Can Eric Trump Even Hear Himself Speak?

There’s a good chance that in 13 months, Eric will be the son of a former President who traded on his father’s name and position to make money overseas. And yet, here he is, leading a “lock him up” chant about Hunter Biden, the son of a former vice President who traded on his father’s name and position to make money overseas.

I can’t think of a better example of how the Trumps assume that laws and norms are only for other people, never them.

The authoritarian, like a child, lives only in the now, unable to imagine that their present, self-serving actions might in the future come back to hurt them. The authoritarian assumes they will get to control what history says about them, just as they control the information their adoring rally crowds have in their heads. The authoritarian’s gamble is that they are the one who will cheat history, the one whose misdeeds will remain unpunished in the near present, and unexposed in the distant future.

Up to now, it has rarely worked that way. The truth is neither self-enforcing nor all-powerful, but when the gap between manufactured reality and reality itself grows unbridgeably wide, the man behind the curtain has a habit of getting exposed and brought down to size. The authoritarian wins the hearts of a nation’s cynics who believe, like him, that the rules are for suckers and losers. And when those rules eventually get applied to them, they whine like little babies about how unfairly they’re being treated.

It’s a terrible bind this bumbling, two-bit crime family has put our constitutional democracy in. Nations that get in the habit of locking up the previous administration are prone to instability and violence. But nations that fail to hold accountable leaders who abuse their power give license to future leaders to engage in similar if not worse abuses.

Son of President who says his father’s critics “are not even people” is shocked, when his party loses an election, to discover what happens in political cultures in which the opposition is regarded as an inhuman, existential threat.

I don’t know what the right approach to this is. I would walk out of a Democratic rally where someone led the crowd in a “lock them up” chant about the Trumps. Unleashing those furies can have all sorts of unintended consequences, most of them bad. But as we learned from Nixon’s pardon and eventual rehabilitation, allowing people to abuse power with impunity sets a terrible precedent.

Perhaps the distinctions we need here are between justice and vengeance, between a desire for accountability and a bloodlust for punishment and the suffering it entails. But the problem is that the rank and file of one of the nation’s two major parties, Trump’s party, does not honor those distinctions. To them, justice done to “one of theirs” is always perceived as partisan vengeance and unfair punishment.

Those tens of millions of people are not going away anytime soon. What the GOP desperately needs is leaders, both in elected office and in their media, who have the courage and ability to talk Trump’s base down off the authoritarian ledge. Not holding my breath on that one.