The Only Real Crime Wave Is Donald Trump + MAGAts Selling Fentanyl
Last week, Philip Bump, took on the inherent dishonesty of how the GOP is dealing with their manufactured “crime wave” they had hoped to pin on Joe Biden and how, at their convention, they couldn’t have approached it in a more ham-fisted way. You may recall the 2014- 2023 TV series Growing Up Chrisley, a spin off of Chrisley Knows Best about a wealthy white family from Atlanta suburbs Roswell and Alpharetta, where, coincidentally, Marjorie Traitor Greene was blowing potential customers to get them to buy members ships in her gym (before she discovered QAnon and turned over a new leaf).
In real life, the main characters, South Carolinian conservatives Todd and Julie Chrisley were found guilty on federal charges of bank fraud and tax evasion and submitting false documents to banks to take out loans and fund their lavish lifestyle. He was sentenced to 12 years and she to 7. He has been promoting some kind of nonsense about how he’s bisexual.
Their daughter, Savannah, a frequent loser in various beauty queen pageants, was a speaker at the Republican convention’s second night, the one they themed “making America safe again.” Bump wrote that there was a certain tension of having her speak then. “It wasn’t simply that America has by observable measures gotten safer over the past several years, undercutting the rhetorical point of the exercise. It was instead that the relentless focus on the GOP’s dedication to the rule of law as it nominated a convicted criminal to serve, once again, as its nominee for president.”
“We in the Republican Party are the law and order team,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said from the lectern. “We always have been and we always will be the advocates for the rule of law.”
Well, not always always.
The tension between what Donald Trump is facing and has done and the Republican Party’s vision of itself is reconciled through the oft-repeated rhetoric of the former president. He is merely a victim, someone targeted unfairly for his politics. It’s a remarkably effective line of argument, convincing his base, his allies and even, it seems, the Supreme Court.
The entire point of dedication to the rule of law, though, is that you have respect for and confidence in the process even as you recognize that it is imperfect. The concept is predicated on the idea that the dispensation of justice is mechanical and objective. If you eagerly champion the baseless idea that the system is targeting your allies, you are not an advocate for the rule of law. You are an advocate for the selective application of power, which the rule of law is designed to counteract.
Which brings us to reality-TV star Savannah Chrisley.
Chrisley began her speech at the convention Tuesday night by rattling off her parents’ identification numbers within the federal prison system.
“You may have seen my family on TV,” she said, referring to a program that ran on the USA Network. “But for the past decade, we’ve been consumed with a different kind of drama. My family was persecuted by rogue prosecutors in Fulton County due to our public profile.”
The crowd booed, recognizing the location as one in which Trump himself was indicted.
“I know! Fulton County!” Chrisley continued. “They know how to do it, don’t they?”
She excoriated prosecutors for convicting her parents of fraud despite their being the victims of a “dishonest business partner.” She also complained that a prosecutor in the “most heavily Democrat county in the state, before an Obama-appointed judge … called us ‘the Trumps of the South.’ ” This, she said, was a badge of honor.
“We live in a nation founded on freedom, liberty, and justice for all. Justice is supposed to be blind. But today, we have a two-faced justice system,” Chrisley said. She noted Trump’s prosecution contrasting it, oddly, with President Biden’s son Hunter not yet having been sentenced. “Look at what they are doing to countless Christians and conservatives that the government has labeled them extremists or even worse.” Look, she said, at Stephen Bannon.
“We need to rise above the persecution. We need to hold rogue prosecutors accountable,” Chrisley said. She added that “we need to expose the Democrats’ corruption and better yet, the Biden family’s corruption.” Trump, she said, had only one conviction that mattered: “his conviction to make America great again.” The crowd applauded heartily.
So! About all of that.
Chrisley’s parents, Todd and Julie Chrisley, were convicted on charges of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion and are currently in prison. But they were not charged by rogue prosecutors working for Fulton County, Ga. District Attorney Fani Willis. She wasn’t in that position when they were charged, but it doesn’t matter: the charges were federal, filed in Georgia where their accountant was based.
What’s more, they were filed in 2019 under U.S. District Attorney Byung J. Pak, working for the Justice Department under President Trump. (Pak resigned after the 2020 election as Trump was trying to have the results in Georgia overturned.)
There are other sordid details surrounding all of this, including that Todd Chrisley was fined more than $750,000 for defaming an investigator for the Georgia Department of Revenue. The end result, though, is that the Chrisleys were sentenced to 19 years in prison in November 2022. An appeal is underway.
It is understandable that Savannah Chrisley would side with her parents and view their prosecution as unfair. But her presentation of that case wasn’t being made on the USA Network or on social media. It was being made as an argument in support of the Republican Party and its nominee for president. A nominee who, like Chrisley, is comfortable in disparaging indictments that he finds personally inconvenient. A nominee who, if reelected to the White House, would almost certainly quickly pardon Chrisley’s parents as he so frequently pardoned or granted clemency to his allies when he was president: Dinesh D’Souza. Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner.
For all of the somber invocation of the Republican Party’s loyalty to law enforcement and respect for traditional American institutions, Chrisley’s presence on the stage laid bare the self-serving nature of the GOP’s rhetoric about prosecutions. They believe deeply in the rule of law as it applies to protesters on college campuses, Hunter Biden’s gun charges and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ). But when the criminality is for things like fraud or tax evasion or spiriting classified material off to your home, the system is rigged against conservatives. Defund the IRS! Defund the FBI!
Chrisley’s speech aimed at reinforcing the idea that prosecutors were targeting the right unfairly. The sleight of hand about timing and venue were merely mechanisms for making that case. But it was a useful speech because it formally established the legal boundaries that Republicans respect: those around people they don’t like. This is, in fact, what Trump intends to bring back to the White House.
It seems more than a little obvious that the GOP's claim to be some kind of “party of law and order,” while supporting a convicted felon as their presidential candidate, is deeply hypocritical and undermines whatever credibility the still have with non-MAGAts. Would you agree that this contradiction highlights a broader issue within the party: their selective application of the rule of law, which they use to attack political opponents while ignoring the misconduct of themselves and their allies. It’s not just hypocritical but also dangerous. It undermines the public's trust in the legal system and perpetuates a sense of injustice that will fuel further divisiveness and conflict. Moreover, this cynical ploy to maintain power rather than a genuine commitment to justice reveals a broader strategy of using the rule of law as a political weapon rather than a foundational principle of governance.
It may resonate with their moron base but it risks alienating people with 3-digit IQs capable of seeing through the inconsistency and recognizing the importance of an impartial legal system. This Bob Newhart quote is meant to be cutting and funny. I’m a former country music dj, editor of Country Music Magazine and board member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. I get the joke. Country music MAGAts won’t— not the ones who take political monstrosities like Ohio State Senator George Lang seriously. Lang took his bow on the national stage on Monday when he helped JD Vance kick off his campaign for VP in Middletown, Ohio by shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight for the soul of our nation [and for] our kids and our grandkids… I believe wholeheartedly that Donald Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country, politically. I’m afraid that if we lose this one, it’s gonna take a civil war to save this country. It will be saved. If we come down to a civil war I’m glad we have people like … the Bikers for Trump on our side gesturing to a gaggle of violent, laughing Nazi thugs behind him on the state. Yeah… Republican law and order— replete with rhetoric undermining their phony law and order stance by promoting violence and disregarding legal processes, justifying lawlessness within their own ranks. This hypocrisy is stark, especially when juxtaposed with Trump's legal troubles and the party's bullshit about being targeted unfairly by the justice system.
“The worst thing to happen to Milwaukee since Jeffrey Dahmer,” is how John Oliver termed last week’s GOP convention. Trump’smessage of national unity was only about him and Ron DeSantis, nothing about immigrants. In fact, Trump was all over the GOP-manufactured, disengenuous “migrant crime wave.” Oliver told his audience that “There is no migrant crime wave happening right now. In fact, there is no crime wave at all. Crime in general has been trending downward in recent years, including this one… And yet despite that, there have been a wave of conservatives claiming there is a wave of migrant crime. And that is almost definitely going to be continuing until November. And because there is, again, no data to back up claims of a migrant crime wave, they’ve had to resort to anecdotes or exaggeration… I am not saying that there haven’t been individual migrants who have committed crimes. Of course there have, because migrants are people, and some people do bad things, in the same way that some Abba fans and some people with Spongebob tattoos have committed crimes. If you want to prevent crime and death, that’s a great idea, and there are absolutely ways to do that. But when you draw a circle around a few members of a particular group, especially one identifiable by race or nationality, then generalize about what this means about all of them, no matter what you say, you’re not having a reasoned debate about crime or safety. You’re being racist… Migrant crime is not on the rise. That is a fact. What is also a fact, though, is that people now feel as though it is. And that feeling has the potential to cause massive harm.”
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