WASHINGTON—For Donald Trump, there’s a mass mainstream media conspiracy out to get him, Joe Biden let “millions of illegal immigrants” into the country to commit crimes, and a politicized Justice Department went after him, just like the FBI did after Al Capone.
And Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Biden, won “a rigged and crooked election” and should go to jail.
Those were among the highlights in a long presidential revenge speech with Trump jumping from topic to topic, on March 13 in the Justice Department auditorium.
The mainstream media characterized the speech as a Trump “enemies list,” a la Richard Nixon more than 50 years ago. It wasn’t. Trump “enemies” were scattered through the speech.
They were also fewer than Nixon’s eventual 220. One Trump foe was Biden. He was joined by former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the prosecution of Trump for ordering and abetting the Jan. 6, 2021 invasion, insurrection and attempted coup d’etat at the U.S. Capitol.
Other Trump enemies included career FBI agents who probed Trump and the invaders, and several New York officials who also prosecuted him. But his main foe, just like on the campaign trail, was migrants. The subtext, of course, was migrants of color coming over the U.S. border with Mexico.
The Capone comparison, which Trump never used before, came after his rant against Biden’s alleged politicization of the Justice Department in pursuing cases against him for property tax evasion and campaign finance fraud—New York state and city cases and convictions—and for the insurrection.
“The great Alphonse Capone, legendary Scarface, was attacked only a tiny fraction of what Trump was attacked, and maybe it worked out well. I don’t know,” Trump mused. “If I had to give it up, I probably wouldn’t, but only because I’ve gone through it. But I wonder what the difference would be.”
One difference: In 1931, the FBI caught and the Justice Department indicted infamous mobster Capone, who ran the Chicago crime syndicate, for income tax evasion. Capone was convicted, and eventually sent to Alcatraz. Another: Trump boasted at the Justice Department about pardoning 1600 indicted or convicted insurrectionists.
The crazy speech reflects, however, the necessity of top Democratic leaders mounting a much more forceful fight against Trump on the economic and political fronts.
The comedian Jon Stewart noted on his show that Democratic Sen. Chuck Schemer declared that Trump’s approval rating has dropped from 52 to 48 percent. He quoted Schumer: “We will keep at it and keep at it and keep at it until it goes below 40 percent and then the Republicans will have to work with us.”
“Keep at it?,” Stewart asked. “What is IT? You have to have an IT if you are going to keep at IT. What is the IT Schumer is talking about?”
“We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government,” Trump promised in his speech. That includes FBI agents who investigated the invaders and career prosecutors who handled the cases, though Trump didn’t identify those two groups.
“We will expose and very much expose their egregious crimes and severe misconduct of which was levels you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s going to be legendary,” he bragged.
He wasn’t done
Trump wasn’t done. He saved his sharpest and longest vitriol for a common focus for both him and his MAGA legions: Undocumented people, whom he calls “illegal immigrants,” and worse.
“The last administration presided over the worst increase in violent crime in our country in many, many decades,” Trump claimed, a flat-out lie according to crime data. “We had levels of violence and crime and a lot of it had to do with the illegal immigrants that came in. Remember when I used to complain about it, because I knew how tough they were, how mean they were?
“And they”—the Biden administration—”said ‘No, people that come into our country are all wonderful people,’” Trump alleged in another lie. “No, they’re not wonderful. These are stone-cold killers. They make our killers look nice by comparison. They make our killers look nice. These are rough tough people with the tattoos all over their face.”
Crime data again show Trump lied. Migrants, legal and illegal, actually commit crimes at a lower rate than do native-born people, statistics reveal. That didn’t stop Trump’s rant. It also didn’t stop Trump’s anti-migrant czar, Tom Homan, from declaring on March 17 that federal judicial rulings against mass deportations won’t stop him. “I don’t care what the judges think,” Homan stated.
“These are rough, rough killer people and they [the Biden administration] allowed them in by the millions,” Trump charged. “In major cities like New York, Chicago and Washington, mothers can’t walk their children to the park without fear of being shot or killed or raped or anything. Women can’t ride the subway without worrying that a hoodlum will shove them onto the train tracks,” he declared, without evidence.
What Trump didn’t say was that Trumpite Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas loaded migrants–including those seeking asylum–onto buses and planes and transported them to those three “sanctuary cities” and others. The governors’ agents then dumped the migrants on those cities’ streets, leaving them to fend for themselves and sticking the cities with the bill.
Trump wasn’t done with his enemies, though. He just grouped them.
“My administration stripped the security clearances of the disgraced intelligence agents who lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell. We revoked the clearances of deranged Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James and the crooked law firms that aided their partisan prosecutions. And I went through it. These are state and city courts and the corruption is unbelievable.”
Smith was the Justice Department’s special counsel handling the insurrection case in D.C. Bragg is the Manhattan District Attorney who convicted Trump on charges of campaign contribution fraud. James is the New York state’s Attorney General. She convicted Trump and his firm of state property tax fraud.
“We also terminated the clearances of the Biden crime family and Joe Biden himself,” Trump said. “He didn’t deserve it. In fact, he was essentially found guilty, but they said he was incompetent and therefore, let’s not find him guilty, I guess.”
By contrast with Trump’s enemies list in the Justice Department speech Nixon’s initial “enemies list” in 1971 named 20 individuals. Nixon’s “hatchet man,” infamous aide Charles Colson, expanded the list to 220 individuals and institutions.
Among them: All but one member of the 21-person Congressional Black Caucus, Democratic Sens. Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, Ed Muskie—all on the initial list—and Walter Mondale, plus the Brookings Institution, a leading D.C. think tank.
Initial Nixon list
The initial Nixon list also included United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock, AFSCME President Jerry Wurf, anti-Vietnam activist Allard Lowenstein, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and performers Barbara Streisand, Dick Gregory and Paul Newman. Colson’s additions included eight other union presidents, a top AFL-CIO staffer and Lane Kirkland, then the AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer and later its president. Colson also wanted to “set a little fire” i.e. arson, at Brookings.
The point of both lists was “to use the government to screw our political enemies,” as then-Nixon Counsel John Dean later testified.
Trump, on the other hand, lumped together major print and broadcast media, including The Washington Post and the New York Times—both also on Nixon’s list—in a massive conspiracy to both get him and to, as he put it, “play” (intimidate) “the ref.”
Others in his conspiracy are “The Wall Street Journal, MSDNC”—his nickname for the cable network MSNBC—”and the fake news, CNN and ABC, CBS and NBC, and they’ll write whatever they say,” Trump declared. His “they” is the Democratic National Committee. Which, ironically, was the initial target of the Nixon’s original Watergate burglars in 1972.
“And what do you do to get rid of it?” the president asked rhetorically. “You convict Trump. All you have to do is be really tough on him and ultimately convict him and they leave you alone. It’s totally illegal what they do. I just hope you can all watch for it, but it’s totally illegal.”
And in this speech, Trump flipped and handed out praise to his staff and his political pals, ranging from a federal judge who let him off in the Mar-a-Lago papers case to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump praised U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee during his first term. The judge squashed the Justice Department’s case against him illegally for taking classified secret documents from the White House after that term ended, and transporting them to Mar-a-Lago. Special Counsel Jack Smith and his staff handled that case, too.
Trump name-checked other supporters, including former campaign consigliere Rudy Giuliani, Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton—who attended the speech—and the late University of Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight, who endorsed Trump in earlier runs for the White House.
“Rudy Giuliani had to suffer greatly, greatly; the greatest mayor in the history of our country had to suffer greatly,” Trump declared. Giuliani first gained notoriety as U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, then as New York City mayor, where he had police target youths of color and presided over 9/11.
Giuliani was stripped of his law license after being convicted of libeling two Black female ballot counters in Georgia as part of a Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. Biden carried Georgia then, while beating Trump overall. The women successfully sued Giuliani for $148 million and are now trying to collect. The loss of his law license and the conviction and fine are “suffering.”
Paxton is under indictment for rampant corruption and infamous for sending Texas Rangers out against communities of color, especially during elections.
Knight, known for his hair-trigger temper, used it to “play the refs,” Trump said. What he didn’t say is Knight was fired after racist statements and throwing a folding chair onto the court during a basketball tournament in Puerto Rico and, later, choking one of his players during an Indiana team practice.
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