Nice Democracy You Got There ... Shame if Something Happened To It

America is increasingly a democracy in name only.

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Jonathan Bernstein made an interesting point yesterday about our president. He’s a loser.

I seem to keep writing about Donald Trump as a loser, but every time I turn around there’s more – and I don’t think it sinks in nearly as well as it should.

This comes up after political scientist Adam Bonica posted some figures on Trump’s record in district courts during his second term. It turns out that Trump has lost in district courts at a startling 96% rate in May. Perhaps even more striking: So far, January through May, Trump has lost 72% of the time with district court judges nominated by Republicans (and 80% with those chosen by Democrats). Bonica points out that Trump is doing better at the Supreme Court, but even there he’s suffered quite a few defeats.

And that’s not all! Trump’s tariffs are a story of losing and losing again, most recently in postponing higher tariffs that he threatened Europe with. Trump does appear to have won a few bribes, but so far at least he has pretty much nothing else to show for all his threats.

His attempts to conquer Greenland, Canada, and portions of Panama are pathetic jokes. His dream of ethnic cleansing in Gaza followed by US occupation is a sick, sad, joke. His claims that he could end wars in Gaza and Ukraine? All bluster. More losing. As was his brief escalation against the Houthis in Yemen.

Even where he seems to win, he loses. Take the megabill that the House passed last week. Yes, Trump seems to have helped get the bill over the finish line. And House Republicans did include his various tax promises from the 2024 campaign, so that (so far) counts as a real win for the president. But along the way, he repeatedly said he was against slashing Medicaid, and they entirely ignored him – indeed, after he came to the Hill early last week and told them to leave Medicaid alone, they wound up adding additional cuts to get House Freedom Caucus radicals on board.

I have quoted Jonathan at length because it’s important to remember that much of Trump’s agenda has been stopped in its tracks. The numbers he cites regarding Trump’s legal losses are staggering and demonstrate how the White House’s incompetence and unwillingness even to pretend to adhere to the law have undermined many of its policy goals.

But here’s the problem: there are plenty of other ways for Trump to undermine the rule of law, screw up our governing institutions and do long-term damage to our democracy.

Pardon Me …

Take, for example, his flagrant misuse of the president’s pardon power.

President Donald Trump announced on Monday his pardon of former Culpeper County, Virginia, sheriff Scott Jenkins, who was convicted of federal bribery and fraud charges in December.

… Jenkins was sheriff for 12 years before being voted out of office after his indictment on bribery charges. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for accepting more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for appointing wealthy businessmen as unpaid auxiliary deputies. Prosecutors said the men paid for badges so that they could avoid traffic tickets and carry concealed firearms without a permit.

You’ll likely be shocked to hear that Sheriff Jenkins is a long-time Trump supporter.

Jenkins’ pardon comes a month after Trump issued another pardon to another political ally, Michelle Fiore.

Fiore, a former Las Vegas city councilwoman and state lawmaker who ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for state treasurer, was found guilty in October of six counts of federal wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

… The pardon, issued Wednesday, comes less than a week after Fiore lost a bid for a new trial. She had been facing the possibility of decades in prison.

Federal prosecutors said at trial that Fiore, 54, had raised more than $70,000 for the statue of a Las Vegas police officer who was fatally shot in 2014 in the line of duty, but had instead spent some of it on cosmetic surgery, rent and her daughter’s wedding.

In related news, the New York Times reported today that Paul Walczak, “a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election,” received a pardon three weeks after his mother attended a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

According to the Times:

It came just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.

Guess not.

As for Walczak’s crimes, here’s a flavor:

Between 2016 and 2019 … he withheld more than $10 million from the paychecks of the nurses, doctors and others who worked at his facilities under the pretext of using it for their Social Security, Medicare and federal income taxes. Instead, he used some of the money to buy a $2 million yacht and to pay for travel and purchases at high-end retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman and Cartier, prosecutors said.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the once-sober pardon process has been replaced by what it calls a “Wild West” approach that depends mainly on Trump’s whims.

Pardon seekers are shelling out to hire lawyers and lobbyists who tout access to those in the president’s inner circle. Others seek to make their case to Trump or his inner circle at places they frequent, showing up at events at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, GOP hangouts on Capitol Hill and a collegiate wrestling match. And still others connect with conservative influencers, pitching their case on shows Trump consumes.

The president is listening. Several of the pardons he has issued so far followed advocacy by people close to him. Some lawyers with close ties to Trump, including the president’s former lawyers Jesse Binnall and Jim Trusty, have helped clients pursue pardons, people familiar with the matter said.

… “You need someone who can get in front of the president for five minutes and make a pitch of how a person was wrongfully targeted,” said Eric Rosen, a defense attorney who has clients seeking pardons.

If you’re a Republican officeholder or Trump ally right now, what reason is there not to openly break the law? Chances are slim that you’ll be prosecuted, and even if you are, a pot of money or a compelling sob story about how the Justice Department victimized you (like Trump believes happened to him) could provide a pardon down the road.

To say this undermines the rule of law in America is perhaps the understatement of the century. In most of these cases, federal prosecutors spent years accumulating evidence, talking to witnesses, and building cases. Yet, all it takes is a short meeting with Trump to undo all that work.

Trump’s flagrant misuse of pardon power creates, in effect, a two-tier system of justice. Prominent Democrats face the threat of federal investigation and possible prosecution, while MAGA Republicans or other allies of the president get to walk. For others with deep pockets, there is an explicit quid pro quo: donate to Trump’s various political action committees, or maybe buy his meme coin, and a pardon could be in your future. This is naked corruption, out in the open, for anyone to see and seek to take advantage of. Pardons are available to the highest bidders, and Trump is more than happy to abuse this presidential power for his personal enrichment.

Ask yourself? What would Americans say if they saw such behavior in any other country in the world?

Trump’s War On Harvard

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It’s not often I read something that leaves me as stunned and dismayed as this interview with The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt re: Trump’s legal assault against Harvard University.

I’d imagine that for international students, this makes the prospect of attending Harvard feel deeply uncertain — even unappealing. Where would the university find itself, even if it wins?

Even if Harvard runs the table in court, it’s still persona non grata with the Trump administration, and that means that it’s going to continue to face investigations, including from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?

Harvard finds itself in this impossible position. If it continues to fight the administration, it will continue to get hit with these extraordinary uses of federal power to punish the university.

The federal government has more levers to use against an institution like Harvard than certainly I had appreciated. If you are persona non grata with Trump, he’s got you by the lapels in a way that is extraordinary. And Harvard is feeling it. What we saw yesterday is just the latest pressure point.

This is legitimately one of the more harrowing things I've read in a very long time. What Schmidt is describing here is a full-scale extrajudicial assault by the federal government on the nation's premier university, based, it seems, purely on animus.

With any other president, this would be grounds for impeachment. A presidential administration cannot simply declare war on a university and use every extrajudicial tool at its disposal to attack it ... but that's precisely what's happening. There is simply no functional check on what the Trump administration is doing. As Schmidt points out, even if Harvard “runs the table in court” (and that seems like a reasonable possibility), the damage to the university will be enormous. Harvard will spend millions of dollars to defend itself against a vengeful president. It’ll likely lose tens of millions in research grants as well as potential students who might choose to go elsewhere. This is the equivalent of killing the accused with process, or more accurately, using process as punishment.

Trump’s war on Harvard is the type of capricious behavior that led Americans to take up arms more than two centuries ago. I’m not exaggerating. What Schmidt is describing here is a federal government that is completely lawless and using the institutions of government to harass, intimidate, and terrorize its political opponents. A country where the federal government can carry out this kind of assault on a private educational institution, and Congress, the only constitutional check on executive power, is silent, can no longer be considered a democracy.

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