A Better F-Word Than Felon for Trump: Fascist

Reflections on the Single Trumpist Standard and "Post-Constitutional Times" + a Quick Postscript on the Hunter Biden verdict

I’d like to caution liberals and progressives against gleefully mocking Donald Trump’s new status as a “convicted felon.”  

Trump-bashing[1] is one thing.

Felon-bashing is something else altogether.

“Collateral Consequences”

The mark of a felony record is no laughing matter in this country, especially for the one in three US adult Black males who have been saddled with this crippling impediment to full citizenship.

As many as 100 million Americans, disproportionately Black and Latino, face a long list of barriers to “rejoining society” because of criminal records.  As the centrist Center for American Progress (CAP) reports:

“Following America’s failed experiment with mass incarceration and overcriminalization, an estimated 70 million to 100 million Americans now have some type of criminal record. While felony records carry the greatest stigma, in the digital era, any record—no matter how old or minor—can stand in the way of reentry, economic stability, and full participation in society…. The proliferation of criminal background checks alongside the sharp rise in the share of the population saddled with the stigma of a record—which has reached 1 in 3 U.S. adults—have become major drivers of poverty and racial inequality in the United States. Nine in 10 employers, 4 in 5 landlords, and 3 in 5 colleges and universities now use background checks to screen out applicants with criminal records. Often called ‘collateral consequences,’ the resulting barriers to employment, housing, education, and other basics put economic stability, let alone upward mobility, out of reach for tens of millions of individuals and families—disproportionately from communities of color—who have been affected by the U.S. criminal legal system….Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities have been particularly harmed by the dramatic increase in the number of people with records. Decades of biased policing and charging have resulted in people of color disproportionately bearing the brunt of mass incarceration and overcriminalization in the United States, and likewise, the criminal records crisis has also exacerbated stark levels of racial inequality. A recent study by the Brennan Center found that people who have been incarcerated see their subsequent earnings reduced by an average of 52 percent, with an average lifetime earnings loss of nearly half a million dollars… mass incarceration and its…collateral consequences serve as core underpinnings of the fabric of structural racism that defines much of 21st century American society. Black, Indigenous, and Latino people are disproportionately criminalized and more likely to have a record and be treated unfairly across society because of it…. People with records are…treated as ‘criminals’ long after they present any significant risk of committing a future crime—relegated to the ranks of a permanent underclass for no reason with any sound basis in public safety.”

Many felons are politically disenfranchised for life, denied the right to vote in American elections.

Explaining “The New Jim Crow”

What the CAP calls America’s “failed experiment in mass incarceration and overcriminalization” was initiated as a punitive form of racist counterinsurgency in response to the urban Black uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. The mass imprisonment and criminal branding campaign – what the law professor Michelle Alexander suggestively if somewhat inaccurately called “the New Jim Crow”[2] – was fueled further by the ongoing “neoliberal” (global-capitalist) evisceration of livable wage manufacturing employment proximate to the hyper-segregated ghettos to which much of the Black community was consigned in the early and middle 20^th Century. Lack of decent jobs and the expansion of the drug trade in opportunity-bereft Black and Latino inner cities and suburban rings helped turn Black and Latino neighborhoods into crime- and gang-plagued zones of despair that provided fodder for racist “law and order” zealots in both reigning US capitalist-imperialist political parties. The CIA helped fuel the madness by flooding minority communities with crack cocaine.  American racist capitalist imperialism undertook the massive warehousing of poor Black people, men especially, seen as no longer possessing profitably exploitable labor power. Their chief political-economic role for the neoliberal system was to serve as raw material for the building of rural prisons.

Exempt

The newly branded 34-count criminal Donald Trump is exempt from the “collateral consequences” of a felony record.  His wealth obviously insulates him from any danger of real economic insecurity resulting from his record.  He will retain his voting rights in Florida this year. He is free to run for a second term in the White House. Nothing in the US Constitution forbids a felon from doing so. The Christian Fascist Supreme Court he did so much to create during his first presidency has shot down efforts to use the 14^th Amendment’s “insurrection clause” to remove him from the ballot for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. His status as front-runner in the 2024 race has remained intact despite his convictions.

Judith Browne Dianis, director of the Advancement Project Action Fund,  told CBS News that Trump has obviously escaped the sort of unfair treatment that Black and Hispanic people regularly experience in the US criminal justice system: “He didn’t have a violent arrest by police, he didn’t stay a night in Rikers Island because he couldn’t afford bail, he didn’t even go to jail. He could pay a battery of lawyers to represent him and he can pay for an appeal.”

The man Noam Chomsky has reasonably called “the most dangerous criminal in human history” is not going behind bars.

Of course.

The Same Courthouse

The dark and ironic, racially disparate comedy goes deeper. The newly convicted felon Trump remains a leading and powerful agent and cheerleader of the racist mass incarceration campaign that long ago turned the United States into the world’s leading prison and criminal-branding state. His not so subtly racist calls for a massive and violent “law and order” crackdown on Black and brown America includes a promise to deploy the US military to “end inner city crime in one day” (essentially a call for mass executions). Trump has never apologized for his highly public calls for the execution of the Central Park Five, a group of subsequently exonerated Black and Latino men who were falsely convicted for raping and killing a white women in the 1980s.

In a rich irony, Trump was convicted by a jury of twelve New Yorkers in the very same courthouse where the Central Park Five were convicted in a racist show trial for a crime they never committed.

The Single Fascist Standard

Liberals and progressives no doubt see “hypocrisy” in Trump’s claim to be a victim of a “rigged” and “two-tier” criminal justice system that he himself has worked to distort against those on the wrong sides of the nation’s gaping race and class chasms.   

But it’s not really about hypocrisy and double standards.  It’s about the single standard of Trumpist neofascism, which backs the rule of law when the people punished are one’s social and political enemies but rejects the rule of law when it is applied to oneself and one’s followers and fellow reactionaries, putschists, revanchists, and, …well fascists. Trump is planning to pardon hundreds of the fascist thugs who criminally attacked the US Capitol in his name and in defense of his Hitlerian claim of a stolen election on January 6.

A Better F-Word

If you want to brand Trump with an F-word, let me suggest a better one than felon.  Try fascist. I’ve been showing precisely why fascist fits him very well here, on CounterPunch, at Refuse Fascism for years.  I also wrote a whole book about the match.

“Post-Constitutional Times”

Consistent with what I and others have been saying about how the grotesque US-American capitalist-imperialist order has enabled and promoted this sick fascist maniac, the US political and legal system has showed itself abjectly unwilling and/or unable to bring Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump to legal heel before the 2024 election for the much bigger federal and state crimes on which he has been indicted: insurrection, election subversion, classified document theft, and more. His “hush money” crimes are minor compared to those ones. If Trump wins in 2024-25, and he very well may, all these charges will be promptly cancelled and nullified.

Speaking of fascism, get a look at a recent Washington Post report on Trump47’s likely first chief of staff Russ Vought. Vought is:  

“a battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails ‘radical constitutionalism.…He has helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations – and that’s just on Trump’s first day back in office. …‘We are living in a post-Constitutional time,’ Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions.”

“The left has corrupted the nation's laws and institutions”! Know any other good jokes.

Postscript: Do This Switch-Out

This essay was written right before the federal Hunter Biden felony convictions, which contradict the Trumpist-Republi-fascist narrative claiming that the criminal justice system is rigged for Democrats and against Republi-fascists. No love for Biden here, to say the least, but switch out Genocide Joe B for Fascist Donald T and Hunter B for Donald T, Jr: 1. The prosecuction would almost certainly never have occurred both because there’s no F'ng way a president Trump would let his son be prosecuted by the US Department of Justice and because the right would be against such a prosecution on Second Amendment/gun rights grounds. 2. If somehow a federal prosecution happened and won a conviction, the Republi-fascist right would go apeshit out of fealty to their orange-hued fearless leader and on Second Amendment/gun rights grounds and daddy Don would pardon Don Jr. immediately.

Endnotes

1. Just to be clear, I am no fan of the kind of childish liberal Trump-bashing that treats the 45th US president as some sort of supernatural devil incarnate somehow operating outside and above his enabling historical, social, political, and institutional context – a context that includes the miserable complicity of the dismal neoliberal Democratic Party of “inauthentic opposition” (Sheldon Wolin’s phrase). That kind of Trump hatred actually deserves the right-wing and Trumpenleftish label of “Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).” The radical Marxist criticism of Trumpism-fascism that I and others have advanced over the years does not.  

2.  Jim Crow oppression was directed at the entire Black population in the US South.  It enforced a cotton-productionist regime of mass racist labor exploitation. Contemporary racist mass incarceration is largely about the warehousing of de-/post-industrialized Black and Brown people who have largely been separated from production processes. It is directed mainly at lower-/under- and working-class Black and brown people, not Black and Brown middle and upper class people, even if racist policies and structures do make middle and upper class Black and Brown people far more subject to police harassment and general criminal justice mistreatment than their white class counterparts, to say the least.