Why 'hero-worship amidst crisis' is 'awfully counterproductive': columnist

United States Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and United States DIstrict Court Judge Tanya Chutkan were both tasked with roles in overseeing the aftermath of ex-President Donald Trump's alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Smith conducted the months-long January 6 investigation, which led to Trump's August 1 indictment, and Chutkan, was randomly selected to preside over the case.

Politico Senior Editor Matthew Schaffer, in a recently published column notes that both public servants, as a result of their respective assignments, have become "role models" in a matter of days, becoming "the subject of novelty T-shirt sales."

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Schaffer writes:

Chutkan is only the latest public employee whose interaction with Trump has turned her into an icon for the tote-bag-and-novelty-sock set. Last week, my colleague Calder McHugh wrote about the cult that has sprung up around Jack Smith, the man prosecuting Trump, complete with fanboy Twitter and Tiktok accounts and sales of a pillow depicting Smith as Jaws. There's also merch that name-checks Alvin Bragg (the prosecutor who indicted Trump in New York) and Fani Willis (the D.A. who may soon do the same in Georgia.)

A few years earlier, a previous special counsel, Robert Mueller, was the subject of an even more fulsome embrace, complete with Mueller-themed cocktails at D.C. bars and a 'Mueller, She Wrote' podcast analyzing the great man’s ongoing investigation. And while Anthony Fauci never had the power to prosecute Trump, it’s hard not to see the same dynamic play in all the refrigerator-magnet and coffee-mug sales featuring the infectious-disease doctor, who clashed with the 45th president.

The editor insists the "impish instinct to tweak the president and a somewhat juvenile urge to hero-worship amidst crisis" might be "irresistible," but "for supposed foes of the ex-president," he writes, "it's also awfully counterproductive."

Schaffer goes on to emphasize "public servants sticking to the rules in the face of unimaginable pressure are the guardrails of democracy," and that "turning them into pop-culture heroes only furthers the institutional delegitimization that sits at the core of Trump's rhetoric. The whole point of an impartial system is that it's supposed to work the same regardless of which citizen is before the bench, and regardless of which public servant is sitting on it."

He writes, "On the most narrow level, Trump's theory of his criminal case is that it's a partisan plot countenanced by a rigged judicial system. A progressive culture that makes a folk hero out of the prosecutor — much less the judge! — reinforces just that argument."

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American citizens, he emphasizes "should expect that any federal judge would be tough and fair and impartial and not prepared to be swayed by a politician's social-media strategy. To put her on T-shirts because she happens to be the one doing it is to implicitly accept Trump's idea of a system that's rigged."

He concludes, "A country where public servants become heroes or villains simply for doing their job in a way that inconveniences a political faction is not a country we should want to live in. It's less like the government depicted in civics class than the one described in aggrieved Trump speeches."

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Schaffer's full column is available at this link.