined “criminals” in his crosshairs, or other immigrants he and his government deem less-than, Trump officials have been actively workshopping how to make it “legal” to denaturalize certain enemies of the state, or strip them of their U.S. citizenship, and then expel them from our country — in some cases potentially to the notorious prison complex in El Salvador.
On top of all of Trump’s other efforts to force a real and terrifying democratic backsliding in the United States, the president is now evaporating the supposed independence of the Justice Department and publicly commanding, from his televised perch in the Oval Office, the attorney general to launch criminal investigations of several of his political enemies. In one case, there is zero evidence Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s target did anything wrong or illegal, other than commit the unforgivable sin of refusing to sign on to Trump’s attempts to lie about and steal the 2020 presidential election that he had lost to Joe Biden.
The idea that a passport or your place of birth will save you from Trump and the modern-day Republican Party’s wrath — as they take aim at due process, the rule of law, freedom of speech, basic civil and human rights, and so much else we claim to value as a society — was always a fanciful delusion. The president, though, has always been just one man. Trump, a former game-show host and forever a celebrity-gossip monger, is throwing American due process straight into the gore-caked wood chipper from the movie Fargo, and he’s doing it with the enthusiastic support of a shrinking but still sizable share of the nation’s electorate. More importantly, he’s desecrating those rights while being cheered on by every mover and shaker in the Republican Party who matters — and so many of those opportunists and bloodlusting ideologues are having a good laugh about it.
For decades, George Conway was a fixture in the Republican Party’s legal spheres of influence, but he publicly fell out with the party and the movement over their full-throttle embrace of Trumpist authoritarianism. Last month, the attorney and political commentator sent what he describes as “indignant texts” to fellow lawyer — one who Conway notes was the best man at his wedding — Robert Giuffra, who is now representing Trump in his appeal of his criminal conviction in the New York hush-money case last year.
“President Donald J. Trump’s appeal is important for the rule of law,” Giuffra said in January. “The misuse of the criminal law by the Manhattan DA to target President Trump sets a dangerous precedent, and we look forward to the case being dismissed on appeal.”
It doesn’t matter who does or does not buy Giuffra’s argument. The 45th and now 47th president of the United States has every right to appeal his conviction, and to ensure his due-process rights weren’t violated in the history-making process of making him the nation’s first convicted-felon president. It’s a facet of our justice system that Giuffra, Conway, and numerous other elite attorneys on the left and right frequently trumpet as the global gold standard of safeguards against tyranny, persecution, even dictatorship.
“I get that everyone is entitled to due process and that Bob and his firm should be able to represent whomever they want. But I told him it was wrong for him to do a favor like that for a guy who is openly trying to destroy our legal and constitutional system,” Conway tells Rolling Stone.
He adds: “I mean, how appalling is it that Trump — an outright criminal who should have gone to jail for far more than he was convicted of — is using his official power to punish lawyers for representing innocent people he doesn’t like and to deny people the very due process he’s getting? And yet there’s [Giuffra’s firm] Sullivan & Cromwell, representing Trump, just so Bob can feel important. It’s a disgrace, and his firm should be embarrassed.”
Another grand but inevitable irony of the second Trump presidency is that he campaigned during the 2024 race so routinely as the victim, claiming that all the legal and investigative efforts to hold him accountable for his array of alleged crimes and jaw-droppingly blatant abuses of power were nothing more than a form of “lawfare” by his Democratic nemeses. Trump, as he constantly propagandized to voters, was simply prey in a “two-tiered system of justice.”
“They’re not coming after me,” he claimed. “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”
Thanks to his second administration, those claims from Trump have now been made, in a sense, correct.
The government is now ruthlessly targeting you and your most fundamental constitutional rights. There is a two-tiered system of justice.
On one tier sits Trump, and whichever wealthy, fair-weather pals and suck-ups he allows to join him there. The second tier is reserved for his victims and the rest of us.
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