Jonathan P. Baird

Around the time of the No Kings demonstrations earlier in June, I saw the following sign on social media:

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their home. Families are torn apart…Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.” Anne Frank, 1943

What Anne Frank described is going on now. For anyone who has been paying attention to the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or as it is called ICE, they have been on an out-of-control rampage rounding up thousands of immigrants all over the United States. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has demanded that federal agents arrest 3,000 people a day. It is called Operation At Large.

In the process of attempting to meet the quota, ICE has been creating an anti-democratic police state. ICE has entirely junked any concept of law or due process. There has been a race to arrest as many as possible as quickly as possible.

ICE and the Custom and Border Protection have been terrorizing Latino communities, especially. People are so terrified of the federal government they are afraid to leave their homes. This includes residents who have lived in the United States for decades. ICE has been turning formerly thriving business communities into ghost towns. People are afraid to go outside out of fear of an ICE kidnapping.

The lawlessness could not be more apparent. Masked, unidentified ICE goon squads in unmarked vehicles have been disappearing people from workplaces, churches, farms, street corners, high school volley ball practices as well as immediately after their citizenship hearings. The masking and lack of identification is an obvious problem particularly in light of the shootings of the Minnesota legislators by the guy who dressed up like a cop. How do those being detained even know if they are being taken away by any lawful authority?

Those taken are often removed to faraway concentration camps compromising any right to counsel. Just finding and reaching a detained person can take days. As we have seen, some of those gobbled up by ICE are next located in an unreachable gulag outside the country where they have been transported with no due process.

No longer is there any attempt to focus on those with alleged criminal records. Now the focus is on anyone with a brown skin, regardless of whether they have any criminal history. ICE wants to put them on a plane out of the country as soon as it is feasible. It doesn’t matter if the detained person is married to a U.S. citizen or has small children and is breast-feeding.

The Trump administration has ordered immigration judges to quickly dismiss cases by denying asylum seekers a hearing. They have entirely short-circuited asylum law. The stories have been piling up of fast-tracked removals from the U.S. as well as stories of American citizens being improperly detained and even removed from the country.

ICE facilities throughout the country can accommodate 41,500 people but are currently holding more than 56,000. It is forgotten that being undocumented in the U.S. is a civil infraction, not a criminal offense. The Trump administration will never acknowledge that as it cuts against their demonization agenda.

This is all taking place before our eyes but no one has a full picture of what the ICE secret police force is up to. We can only see bits and pieces of their operations. ICE always says it is deporting “the worst of the worst” but invariably it is people who have lived in the U.S. for decades who have been contributing members of society. ICE data shows a staggering increase in the number of those arrested who have no track record of being charged with or convicted of a crime,

Trump’s budget bill includes $75 billion in supplemental funding for ICE, an enormous increase. He wants to deploy 10,000 more ICE agents to conduct more monstrous raids. ICE’s budget in 2024 was $9 billion. If the budget bill passes with the ICE increase, expect a tsunami of more deportations.

This is the gravest threat to civil liberties in my lifetime. The public reaction has not been commensurate with the threat. The No Kings demonstrations were tremendous but our institutions need to respond. The Democratic Party has failed to sound the alarm.

I would suggest we need a public investigation and hearings that thoroughly expose the actions of ICE. ICE operations are conducted in secrecy and they are hiding what they are doing from the public as much as possible. The Department of Homeland Security is imposing new limits on visits by members of Congress to immigration enforcement facilities.This is contrary to federal law which explicitly allows members of Congress to make unannounced oversight visits.

There are many questions that need to be answered: how many have been deported? What kind of process did they receive? Who is getting a hearing before an immigration judge? What are the living conditions of those being held in ICE detention? Are those being held getting adequate nutrition, living space and medical care? Are consent decrees the government previously agreed to such as those around family separation being adhered to? Why are ICE agents masked and why are they arresting people without a warrant? Is ICE doing racial profiling? How are they deciding who to detain and who to deport?
How many have died in ICE custody and under what circumstances? How many American citizens have been detained and how many have been deported? What were the circumstances in those cases and what steps were taken to protect U.S. citizens? What are the financial arrangements around ICE prisons and concentration camps? Is there a financial gain that is motivating an increase in the number of detentions?

If the Democrats in Congress cannot figure a way to investigate ICE, I think some kind of independent investigatory tribunal should be created to explore ICE’s many crimes. While it may not be the best analogy, I am old enough to remember the Russell Tribunal created in 1966 by Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre to examine America’s war crimes in Vietnam. We need a tribunal like that to study and report on the Trump regime’s immigration-related crimes.

A tribunal featuring pubic hearings to increase public understanding would help the American public come to a better appreciation of how ICE is replacing due process with a system of repression. We must not passively sit by and watch rights being stripped away.

It is a horrifying commentary that many people are so afraid of the federal government that they are afraid to leave their home.

While it seems almost unbelievable to me, I knew Howard for over 35 years. When I started as a staff attorney at New Hampshire Legal Assistance in the late 1980’s, Howard worked as a vocational expert in the Manchester NH hearing office of Social Security Administration.

Back then, all hearings were in person and everyone, including vocational experts, appeared at the hearing. The Manchester hearing office had jurisdiction for both New Hampshire and Vermont. Hearings that I attended were held in Manchester, Littleton, White River Jct., Woodstock, Franconia and Brattleboro. I got to know Howard in hearings and in waiting rooms before the hearing. We both were talkers.

It was an entirely different cast of characters then. There was Judge Wilkin, Donnelly, Milne and Herman. Then there was Judge Harap, Hoban, Mason, Gormley, Fallon, Klingebiel and Kleinfeld. All these judges have either retired or passed away.

When I told Judge Paul Martin who has been Chief Judge in Manchester for a long time that Howard had died, he told me that Howard was “the gold standard in vocational experts”. I would agree with Paul’s assessment and I think that very high assessment of Howard’s professionalism was widely shared. Judges and lawyers were universally happy to have an expert of Howard’s high caliber.

Howard was always prepared. He could back up his opinions. He brought a wealth of experience to his job. He was eminently fair and he played it down the middle. I knew he had empathy for claimants but he took the job of being an impartial expert very seriously.

We had some funny experiences back in the old days. I remember doing hearings with Howard back in the Continental 93 Hotel in Littleton in their freezing conference rooms adjacent to the hotel. Witnesses testified through chattering teeth.

After I became an ALJ, Howard and I reconnected. He started doing hearings in my home office in Lawrence Mass. Instead of being the representative, I had the experience of working with him as the judge. Through the course of many hearings we got to know each other much better.

There are subtleties to vocational expert testimony. Howard was a sly fox. He knew the ins and outs and he knew how to be an effective witness.

Howard and I bonded over both of us being Jewish even though neither of us were religious. He once used a yiddish word: rachmones. It impressed me and it is funny because I always thought the word described him. Rachmones is a very Jewish word. It translates literally as “compassion”. It also has connotations of soulfulness and wisdom.

In his book, The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten said this about rachmones:

“This quintessential word lies at the heart of Jewish thought and feeling. All of Judaism’s philosophy, ethics, learning, education, hierarchy of values, are enhanced with a sense of and heightened sensitivity to rachmones…”

Howard’s soulfulness was reflected in his music and his politics. I went to see him and his pal Jock Irvine (also a former hearing reporter at Social Security) play at Hermano’s restaurant in Concord. They could get down and play and they were frequent performers.

I was trying to convince Howard to leave Florida and return to New Hampshire. The combination of climate change superstorms and Florida’s far right politics was getting to him. He told me he was putting his condo in St. Petersburg on the market. He had told me about Fever Beach, a new novel by Carl Hiaasen. It is a very funny takedown of Florida’s right wing nuttiness. He and I both liked Hiaasen.

His plan to move north got short-circuited as time ran out. Howard knew the Granite State well, both the good and the bad. He had lived in Rochester NH before he moved to Concord. New Hampshire is such a small world that it turned out we both knew a long-time Rochester state representative, Sandy Keans. I had worked closely with Sandy when I had worked as the legal aid lobbyist in the NH state legislature.

Howard was a strong progressive. He suggested books for me including The Last Holiday A Memoir by Gil Scott Heron. We both loved Gil’s music and I reminisced with Howard about seeing Gil play in Boston. Howard was open-minded, anti-racist and anti-fascist.

Howard had vast musical knowledge and he was very supportive of young musicians. I used to send him videos of my son Josh playing and he was enthusiastic and encouraging.

It is very hard for me to accept that he is no longer with us. Howard died on June 3. Judge Eric Eklund, a former colleague of mine in Lawrence sent Howard this note:

“Howard I hope you remember me we did 100 cases together back when I was stationed in Lawrence. It was always a tremendous pleasure working with you. And I both enjoyed our conversations and our resolution of cases. Whether you believe it or not, I can still hear your voice in my ears as if we were in the courtroom just yesterday ….I want you to know that I will be thinking of you and it has been one of the joys of my professional life to work with you.”

Howard will be missed. As anyone who understands Social Security law knows, vocational experts play a critical role in hearings. Howard was a true public servant and he performed with distinction. He was both a great friend and colleague. He made a positive difference in this world.

June is the month when the U.S. Supreme Court drops many of its big opinions from its merits docket. Of less notice but very consequential are decisions rendered on the Court’s shadow docket. The shadow or emergency docket includes those decisions when there is no legal reasoning. They are unsigned, unexplained decrees.

During the Trump era, both in its first term and now, the shadow docket has ramped up and become much more prominent. Trump’s solicitor generals have sought emergency relief far more often than previous administrations. They know which way the wind is blowing.

In fact, 99% of the Court’s decisions take place on the shadow docket.

The most recent notable example was the May decision in Wilcox v NLRB. In that case, the Court declined to reinstate Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Kathy Harris of the Merit System Protection Board after they were fired by Trump. They are out of jobs while the litigation continues and realistically their jobs are history. The Court majority would not have allowed the firings if it was not a certainty how they would ultimately rule.

Under federal law, both Wilcox and Harris were protected from removal by the President. Congress had passed a statute that required good cause for removal. With neither Wilcox nor Harris was there any allegation of a good cause reason for removal. Congress had designed independent federal agencies to be both bi-partisan and balanced. Here the Court essentially trashed Congress’s clear roadmap.

Additionally, there has been a 90 year old precedent, the case of Humphrey’s Executor v U.S., which has upheld protections against removal for members of independent federal agencies like the NLRB and the MSPB. Yet, the Court, without explanation, overruled existing law. The Court said nothing about Humphrey’s Executor although it has been widely anticipated that the Court would eventually overrule that precedent.

By removing Wilcox from the NLRB, there are only two members left on the board which is insufficient for a quorum. Without a quorum, the NLRB cannot hear cases or make decisions. The NLRB exists to hear cases about the violation of worker’s rights. In effect, the Court is stymying and delaying accountability for unfair labor practices. Justice delayed is justice denied and the Supreme Court’s action furthers the interests of Big Business and the Trump administration who both oppose labor.

I would mention that Gwynne Wilcox was the first Black woman to serve on the NLRB and the first Black chair of that board. During her tenure, the NLRB supported workers’ collective bargaining rights and adopted a more pro-worker stance.

Wilcox aside, there are many reasons for the diminished reputation of the Supreme Court. Always siding with the billionaire class and the powerful against workers, failing to investigate and clean up its very public corruption, and giving a convicted felon almost absolute criminal immunity are three reasons.

The shadow docket doesn’t help what is already an embarrassing picture. The Court’s majority makes political decisions that help their Republican allies and they do it with no explanation while disregarding precedent. Shadow dockets were not supposed to be used to change the law.

Professor Stephen Vladeck, author of The Shadow Docket, has written that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy depends on its ability to explain itself. He says the rise of the shadow docket is anathema to that understanding. There is a connection between the increased use of the shadow docket and the decline in public confidence in the Supreme Court.

Wilcox is not the first shadow docket decision of significance. A little less than a year before the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs overturning abortion rights, the Court majority refused to block Texas’ ban of abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy. The Texas court ruling flagrantly violated Roe v Wade which was still the law of the land. That was wildly improper but as with Wilcox, it was a tip off on the position of the Court’s conservative majority.

At a time when the nation faces an unprecedented authoritarian threat from an out-of-control President, the Court gives that president expanded powers. It was not enough for the Court majority to shamefully and wrongfully protect Trump from crimes he has committed. They feed the would-be dictator’s power grab at the expense of Congress. Right wing authoritarianism is moving on many fronts to strengthen their grip on power and control. The shadow docket isn’t doing law. It is doing politics for the Trump team.

The reckless use of the shadow docket as in Wilcox will only breed more contempt for the Court. In the case of Planned Parenthood v Casey, Justices Souter, Kennedy, and O’Connor wrote:

“..the Court’s legitimacy depends on making legally principled decisions under circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the Nation.”

The current Supreme Court majority has lost its way. They are about using their super-majority to achieve MAGA goals as quickly as possible.

I thought of diversity, equity and inclusion when I heard about the death of Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone fame. Sly died on June 9. His whole persona stood in opposition to the crusade against DEI. I liked what Questlove wrote about Sly:

“He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will. He had a look, belts, and hats and jewelry. Everybody was a star, as he said (and sang) but he was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.”

Sly was the vision of radical inclusion. He was about getting everyone up and dancing. He left no one behind. Sly opposed racism of all varieties. His singing “I Want To Take You Higher” at Woodstock was pure joy and unifying to all who experienced it.

Coming out of an American history of deep segregation, Sly pioneered having a mixed sex, multi-racial band. Shocking as it is to acknowledge because it didn’t happen until the late 1960’s, Sly’s band was the first big-name American rock band that was integrated both racially and sexually.

You cannot appreciate Sly’s radical quality unless you situate in the late1950’s-early 1960’s environment. To say America wasn’t integrated doesn’t convey lived reality. Black and white people lived in different universes that were separate and unequal. Donny Hathaway singing The Ghetto comes to mind.
Opponents of DEI forget that segregation utterly defined America only a short time ago. As a society we have never honestly faced this history. There has never been any Truth and Reconciliation commission here. Sly didn’t accept that status quo and in his own way, he lived opposition.

Of 1960’s counterculture heroes, I think Sly is most under-rated. Maybe a definitive statement of the 1960’s peace-and-love world view was his song “Everyday People”. It is stunning how one song can say so much and do it so beautifully. The lyrics are simple and memorable:

“There is a blue one who can’t accept the green one
For living with the black one trying to be a skinny one
.Different strokes for different folks..”

It is a lead up to the killer lines:

“We’ve got to live together!
I am no better, and neither are you
We are the same whatever we do…”

There is no better statement of egalitarianism. That callout “I am everyday people” was like the hippie national anthem. Other Sly songs are equally memorable. “Stand” was a great song about fighting injustice.

“Stand for the things you know are right
It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight.”

I always loved “Dance To The Music”. No song could get people up and dancing faster. Later on, there is the melancholic “Family Affair”. Sly was not a shallow pop star. He knew sadness and almost self-destruction.

For Sly Fans, I wanted to recommend his autobiography Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) co-written with Ben Greenman in 2023. There was much I didn’t know about Sly’s life. His voice comes through strongly in the book.

Sly grew up in a religious Pentecostal family that loved music. The family sang together. Sly was a musical prodigy and multi-instrumentalist. He played keyboards, guitar, bass, harmonica and drums. As a child he sang with his siblings in a gospel group. At age 11, he was performing six or seven times a week at church functions.

Before he became famous, he worked as a disc jockey at San Francisco’s soul station, KSOL. He had eclectic tastes and he played Dylan, Ray Charles, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Aretha and the Staple Singers. He also went on to work as a record producer in the Bay Area and he knew the whole music scene and produced, among others, Grace Slick. Whether it was as a DJ or a musician, there was an open-minded spirit of inclusion in his work.

He mixed funk, soul, gospel and rock. Musical historian Rickey Vincent described Sly’s band as “too hot and too black to be rock, too positive to be blues and too wild to be soul”.

Sly’s autobiography shows the out-of-control craziness of his lifestyle when he was living the largest. Super-stardom was an impossible burden. The pressures to keep producing at the level he was were too much. The disintegration of the band and Sly’s chronic drug use turned him into a recluse. He isolated and he had a tremendous problem breaking from his drug habits.

In evaluating Sly and his musical legacy, I think the great moments are what we should focus on. Everyone has contradictions and peaks and valleys in their life. Given how hard he lived, it is amazing that Sly lived until 82. He watched Janis and Jimi go down early and I am sure he knew it could have been him.

In his song ”Everybody is a star”, Sly wrote:

“Everybody is a star
I can feel it when you shine on me
I love you for who you are
Not the one you feel you need to be…”

That is the authentic Sly Stone.

It is hard to get your head around the scope of the totalitarian project being engineered by the Trump regime. The dimensions of the project are expansive. Instead of a constitutional republic, they desire a monarch-president with greatly expanded powers. Instead of three co-equal branches of government, they favor an entirely submissive Congress (which they have) and a corrupt complicit Supreme Court whose majority acquiesces to the Executive.

They are a constellation of mediocre white yes-men (with a few white women thrown in) who will sell out the working class every time in favor of billionaires.

Back in the 1960’s, people on the left emphasized naming the system responsible for the Vietnam War. Now we need to name the revised system which Trump and his cronies have created. Capitalism is a tired old word that inadequately conveys what is coming. It is only part of the picture.

The Steve Bannon metaphor “flooding the zone’ comes closer to describing how the process is unfolding but the project is anything but populist. As noted, it is at the service of the billionaire class and their profit.

There is the war on colleges and universities. Then there is the war on science and scientific research. There is also a war to control federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. As with classical fascism, there is scapegoating and the need to blame an entity. These fascists have landed on immigrants to explain all that is wrong in America.

Although they have tried unsuccessfully to align immigration with criminality, much of the Trump regime’s anti-immigrant aggression has been directed at students. There is a thinly veiled anti-intellectualism underlying this offensive. They want to kick foreign students out of the country, especially students of color. The reasons given are invariably flimsy. It is usually an op-ed written to defend Palestinian rights or something the student posted on social media that contravenes Trumpian orthodoxy.

Most liberal or progressive commentators are seeing a piece of what is going on but not the big picture. The Trump regime is attempting to criminalize dissent. International students get arrested for the crime of expressing a minority view. Then they get shipped to distant jurisdictions and face deportation. The Trump regime wants to set the parameters for allowable thought.

What is going on is far worse than McCarthyism. In the past, even if politicians were upset with a professor or the goings-on at a particular university, they were not trying to control the intellectual life of whole universities. Now the Trump regime wants to control curriculum. They want to decide what is intellectually acceptable. This is an unprecedented threat to academic freedom.

To quote Vice-President Vance, “professors are the enemy”. The Trump regime wants control of all cultural and artistic institutions, particularly those that are left leaning or are more free-thinking. They hate that universities and cultural institutions like the Smithsonian have made a sincere effort to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Cancelling millions of dollars in grants to researchers, banning international students and attempting to eliminate tax exempt status as they are doing at Harvard are part of their power grab scheme.

Harvard has been forced to sue because the university recognized Trump’s agenda is an attack on the First Amendment. It is a stand-in for all colleges and universities who all face the same threat to academic freedom. The Trump regime is using antisemitism (which they could care less about) as an excuse to attack private institutions outside their control.

Surveillance capitalism is now employed to monitor the social media accounts of thousands of foreign students. ICE and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are using AI and data mining to find suspect students whose visa could get revoked. Tech companies are cooperating with this endeavor. The effort has a Big Brother quality.

A further follow-the-money aspect is the connection between Trump’s mass round-up of immigrants and the private prison companies that profit from that enterprise. Companies like GEO and CoreCivic are making a killing housing masses of arrested immigrants who have no criminal convictions. These companies run what are effectively concentration camps and they charge the government $120,000 per immigrant. The companies then donate a percentage of profit back to Trump.

Many of these arrested immigrants have American citizen children. The private prison industry has effectively turned these children into orphans.

Trump’s war on science deserves mention. His administration has arbitrarily fired thousands of workers who ran America’s scientific infrastructure. The effort is about destroying the U.S. as an international center of learning. It will absolutely lead to a brain drain. You might think no one would benefit from assaulting science but since the COVID-19 pandemic, MAGA conservatives have made anti-science a new normal. In the name of health freedom and fighting elitism, they dismiss mainstream science, including around vaccines.

The budget bill that passed the House cuts biomedical research on cancer, infectious disease and Alzheimer’s. These MAGA conservatives seem determined to lower life expectancy in the U.S. It is like they are at war with scientific expertise if they perceive it as in conflict with their hard right ideology.

This shows up most blatantly around climate change. The Trump regime has withdrawn support from any science research that even mentions the words “climate change”. They have purged government websites of climate data. They are escalating the production of greenhouses gases, like a death wish.

Looking broadly, what is going on is the equivalent of a national book burning. Anything that conflicts with the Trump game plan goes into the burn pile. It is the new Dark Ages. The masked, unidentified ICE agent who is armed to the teeth is their public image.

Nothing is automatic in this life though. MAGA’s jihad to undermine liberal democracy is not a done deal. While we still have some rights, it is incumbent on people of all political persuasions to push back hard. We can stop this.

One of the biggest stories of the second Trump presidency has to be its mushrooming corruption scandals. A major theme of this presidency is self-enrichment and the normalization of white collar crime.

Just when you thought it could not get worse, there are surprises. I had thought the profiting-off crypto was the worst. Since January, Trump has been adding a billion dollars a month to his family fortune. But then along came his palace-in-the-sky, the $400 million luxury jet gifted by the Qatari royal family.

Trump had complained that Arab leaders had bigger and more impressive airplanes than the current Air Force One. His preference is for Louis XIV-style opulence and gold ornamentation. He said it would be stupid to turn down “a free, very expensive airplane”. The plan is for the jet to be used first as Air Force One and then it is supposed to be given to Trump’s presidential library foundation.

Whether it would remain available for Trump’s personal use after he leaves office remains contested.

The ethical and legal questions jump out. The Framers of the Constitution sought to prevent corruption in drafting the Foreign Emoluments Clause. That clause prohibits the president from receiving any profit, gain or advantage from foreign governments without the consent of Congress.

The jet looks to be an unconstitutional payoff from a foreign government to the president. Congress hasn’t authorized the deal. No president has ever accepted a gift of this magnitude from a foreign government. The formerly royal jet raises the spectre that the Qatari government will receive favorable treatment because of the gift.

And this arrangement doesn’t begin to get to national security concerns. The Qatari jet would require a costly, time-consuming renovation to meet the intensive security, safety and technical standards of an Air Force One. The plane would have to be stripped down to ensure there are no listening devices or secret technology hidden away. That cost alone could be enormous and it is not clear the work could be finished before January 2029 when Trump is slated to leave office.

I think extravagant gift-giving like the Qatari luxury jet perfectly illustrates the core model of behavior we see in this presidency. Corrupt gifts are this Administration’s life blood. Donors line up to purchase desired results.

When I was in junior high school, I had a very witty math teacher named Mr. Harper. I remember Mr. Harper saying, “Every man has his price”. So it is with Donald Trump.

We see this most clearly in how he is authorizing and selling pardons. Presidents do have broad pardon authority but Trump has misused the power to pardon white collar criminals and his political allies who have earned their prison sentences. You might think pardons would be about correcting some blatant injustice. This is absolutely not the case with Trump. His mission is to pardon the worst cheats and crooks.

In the last week, there is the Paul Walczak story. Walczak was hired by his mother to run a Florida nursing home and to act as a CEO. Over the course of years, he stole $10 million out of the paychecks of his employees (doctors, nurses and health care workers) and he stopped paying taxes. He used the money he stole to finance a luxurious lifestyle, including private jets and purchase of a $2 million yacht.

Walczak pled guilty and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and he was ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution. At sentencing, the judge said “there is no get out of jail free card”. However, Trump granted Walczak a full and unconditional pardon meaning he would do no jail time and he was off the hook for the $4.4 million restitution. As a result, all the health care workers he cheated get no compensation for being ripped off.

Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, has a history of raising millions for Trump campaigns. The Trump pardon came less than three weeks after she attended a $1 million per-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago that promised face-to-face access to Trump. Good deal: pay one million so you don’t have to pay four.

At almost the same time as the Walczak pardon came the pardon of reality-TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who had been convicted of evading taxes and defrauding banks of more than $30 million. They had submitted false financial documents to obtain loans they used to fund a lavish lifestyle. The Chrisleys’ daughter, Savannah, has been a big player in the MAGA universe. She spoke at the Republican National Convention. She also was interviewed on FOX by Lara Trump about her parents. This pardon was tossing red meat to the base.

There are many other stories like Walczak and the Chrisleys where Trump has granted pardons. There is a New York lawsuit going on now where Rudy Giuliani’s former assistant Noelle Dunphy is suing Giuliani and alleging in her lawsuit that Giuliani was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split.

Trump has been signaling to his billionaire friends and his political allies that there is no longer any enforcement of white collar crime law. Likewise, he is signaling to foreign donors: pony up and let’s make a deal. His purge of the Department of Justice lawyers ensures no consequences for criminality. There is nothing to get in the way of leader wealth maximization.

Never has corruption been so out front. This presidency has replaced any sense of national self-interest with the family interest of the would-be king. We are all being played for suckers.