One prominent conservative writer is arguing that the White House's response to the fatal shooting of 37 year-old U.S. citizen Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota last weekend marks a turning point in how President Donald Trump's administration views its relationship with the law.
In a Monday conversation hosted the New York Times' Matthew Rose, conservative columnist David French – speaking alongside the Times' Lydia Polgreen and Michelle Goldberg — asserted that Pretti's death is merely the latest escalation from a president who has continued to push the legal envelope. French cautioned that Americans are collectively "witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials."
"The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States," he wrote. "The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption."
French — a retired major in the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General Corps — went on to observe that Trump was "exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability." He posited that the American legal system has been shaped by years of belief that the federal government is a rational, good-faith actor while people who criticize the government are presumed to be "almost always wrong." Now, in Trump's second term, French warned that Americans are "tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies" with little recourse.
"The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law," he wrote. "The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic."
Rose prodded French on his recent argument that the United States during Trump's second term is similar to the system of government described by Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel as "the dual state." Fraenkel's theory was that German citizens under the Nazi regime simultaneously lived in "a capitalist economy governed by stable laws" and under a brutal dictator who carried out heinous acts of genocide. French commented that while the "the dual state" under Trump is "not to the same extent as the Nazis," Fraenkel's theory was "still relevant."
"The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation," French said. "But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law."
