Donald Trump threatened to jail me (and maybe you.) The New York Times doesn't care.
Donald Trump threatened to jail me (and maybe you.) The New York Times doesn't care.
It's not great!
At a rally Monday night in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump threatened to put me in jail.1
Immediately after lying that Kamala Harris supports increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court to twenty-five,2 Trump threatened:
“They were very brave, the Supreme Court, and they take a lot of hits because of it. It should be illegal what happens. You know you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight, these people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices trying to get them to sway their vote, sway their decision.”
Well that’s not great for me, personally!3
See, Kamala Harris does not support Supreme Court expansion (yet!) but I sure do. For five years I’ve been an advisor to Take Back The Court,4 which advocates expanding and rebalancing the Supreme Court.
There are quite a lot of reasons I do this work, but to condense it to a paragraph: The Supreme Court of the United States is, in both composition and actions, deeply undemocratic; its right-wing supermajority is relentlessly dismantling our democracy in order to seize for itself and for the Republican Party absolute control over American law and government; it is ceaselessly assaulting our most fundamental freedoms; it undermines the health, safety, and financial wellbeing of everyday Americans on behalf of wealthy plutocrats all while engaging in flagrantly corrupt financial relationships with billionaire benefactors. This is neither a new problem — the Republican Party has held a majority on the Supreme Court for more than 55 consecutive years despite losing the popular vote for president in seven of the last eight elections — nor one that will solve itself. American democracy is on life support; many reforms are needed. Expanding and rebalancing the Supreme Court is not sufficient, but it is necessary in order to make possible other urgently-needed reforms.5
So anyway: I’ve been a frequent and blunt critic of the Supreme Court,6 and I work with one of the leading court reform organizations in America — an organization that has led the way on expanding and rebalance the Supreme Court, the specific reform proposal that Trump denounced before saying critics like me “should be put in jail” for the way we talk about Supreme Court justices like the flamboyantly corrupt Clarence Thomas.
So while I won’t flatter myself that I’m at the top of Donald Trump’s people-to-jail list … there’s a decent chance I’m higher on it than I’d like to be.7 And maybe you are, too! After all, quite a lot of people have been critical of the Supreme Court in recent years, with good reason. Maybe you’re thinking that I might be screwed but you’re probably pretty safe. After all, Trump probably can’t jail all of us. Bad news: Trump has previously proposed a more scalable punishment for criticizing the Supreme Court: fines. In Wilkes-Barre, PA in August8 Trump said of Supreme Court critics: “I believe it’s illegal what they do. … I really think it’s illegal what they do with the judges and justices.” And: “playing the ref with our judges and our justices should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that.”9
There’s a pretty good chance this is the first you’re hearing of any of this. If you get all your news from The New York Times, it definitely is. I just checked, and The New York Times has never told readers about Trump threatening last month to impose “very serious fines and beyond” on people who criticize the Supreme Court. (The Times did tell readers that Trump accused Democrats of “fascist” policies. Might have been a good time to mention that in the very same speech Trump threatened fines for criticizing the government!) And the Times hasn’t mentioned Trump’s threat Monday night to jail Supreme Court critics, either.
The New York Times’ lack of interest in Donald Trump’s threats to fine and imprison Americans for criticizing the Supreme Court is particularly striking in light of the paper’s ongoing, years-long freakout over supposed attacks on freedom of speech from liberals. Every time an Ivy League member of the College Republicans pretends to be oppressed because someone told him he shouldn’t use racial slurs, the New York Times runs three articles and six op-eds about the chilling effect of cancel culture run amok. If you’re a regular reader of the New York Times, you’ve received a clear message for years: Conservatives like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are defenders of free speech against oppressive “woke” liberals trying to stifle dissent.
But that’s all bullshit, and Donald Trump’s threats to fine and imprison critics of Supreme Court justices makes clear that it’s bullshit. Or they would, if they were covered.
Now, I know some folks will dismiss Trump’s threats as just that. They shouldn’t, both because threats to jail Americans for criticizing their government are deeply un-American even if they remain threats, and because Donald Trump keeps telling us quite explicitly how much he admires foreign autocrats like Viktor Orban who are doing quite a bit more than issuing threats:
The US state department has warned that a new law in Hungary “can be used to intimidate and punish” Hungarians who do not agree with the government, adding to concerns from Hungarian journalists and activists who have expressed worries the law is aimed at silencing critical voices.
Hungary’s parliament approved legislation last week that creates a sovereignty protection office with broad powers to investigate Hungarians active in public life.
[…]
David Pressman, the US ambassador in Budapest, underscored that the new law gave the new office a lot of power without proper oversight.
“This new state body has unfettered powers to interrogate Hungarians, demand their private documents, and utilise the services of Hungary’s intelligence apparatus – all without any judicial oversight or judicial recourse for its targets,” he wrote on social media.
Again, that’s not great!
Trump’s fondness for Orban, and what that says about how Donald Trump would behave if he regains the White House — and The New York Times’ general lack of interest in the topic — is something I’ve written about frequently in this space.
Earlier this month, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote an extraordinary opinion published in the rival Washington Post about the authoritarian threat Donald Trump poses to America. Sulzberger’s piece began with a four-paragraph summary of Viktor Orban’s actions stifling Hungary’s free press; he then went on to portray Orban and other foreign autocrats as models for Trump. As I explained at the time, it was ironic that Sulzberger was so focused on Orban as an “inspiration” for Trump, because Sulzberger’s own newspaper has ignored the fact that Donald Trump used a portion of his speech at the Republican convention to praise Orban and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. It was a clear indication of Trump’s own totalitarian plans, as I explained immediately after Trump’s speech. Then just a few days after Sulzberger’s piece ran, Trump embraced Orban during his debate with Kamala Harris — and the Times’ has made only a few brief mentions that Trump did so, never once exploring what it might say about what Trump would do if he regains the presidency.
Now Donald Trump is running around threatening to fine and jail people for political speech he dislikes — just like his role model Viktor Orban in Hungary — and The New York Times doesn’t find it newsworthy. I’ll just say this again:
Sulzberger considers the threat of Donald Trump imposing an Orbanesque autocracy on America so dire he wrote 4,300 words on the topic for a rival newspaper “because I believe the risk is shared by our entire profession, as well as all who depend on it.” But that’s about 4,200 words more than Sulzberger’s own newspaper has published about Trump and Orban since the former dedicated a portion of his convention speech to praising the latter seven weeks ago.
If Sulzberger really believes what he wrote for the Washington Post, the New York Times should behave accordingly.
As for the rest of us … well, if you don’t want Donald Trump to return to the White House, where he can follow through on his threats to fine and imprison people for criticizing the government in ways he dislikes, now would be a good time to check your voter registration, make a plan to vote, and encourage your friends and family to do so, too.
Not me, specifically. But also very much me! But we’ll get to that. Also maybe you? It’s not great!
Kamala Harris supports term limits and ethics reform for Supreme Court justices but has not supported expanding and rebalancing the Court; Trump is lying. And pretty much nobody is proposing expanding the Court to 25 justices — not that there’s anything wrong with that. The Court expansion bill that has been introduced in the last two congresses would increase the size of the Court to 13 justices, not 25. Again, Trump is lying.
Or for, you know, America.
Boring technical note: Actually the Take Back The Court Foundation and the Take Back the Court Action Fund.
Which, to be clear, is not on it at all.
No, I don’t know why Trump makes all of his most explicit threats to punish Supreme Court critics in Pennsylvania. It’s very possible he thinks that’s where the Court is located? (It isn’t.)
As usual, Donald Trump isn’t expressing any kind of principle here: Trump himself routinely and abusively criticizes judges he doesn’t like. When Trump threatens to jail people for criticizing judges he means people who say things he doesn’t like about judges. He isn’t proposing a blanket rule that would apply to himself and to his followers; he’s proposing an autocracy in which he does whatever he wants — including doing whatever he wants to whoever he wants.
Thank you for your excellent columns. I am new to your Substack site and am delighted to have found it. Keep on!
The Opus Dei contingent on the Court (and Vance) plus John Roberts are a political block, let’s not kid ourselves. Wiping out affirmative action has the net result of getting fewer minority candidates into positions of power. Toppling Roe shackles women. They don’t even want you to have a job outside the home—they need you to have their white children. And undermining the federal agency system means no EPA—the rich get much richer, and the planet is destroyed. Just hope the trillionaires can spend their money fast enough. Oh, I forgot—Elon will be on Mars. When the three liberal justices are appalled, and even had coney Barrett side with them once, it is clearly a political game. There is just blank space in the middle.
Law school teaches the principle of using prior decided cases to support your legal case. But the Supreme Court now throws out the state decisis principle. How are we now to write legal briefs that hold any water? The principle eludes me. This is not going to be a country of laws if Trump wins. Even we’re not to prevail, the Court will continue to dismantle the government—that is what all their amazing wealth and power is designed to do.