I want to go back to the conversation you and I had after Trump v. United States, which the Supreme Court wrote in these very bloodless terms about the immunity conferred upon the president within the outer and inner perimeters of his “official acts.” And I want to layer that against the image of a family car splattered in the blood of a mother gunned down for no good reason, including the reasons being proffered in defense of the murder. In some ways, I feel like this is the answer to the question that has been plaguing us since we started talking about the immunity case, which is: What does the law even mean when one man is given immunity that he can extend to his cronies and deploy against his enemies? When all of this gets made up on the fly as Trump sees fit, and without limits—beyond, as he told the New York Times this week, the outer boundaries of his conscience? How do we even think about this as a matter of “law”?
Mark Joseph Stern: I think when people in our profession see horrible murders like this—then watch the president claim it was justified because the victim was a “domestic terrorist”—there’s a temptation to process it through legal reasoning. To say: No, that’s not right. But you miss the point if you fail to look at the bigger picture. Because the lawyers crafting some of these statements for Trump know that what they’re saying is false. They know that Minnesota has jurisdiction to investigate this crime. They’re just lying about it. And at a certain point, it does seem foolish to keep arguing the legal logic when it is irrelevant to the people in charge.
The first and clearest sign we got about this came in March, when the Justice Department said that Judge James Boasberg’s investigation into unlawful deportation must yield to “the mandate of the electorate.” As if Trump’s election bestowed upon him a kind of sovereign power, not just as head of the executive branch, but as the personification of the American people’s will. So when anybody tries to stand in his way, they have to be pushed aside. Just this past week, congressional Republicans escalated their effort to impeach Judge Boasberg and remove him from the bench because he dared to resist the “mandate of the electorate” and say, Actually, laws still matter.
We can hold both truths in our heads: Laws matter, but not to this administration, so there will always be a limit to the legal arguments made against it. We have to insist that in this country nobody can ever claim that they have some kind of freestanding authority to deport, to bomb, to murder because they were elected by the American people. Yes, Trump won the election; that does not mean that he can send his goon squads in with masks and assault rifles and start shooting moms and motorists and anybody perceived as a threat.
Unfortunately, that is how the Supreme Court seemed to imply that law might work in its immunity decision when it stripped presidential conduct of factual context and insulated “official acts” from real accountability. And I believe that’s the key source of this administration’s extralegal logic. I remember Justice Neil Gorsuch saying, during those arguments, that he didn’t much care about the details of Trump trying to steal the 2020 election, because the court was writing “a rule for the ages.” And how that rule for the ages cashes out is Renee Good getting shot in the head, her blood splattered over her kid’s stuffed animals in the family car. That’s how the “rule for the ages” ends up transforming our country into a place where Hispanic people have to carry proof of citizenship and any protester can be executed for no reason.
All of this flows from the president’s own claim to represent the ultimate will of the people, to have total immunity for himself and his agents for any kind of criminal wrongdoing. When Trump started bombing the boats, we should have known that it would very quickly lead to his agents assassinating American citizens in the streets. And there has to be a groundswell of opposition to this conception of the law, because if you squint, you can see how they’re trying to call this “law.” It’s the “law” as whatever the president claims is necessary and correct, as he told the New York Times—whatever he believes the country needs, that becomes legal. We have to refuse to buy into the shared reality that the White House is demanding we all buy into.
I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the tropes we saw after the Minnesota shooting—a lot of people seemed to say: Wait, she’s a mom, just like me! She was at school drop-off, just like me! And not that long ago, an appeals court judge talking about the president renditioning people to CECOT said: If they designate anybody as a gang member, they can do it to me. For a lot of us, that seemed like a stretch, right? You’re a federal appeals court judge. Nobody’s going to rendition you to CECOT.
But the category error you’re identifying isn’t “The victim reminds me of me this time and therefore I’m horrified.” It’s that once you give the president the right to declare that people are gang members or drug runners or domestic terrorists—once you have the power to designate entire classes of people, like Somalis and Haitians, as enemies of the state—it can happen to you. I really want to lift that up as a way to think about why we are horrified at what happened to Renee Good. It’s not simply because her life is familiar to us. It’s because the taking of her life has been batted away on the grounds that she is of a class of people that’s subhuman and thus not deserving of the protections of the law. And we all need to realize that if the president can do this to her, the president can do it to me.I guess what makes me despair is that, of course, everything you just said is correct, but it’s a lesson that we have to keep learning over and over again somehow. People always trot out Martin Niemöller’s poem about the Holocaust—first they came for them, and I didn’t speak out; then they came for me. I fear that we’ve reached the end of the usefulness of that poem, because what we’ve seen is that people have endless excuses for why it won’t be them. They think we live in a different time. We’ve learned it. We can move on.
But we haven’t learned it. Because there are still many people on the right, it seems, who defend the execution of Renee Good, even if they could relate to her on some level. There are a lot of moms out there who are MAGA, who voted for Donald Trump, and who evidently support this murder. So even now, they can’t make the connection that if it could happen to that woman, it could happen to me. I don’t know how we fix that. I really don’t have an answer. Many people just do not have the appropriate fear that we have handed the power over to this president to kill almost anyone he wants.
