My editor and old friend emailed me this morning about Trump’s latest outrages.You may have missed them given the dizzying pace of authoritarian bombast from the White House — executive orders, threats, insults, boasts, firings and lies — lobbed almost hourly.

 

On Aug. 25 Trump signed an executive order to eliminate “cashless bail” in D.C. criminal courts and in several other jurisdictions where it’s used.  A second executive order called for the Department of Justice to prosecute people who burn the American flag, a controversial issue settled long ago by the Supreme Court, or so we thought. Now it’s back because Trump can’t resist poking at issues sure to get MAGA blood boiling. 

 

First, let’s look at cashless bail, a criminal-justice reform that was gaining momentum when I wrote about it back in 2018. Here’s a link:

 

https://thequixoticdeacon.com/general/going-to-jail/

 

Criminal courts in D.C. and several states began using cashless bail about 15 years ago. Until then people who were arrested and charged with crimes had to pay a cash bail in order to be released while awaiting their trials. Cash bails incentivized accused criminals to show up for trials. If they didn’t, the court seized their bail money. 

 

No problem for people who had money; they paid and walked free. But people with no money could be held in jail for months, even years, waiting to be tried in the country’s clogged court systems. 

 

In one particularly egregious case in New York City in 2010, a teenager accused of stealing a backpack spent three years in jail on Rikers Island, mostly in solitary confinement, before going to trial.  He hadn’t been able to come up with bail money. When he finally got to court, the charges were dismissed. He later killed himself.

 

Cashless bail seeks to eliminate an inequity inherent in cash bails, which effectively criminalize poverty. Judges weigh non-monetary factors — Is the accused a flight risk? Does he/she pose a danger to the community?  — in deciding whether pre-trial release is appropriate. Now, Trump is demanding  a return to a system that rations justice on the basis of money, and by extension, on the basis of race, since the wealth gap between black and white Americans is so pronounced.  

 

Opposition to his executive order on cashless bail has been muted. Not surprising, because more immediate crises, all of Trump’s making, have  dominated the news. In just over two weeks, he’s threatened the independence of the the Fed, dispatched armed soldiers to the streets of Washington, botched negotiations over the fate of Ukraine, deported immigrants to countries he calls “shitholes,” set about to sanitize the Smithsonian and fired respected senior government officials who pushed back. The New York Times played its story about the executive order deep inside its main section; The Washington Post had it two-thirds of the way down its home page.  But I am not so sure that the majority of the populace really cares if we ration justice according to income. 

 

What a shame. Trump’s order threatens a reform that gives meaning to the words inscribed above the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court building: “Equal Justice Under Law”

  

Flag burning

Trump’s other executive order directs the Justice Department to prosecute anyone who burns the American flag. It flies in the face of a 1989 Supreme Court decision that said flag-burning was a form of political expression protected by the First Amendment — quite a statement from that conservative court. (The majority included Justice Antonin Scalia, an originalist and anchor of the court’s conservative wing.) 

 

Now Trump, unable to pass up an opportunity to fire up MAGAs, has ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to find a flag-burning case that can be used to reverse the high court’s 1989 decision. Until she does, Trump’s order probably won’t get much attention. And when she does, many Americans will shrug, as they did before. They believe that flag burners deserve to be prosecuted for desecrating our most revered symbol of patriotism. 

 

Think about our flag. We’re taught to pledge our allegiance to it in grade school. We put our hands over our hearts when it’s raised on a flag pole as the National Anthem is played. At football games huge American flags are stretched taut on the field before kickoff, as fighter jets roar by to remind us of our military might. Our politicians, both Democrat and Republican, wear American flag lapel pins. We live in a cult of flag worship. It’s rather ridiculous if you think about it at all. 

 

At the risk of coming off as anti-American, I believe that patriotism – a virtue that in its purist form reflects devotion to noble principles like those in our Constitution — can morph into something sinister: Nationalism, and never more so than under Trump. He embodies the tenets of nationalism taken to a dangerous extreme — an us-against-them mentality, a certainty that America is superior to other nations, and a belief that individual rights should be brushed aside if they conflict with the interests of the nation-state. 

 

Beware. We’ve seen where extreme nationalism can take a country. In Germany it paved the way for two world wars. Serbian nationalism caused millions of deaths in the Balkans a couple of decades ago. Russian nationalism made the invasions of Ukraine inevitable. Chinese nationalism makes a future invasion of Taiwan likely. When nationalism hides behind the benign word patriotism, it is destructive..

 

A nation like ours, soaked in jingoism for decades, can easily be manipulated by an autocrat like Trump. Have you ever wondered why American flags are arrayed behind him at rallies and speeches?  I think the message is that he’s the nationalist in chief. When he goes after flag burners, how many of us understand that he’s spitting on the First Amendment? Most Americans, I’m afraid, applaud him for protecting our beloved symbol of liberty. Similarly, we applaud whenever our military girds up to “protect our freedom.” No one dares ask exactly how sending offensive weapons to Israel for their war on Gaza protects freedom here. Being complacent in the face of nationalism run amok is who we are. 

 

Every once in a while I remind myself that the damage done to this country by putting Trump back in the White House was totally predictable. I do so by re-reading and re-posting what the editor of The New Yorker,  David Remnick, wrote on the night Trump won his first election in 2016. Here’s the first sentence of Remnick’s editorial, titled An American Tragedy:

 

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. 

 

It never occurred to me back then that Remnick’s assessment would turn out to be an understatement. Could Remnick have imagined that the entire Republican Party would support any whim that flitted across the 79-year-old brain of this would-be despot? Could Remnick have imagined that the entire Republican Party would excuse Trump’s attempted overthrow of the government? Could he have imagined a charlatan like Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense or a whack-job conspiracy theorist like Kash Patel as director of the FBI?  I could go on. 

 

I don’t put all the blame on Trump — no more than I would if I disturbed a rattlesnake and it bit me. It’s what they’re wired to do. I should have kept my distance. Trump is also wired, in his case, to be a dictator. If his first term didn’t make it abundantly clear, the first 8 months of his second term has removed any doubt. 

 

The mounting disaster of Trump II wouldn’t have happened if Republican loyalists — senators, representatives, governors, mayors, Supreme Court justices, cheerleaders on Fox News and ultimately MAGA voters — had any moral backbone. They sold us out to a dangerous, power-hungry narcissist.

 

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A note: I just learned of the mass shooting at the Catholic school in Minneapolis. I expect I’ll soon hear some politician saying that “this is not who we are.” What BS! This is exactly who we are. Such tragedies are emblematic of the meanness and moral decay that pervade our country under Trump. Don’t expect anything but token hand-wringing from him or Republican politicians  — certainly no meaningful action. Protecting the profits of gun manufacturers trumps keeping kids safe every time. A friend of mine sent me a short poem (origin unknown) that says it all about our country’s love of guns:

 

England is a cup of tea,

France, a wheel of ripened brie,

Greece, a short, squat olive tree, 

America is a gun.

 

Brazil a football on the sand, 

Argentina, Maradona’s land, 

Germany, an oompah band, 

America is a gun. 

 

Holland is a wooden shoe, 

Hungary, a goulash stew, 

Australia, a kangaroo, 

America is a gun.

 

Japan is a thermal spring, 

Scotland is a highland fling, 

Oh, better to be anything.

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