'Profoundly cynical': Trump is 'pulling the guts out of due process' after exploiting it
President Donald Trump's third campaign for the White House was effectively a race against the clock to delay his criminal trials until after the election. One writer is observing that the same due process rights Trump relied on to postpone his prosecution are now under attack by his administration.
In a Wednesday essay for Rolling Stone, journalist Asawin Suebsaeng detailed how the inherent Constitutional right of due process under the law is being gradually eroded during the second Trump presidency. He pointed out that the assault on the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence is happening despite Trump owing his freedom — and, according to Suebsaeng, his second term — to those very same rights.
Suebsaeng recalled how Trump's "expensive armada of criminal defense attorneys" were ultimately successful in their effort to "work the refs" in order to delay three of four criminal proceedings until after November of 2024, banking on the "get-out-of-jail free" card that another four years in the White House would provide. And he opined that now, Trump has taken on a "profoundly cynical" mission to deprive people of those very same rights.
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"Trump was not so much interested in allowing the justice system to run its course, so much as he was concerned with abusing and bleeding it out of self-interest, and for political gain," Suebsaeng wrote, adding that it was "infuriating" to watch Trump use his own Constitutional rights to "stall and obfuscate."
"It is true that most people cannot use their celebrity, connections, or wallet to bend the judiciary to their will, as Trump did," he continued. "Still, to deprive anyone in this country — even a figure like Trump — of their due process rights would be a greater crime than to allow the moral crime of our vaunted institutions handing him the tools to get away with his most horrendous abuses."
Suebsaeng went into detail about how several top officials in the Trump administration — like Vice President JD Vance and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller have railed against providing immigrants with due process rights, with the latter proclaiming that "the only 'process' you are entitled to is deportation." And he reminded readers that even when the Supreme Court (which includes three Trump appointees) issued a 9-0 ruling ordering Trump to "facilitate" the return of a Maryland resident the administration admitted was wrongfully deported, Trump continues to ignore efforts to rein him in.
"Another grand but inevitable irony of the second Trump presidency is that he campaigned during the 2024 race so routinely as the victim, claiming that all the legal and investigative efforts to hold him accountable for his array of alleged crimes and jaw-droppingly blatant abuses of power were nothing more than a form of 'lawfare' by his Democratic nemeses," he wrote. "Thanks to his second administration, those claims from Trump have now been made, in a sense, correct."
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Click here to read Suebsaeng's full essay in Rolling Stone (subscription required).
