We are losing our grip on justice.
Justice in these times is a slippery slope, as a mountain of our long-standing laws, precedents and commonly held values is tumbling down.
Out of the gate in his second term, President Donald Trump has delivered a raft of executive orders and policy edicts that are flaunting justice. The new Trump administration has targeted civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and birthright protections, and policies focused on diversity, equity,and inclusion, aiming at their elimination.
“Former Justice Department officials and advocates,” NBC News reported last week, said that “they expect the new administration to swiftly carry out sweeping reversals of most major Biden administration civil rights policies. Already, the Trump-run department has issued a memo freezing all action in civil rights cases, including filings and settlements, and withdrawn from multiple cases filed during the Biden administration.”
In addition, “as it has in other parts of the Justice Department, the Trump administration has made personnel changes in the Civil Rights Division,” according to NBC. “The top two officials in its appellate section have been reassigned to a new task force that will prosecute officials from sanctuary cities who do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts, according to a DOJ official familiar with the matter.”
These moves are a revolutionary strategy to reshape laws and policies that have been deeply embedded in American society and could forever alter what justice means in the United States.
Trumpian justice is already undermining our faith in the system. About half of Americans are “not very” or “not at all” confident that the Justice Department and the FBI will conduct business in a fair and nonpartisan way during Trump’s second term, according to a poll in January by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. About one-third said they are “somewhat” confident, and about 2 in 10 respondents are “extremely” or “very” confident. The AP-NORC poll surveyed 1,147 American adults from Jan. 9 to 13, using a sample that is designed to be representative of the U.S. population.
No wonder. The nation’s hundreds-year-old system of “and justice for all” is morphing into a “friends and family” model. That is, those who are friends of the powerful who subvert our laws are the beneficiaries of Trump’s cockeyed version of “justice.”
Let’s start with our sitting president, as he sits, tried, and convicted in a New York state court related to payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Trump was convicted on 34 counts of the falsification of business records in the first degree, a felony. Days before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, Justice Juan Merchan sentenced him to an “unconditional discharge,” with no jail time nor other official requirement. Merchan said it was his only option, as Trump would soon assume the presidency.
Trump and his allies argue that he was the innocent victim of a politically motivated “witch hunt.”
In the era of Trump, it appears that even lawbreakers who are duly and fairly convicted by the courts but cry “witch hunt” can slide away from accountability, while others pay the price.
The perpetrators who drove the chaos at the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building have been duly tried and convicted for their terrible and treasonous acts. On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of thousands attacked the Capitol to protest Trump’s loss of the 2020 presidential election; 100 police officers were injured as the rioters stormed the building.
Hours after his inauguration, Trump declared he was ending “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years,” and granted pardons and clemency to about 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the insurrection.
“With the stroke of a pen on his first day back in the White House, Trump’s order upended the largest prosecution in Justice Department history, freeing from prison people caught on camera viciously attacking police as well as leaders of far-right extremist groups convicted of orchestrating violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of power after his 2020 election loss,” AP reported.
That is freedom, friends and family style.
Then there is convicted former Chicago Ald. Edward Burke, who has petitioned Trump for clemency. In 2023, Burke was convicted of federal racketeering and bribery charges. He began serving a two-year prison sentence last September. Now, days into the second Trump presidency, Burke is seeking a shorter prison sentence, WLS-Ch. 7 is reporting.
The former Chicago City Council powerhouse’s request for a commutation of his sentence is listed on the U.S. Department of Justice clemency website as “pending,” the station reported, meaning “the petition is under review.”
Burke once bragged about how, as Trump’s clout-heavy tax appeals lawyer, he saved Trump and his investors $11.7 million in property taxes on the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago.
It’s payback time.
Trump, unfortunately, isn’t the only one practicing this version of “justice.” Et tu, Joe? Former President Joe Biden waylaid justice with a flurry of last-minute pardons of his own family members.
In December he pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for tax and gun related crimes, after declaring repeatedly that we would not. As he left office in mid-January, Biden granted preemptive pardons for his siblings and their spouses. His rationale: his loved ones had been “subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics.”
Justice for all? Under Trump, immigrants who have lived in this nation for decades, worked diligently at menial jobs, raised families, paid their taxes, have been convicted of no crimes, are being hunted down like animals and deported.
Our values of diversity, equity and inclusion were founded in civil right laws and policies that have been on the books since the 1960s. Trump and his allies are demonstrating that those provisions won with blood and tears can be wiped away. The victims of racial and ethnic discrimination and violence, the LGBTQ+ community, women fighting for their reproductive rights and others who are most vulnerable in our society are on their own.
They are all on Trump’s enemies list. The Trump administration’s version of justice rewards his friends and excludes his enemies. In Trump’s America, “justice for all” is just for friends and family.
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Wednesday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.
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