The Best People

Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, aka The Best People

By Finbarr Curtis

The "best people" are breaking lots of laws these days. It's not every day that multiple people from a sitting president's campaign team are found to be felons. August 21st was special, however. Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer, porn-star whisperer, and wannabe Sopranos consigliere, fessed up to 8 felony counts of tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations. Ostrich fetishist and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort got the bad news that a jury convicted him on 8 counts of tax fraud, bank fraud, and failing to report a foreign bank account.

Oops.

All of this is ironic if you took seriously Donald Trump's boast that he hires the best people. The lawlessness of Cohen and Manafort, following on the catch-me-if-you-can brazen illegality of past appointees like Michael Flynn, Tom Price, and Scott Pruitt, would be yet more evidence of hypocrisy from a man who ran on a law-and-order platform.

But that depends on what you mean by law. The Trump team might be hypocrites if you believe that law should be a set of predictable, consistent, and transparent rules that apply to everyone in the same way. In American history, however, calls for law and order mean almost exactly the opposite of this. Rather than treat everyone equally, law-and-order advocates want to harness the force of law to maximize protections of their own security and property. Law that provides equal protection for all citizens requires the sort of methodical, bureaucratic administration that law-and-order proponents hate. This kind of law appears slow and weak to people who demand swift justice. It's the red tape that reigns in the would-be Dirty Harry's of the world.

Trump clarified what he meant by law and order when Lester Holt, the moderator of the first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, asked the candidates how they would heal racial divisions in America. Trump responded: "Well, first of all Secretary Clinton doesn't want to use a couple of words and that’s law and order. And we need law and order. If we don't have it, we’re not going to have a country." This answer was remarkable because the question did not ask how the candidates planned to address crime. Law and order was Trump's response to racial divisions.

In other words, law and order is about deciding who is under the law and who is above the law. This is why it has been a code for white supremacy. But it is also why law-and-order conservatives break the most laws. They do not want to follow the law as much as they seek to make use of the law's authority and power. This helps to account for the Trumpian admiration of Russian oligarchs who can line their own pockets with government money while killing their critics with impunity. Reducing law to pure power fits within a politics of winners and losers, or friends and enemies. Members of the Nixon administration, famous for keeping an "enemies list," anticipated the current administration's appeal to law and order coupled with a sense of entitlement to break whatever laws they needed to consolidate their hold on power. Indeed, Nixon's aides broke laws even when they didn't have to. Part of the appeal of corruption is the feeling of importance that comes when you have the power to reap benefits that others cannot. It is the ideology of cutting in line. Line cutters do not appeal to fairness to defend their actions; they do it because they do not want to have to wait like everyone else.

On the flip side of the person above the law is the undocumented immigrant, known simply as "an illegal." To be a person outside of the law is to become a dehumanized body stripped of any rights or protections. It is the kind of arbitrary exercise of force that strips children from parents, or houses people in camps. No amount of statistical evidence demonstrating that illegal immigration has been on the decline or that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans can assuage the anger stoked by individual stories of criminality. "Illegals" play an important role in the law and order imagination not because of any objective threat, but because they represent the perfect reduction of law to a politics of identification.

It can be an exciting, heady thing to be above the law, to be able to dominate other human beings who cannot fight back. For this reason, calls for law and order are really consistent with the pattern of flagrant lawbreaking that we see across the Trump administration. People like Cohen and Manafort hoped to reap the rewards of Trump's promise of so much winning.