Giving Trump Just What He Wants

Elite self-protection and anarchist violence both feed the authoritarian dialectic

What do the assassination of Brian Thompson and the pardon of Hunter Biden have in common? Nothing, apparently. In the one case, an unknown gunman killed a wealthy and powerful man, possibly as a protest against the policies of the company that man ran. In the other case, one of the most powerful men on earth protected his son from the legal consequences of his crimes, both alleged and established. They seem like opposites, right?

But both are actually responses to a common perception of democratic breakdown. And both are responses that could very well accelerate that breakdown, giving democracy’s enemies exactly what they need to justify a further turn toward authoritarianism, while hobbling those who would try to stop it.

The initial reaction to President Biden’s sweeping pardon of his son was largely negative, including from his own party. But a variety of voices did rise in the president’s defense, many of them arguing that there was every reason to fear that Donald Trump, once he became president, would turn the Justice Department into an instrument of personal vengeance against those he considered his enemies—Hunter Biden included. After all, he promised during the campaign to do exactly that, and the appointees he has named for the relevant jobs appear to have been selected precisely for their willingness to fulfill that promise. Even if you think Hunter Biden deserved some kind of punishment, you couldn’t expect a loving father to hand him over to a pack of slavering wolves, could you?

The same logic, though, extends far beyond Hunter Biden, and now it appears that the White House is seriously considering following that logic to further pardons of people they think Trump is likely to go after: Democratic members of Congress, public health officials, and prominent Trump critics. These people have done nothing to merit prosecution, so the argument goes, but their innocence won’t stop Trump from pursuing them to the point of financial and professional ruin. The only just thing to do, therefore, is remove them from his path.

This, though, is thinking only one move at a time in an iterative game. What’s the next move? Obviously, for Trump to point to how the “Biden crime family” abused the pardon power to stop him from getting to the bottom of the massive criminal conspiracy he’s been talking about all along. And what will the Democrats say in response to that accusation? “Sure, all these people have been accused of crimes, but we don’t believe they did anything wrong, so we pardoned them so as to spare them the indignity of an investigation and trial. We’d be outraged if Trump did anything similar (which he has and will again), but you should trust that our motives are different because we’re the Rule of Law party. Thank you.” Does that sound like a persuasive message to you?

The usual rejoinder to this is to say that Trump doesn’t need any justification for what he’s going to do or say, so nobody should worry about giving him “justification”—but the question isn’t what Trump will do or say but how effective it will be, and that question is bound up with how it is perceived by the public. An action like pardoning a raft of officials may seem to many Democrats like a sensible response to a palpable threat, but Democrats aren’t the only people whose opinions matter, at least not if they care about ultimately defeating Trump. And many of those other people whose opinions matter do not trust the Democrats—which is why they didn’t vote for them in the last election. Nor are the individuals proposed to be pardoned the only people who will be under threat if the rule of law continues to crumble. Even if you believe the rule of law is inevitably going to crumble over the next four years, a raft of pardons for the politically powerful looks an awful lot like giving them the first seats in a rush for the lifeboats. That won’t just play badly with voters; it will encourage others to think in similarly apocalyptic terms about the future, and take the actions they see as justified thereby.

Which brings me to the assassination of Brian Thompson. We don’t yet know what prompted the unknown gunman to kill him in cold blood, but if reports are accurate that the bullets he used were inscribed with the words “delay” and “deny” then it seems likely his motive was related to UnitedHealthcare’s practices, which have drawn criticism from a variety of quarters. Possibly the gunman’s grievance was personal, related to his own care or that of someone he loved being delayed and denied, or possibly it was more broadly political, an example of the anarchist “propaganda of the deed” designed to demonstrate that even the wealthy and powerful cannot be protected from the people’s righteous revenge. Regardless of his motives, his action has elicited a certain amount of sympathy, and not only from “Medicare for All” fans on the left:

Whether the feeling is “what do you expect to happen when insurance companies let people die and nobody stops them?” or, as above, something more like “he would have been a good CEO if it’d been somebody there to shoot him every minute of his life,” either way the reaction, like the assassination itself, is an expression of despair, specifically despair at politics, at our collective ability to make decisions that serve the common interest. I understand how the return of Trump has deepened those feelings of despair among his liberal opponents, but those opponents need to understand that this is a dialectic, and that Trump’s own support is derived substantially from similar feelings of despair on the right. The anarchist impulse and the authoritarian impulse are two sides of the same despairing coin, each justifying and feeding the other in a widening gyre. We have to slow that cycle, not feed into it, and that means engaging in politics—normal politics.

South Korea may just have averted a self-coup. If they have, it’s because President Yoon’s proposed authoritarian “solution” to political deadlock lacked both popular and elite support. Yoon failed to win the support of the populace, but he also failed to win the support of the military leadership or the rank-and-file, or even of his own party. If you are worried about authoritarianism under Trump, then you should be trying to figure out how to deny him that support, because while he might try anything (and we can’t stop him from trying), he needs that support to succeed.

Abandoning the rule of law, whether by issuing preemptive pardons to elites or cheering anarchist violence against elites, isn’t just hypocritical behavior on the part of liberals. It’s playing right into the authoritarians’ hands.