It is not a crime if MAGA does it

Three years after his ignominious resignation, Richard Nixon justified his crimes by saying, “It's not a crime if the President does it.” The comment was widely ridiculed at the time. It seems less funny today. In fact, Nixon's words gained renewed relevance when Donald Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to declare him immune from prosecution for his alleged extensive misdeeds.

Two news reports last week confirmed that Trump's appeal for an exemption is not just another narcissistic pipe dream. His special plea can no longer even be called idiosyncratic. Immunity from public criticism, including the strictures of the law itself, is an operative goal of the anti-democratic movement that Trump leads. Its functional credo is: “It's not a crime if MAGA does something.”

This is how a notoriously partisan Supreme Court judge justified his family raising an upside-down distress flag after the violent attack on the country's constitutional integrity on January 6 – apparently in solidarity with the insurgents (and with the wife of another Supreme Court judge, who vigorously cheered the uprising).

The New York Times reported: “After President Biden won the 2020 election, supporters of former President Donald J. Trump rallied around the upside-down flag and displayed it on their homes, their cars and on social media to show that they believed Mr. Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen.”

In comments tellingly relayed to Fox News, Justice Samuel Alito defended his household's upside-down flag in response to a dispute with neighbors. According to Alito, raising the flag wasn't his fault. His wife was. Not that there was anything wrong with that. The couple was targeted by nasty neighbors who used vulgar language and showed hostility toward the top MAGA leader. Fox News reported that Alito said neighbors even put up a sign blaming Alito's wife for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. What else could a powerless white middle-class couple in the wilds of suburban Washington do to defend themselves against the horrible liberals?

Alito is arguably the most MAGA-like justice; his jurisprudence is less originalist or textualist than Trumpist or Foxist. Flying a partisan flag is consistent with his grievance-ridden partisanship. But even for Alito, tying it to the central lie that drives a violent attempt to overthrow the republic is a grotesque violation of ethics and common sense.

However, it is not corrupt if a MAGA judge does it, and it is not a crime if a MAGA mob does it.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott last week expanded MAGA immunity from assault to murder. Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry, a white man who drove his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in Austin in 2020, gunning down one who approached his car. Both men were legally armed. Thanks to legislation supported by Abbott and his Republican allies, virtually anyone, including Perry, who fantasized about murdering protesters in his writings, was legally allowed to carry a gun in Texas. No witness claimed that the victim, Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old former U.S. Air Force mechanic, had brandished his semiautomatic rifle; it had been pointed at the ground. So Perry had no legal justification for shooting Foster, and after a public trial, a jury of his fellow citizens convicted him of murder.

Perry's writings exposed him as a racist who compared BLM protesters to “apes.” BLM is, of course, the bogeyman of MAGA, which seeks to reinforce traditional racial hierarchy, opposes efforts to curb racial discrimination, and portrays white Christians as an oppressed class in a society where power is disproportionately concentrated among white Christians.

So Perry murdered one of MAGA's designated villains. And murder is not a crime when MAGA commits it.

Abbott's pardon recalls a neologism that has gained currency in recent years: that conservatives use the law as a shield or a sword, depending on the identity of the protagonists. For MAGA, the shield of the law protects. For non-MAGA, the sword of the law punishes. Kyle Rittenhouse, a young white man whose only accomplishment is to have ruthlessly killed protesters and escaped punishment, is celebrated in the MAGA scene for embodying this ideal. A Missouri couple who threatened peaceful, lawful protesters with semi-automatic firearms in 2020 also became MAGA heroes, receiving a speaking engagement at the Republican National Convention that year. In 2021, Missouri's Republican governor, Mike Parson, pardoned them.

Before leaving office in 2021, Trump pardoned a number of criminals, including Paul Manafort, the “serious counterintelligence risk factor” embroiled in corruption and Russian intrigue whom Trump had put at the head of his 2016 campaign. Manafort refused to cooperate with prosecutors, and Trump rewarded him for it, just as he did MAGA cronies Steve Bannon and Roger Stone.

These pardons are easily explained by Trump's gangland code. But the former president has all but guaranteed that in a second term he would also pardon the criminals who attacked the Capitol. Trump's appreciation of crime was also evident in his support for military personnel, including former Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who is accused of war crimes. “They are great warriors,” Trump said.

Degenerate political movements, including Trump's ambitious model, Putinism, inevitably recruit criminals into their ranks and use them violently. MAGA, which has now consolidated its control over the GOP, is increasingly stoking threats of violence. Its leader, faced with a mountain of evidence of criminal conduct and desperate to avoid prison, is threatening violence. Abbott, Alito and other MAGA leaders are stoking that threat.

It is entirely plausible that if Trump were to return to power, he would pardon the criminal who violently attacked the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump has joked about the attack. A pardon for Paul Pelosi's attacker is no more outlandish than the pardon Abbott issued last week. In the MAGA ideology, the law binds but does not protect MAGA's opponents. And it protects but does not bind MAGA.

It's not a crime if MAGA does it.

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