Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Doth Never Prosper

I thought Trump and Elmo were going to visit the vault at Fort Knox, taking assay equipment to be sure the gold was real, and stream it all live. What happened to that whole thing? He’s got 30 days left (of his 130 days per year tenure). Bets on whether he comes back to spend it, or nah?
Miller: This is the choice facing every American. Either we all side and get behind President Trump to remove these terrorists from our communities or we let a rogue radical left judiciary shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus. President Trump will make this nation safer than ever before and do it over the fighting and opposition of the communist left-wing judges
Well, we know Trump wasn’t coming up with it on his own….

Let’s take Miller seriously a moment. He’s arguing for a state of exception, but that’s literally a statutory or constitutional provision, and neither exists in American law. The counterpart is in the common law, or at least the common understanding of martial law. The state of exception is invoked in time of emergency, but it is imposed by government on behalf of the goals of government, especially of its continuance. Martial law replaces the government when the latter is perceived to have failed so badly that law itself is gone, and martial law is the only available replacement.

Miller doesn’t say that law, or government, has failed; but that it’s going to. The go-to emergency situation since WWII and the Russian-American world dichotomy, is U.S. national security. Miller plays that card by claiming the threat comes from inside the house: the judiciary, which refuses to allow Trump to deport those whom he pleases, the “terrorists in our communities.” This is just Red Scare language brought into the 21st century. Although Miller falls back on the same criticism used by the KKK and the John Birch Society against the Warren Court and federal courts in general.  Except he doesn’t have the Warren Court decisions on race and criminal procedure and constitutional rights to stand on, like the Birchers did. He only has the inchoate threat of the results he says will come. It’s an “if-then” argument, with a very, very, very big “If.”

“If” is hard to sell when it’s only a possibility provided you think like Miller does; or Trump. There simply aren’t enough people that hardcore.

“None Dare Call It Treason,” the John Birch Society declared, attacking the politics of the’60’s they despised. The phrase is the concluding one of a couplet: “Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason?/For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Treason, of course, is a government-ender, a betrayal so profound it can threaten governance itself. It is the only crime defined in the Constitution, and an act that could be serious enough to trigger martial law.

No wonder, then, Miller references it. He’s actually arguing for it, without naming it. For that would be, in a sense, treason. And treason can never speak its name until it prospers; but if it does, it doesn’t have to.

The difference between the “60’s and now is that Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon were in the White House, and nobody in their Administrations (well, maybe with the exception of Curtis LeMay), was advocating the madness Miller is spewing; and Trump is restating.

But Trump saying it doesn’t make it so. The question of what “facilitate” means was present only outside the courtroom after the Supreme Court ruled in A.A.R.P. The courts never doubted what it meant. But Trump & Co. tried mightily to doubt its meaning in the court of public opinion. They finally took it to court because they had nothing left in the arsenal. And in court it’s being met with contempt; in the full legal sense of that term.

The same contempt that Miller’s “argument” will receive if it makes its way to court. It’s already falling in the court of public opinion.

Trump wants a “state of exception” that would leave him free to do as he pleases, because he only understands government as a club to wield, or as something to help him get richer. He’s no deeper or more complex than that. The ability to rally the people and the Congress (at least) to his side in order to get them to accept martial law, is beyond him. He hasn’t even convinced the majority of the nation that his use of Salvadoran prisons is a good thing. Nor has he persuaded them that brushing aside due process is a worthy means to an end. That’s why he’s ramped up this effort to demonize the immigrant and terrorize the population. He really doesn’t have anything left.
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