Trump & Co. Are Breaking Laws: Arrest The Criminals.

The federal government under Trump is a criminal enterprise engaging in kidnapping and human trafficking. Arrest the criminals.

Back when I was a Republican political consultant, I made hundreds of ads that revolved around one of the most effective wedge issues Republicans used to attack Democrats: law and order.

A Republican candidate or elected official talking about law and order was like Z-Pac, a broad-spectrum antibiotic with reliable results. Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign was built on the law-and-order theme. It was the foundation of his “silent majority,” an appeal to white middle-class voters after a summer of civil unrest in over 100 cities and chaos at the Democratic convention.

“As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night,” Nixon thundered in his RNC convention acceptance speech. “We see Americans dying... We see a nation that has lost control of its streets.”

Trump echoed the same in his inaugural address with his dystopian description of an America with no borders and cities full of “crime and drugs…This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” If Nixon’s appeal to white voters was somewhat subtle in its racist undertones, Trump removed all plausible deniability. His message: non-whites in our country are a danger to white Americans.

In that period between Nixon and Trump, “soft on crime” was a club used by Republicans to pummel Democrats. The Willie Horton ads painted Dukakis as an out-of-touch liberal elitist. The attack was a constant in Republican campaigns because it was efficient and effective, a classic wedge issue.

Today, the Republican party still claims to be the law-and-order party while attacking the key pillars of the foundation of rule by law. Republicans have shattered any pretense of a judicial system operating along an axis of right and wrong. It has been replaced by a classic authoritarian value system. Are you with me or against me?

When I was in the Republican “law and order” business, there was an underlying rationale that drove the argument: those who break the law should be held accountable. It was most effective when presented in a commonsense tone with the unstated question, “How could anyone disagree?” When Rudy Guiliani ran for mayor of New York, he made an issue of the common practice of turnstile jumping to avoid paying for the subway. He was mocked for it: “What are you going to do, arrest them?” Guiliani’s answer was yes, I will.

After he was elected, police arrested a man who terrorized women on the Upper East Side of Manhattan by hitting them from behind with a brick. How did they catch him? Because he had jumped a turnstile and been fingerprinted, his fingerprints matched those on the bloody bricks he left by his victims. It turns out that maybe arresting turnstile jumpers wasn’t a crazy political stunt. (This was before Rudy became his own version of an authoritarian, followed by a descent into madness.)

In that commonsense tradition, let me offer a simple suggestion for addressing the horror of a government that is seizing those who are in America legally and sending them to a for-profit prison in El Salvador with no pretense of due process. A government that is bragging about its illegal actions is confident no one will be held responsible.

This is kidnapping and human trafficking, criminal acts illegal in every state. Recognizing that the federal government in the Trump era will continue to act illegally, the Attorneys General of states in which this illegal action is taken should charge those involved with the appropriate crimes. Arrest the criminals.

The greatest danger of this moment is the normalization of an authoritarian state that refuses to honor the rule of law. Will a state Attorney General be able to bring a government official involved in these kidnappings to trial? Maybe, maybe not. But it is the sort of challenge that is essential.

William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review, once wrote, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” To hold those accountable who are involved in government-sanctioned illegality is a fundamentally conservative act at a time when the Republican party has morphed from a center-right party to a radical movement.

It's not complicated: Kidnapping is illegal. Arrest the criminals.

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NEW EPISODE TONIGHT: Mrs. Frazzled joins Maya for Punching Up! 7p ET.

As if we didn’t already worry about the state of our schools, the health of our kids, and the soul-crushing workload of our teachers…Trump’s assault on education hits at the very core of what makes us American - the idea that we can always do better. It’s an idea that starts with education. It’s not always been perfect, of course. And historically, hope has not been distributed equally, and our educational system has been under attack for years. But until now, it’s held.

So what happens when our president decides that educating children simply isn’t a priority?

Maya talks to Mrs. Frazzled - teacher, mom, and hugely popular political content creator - about what’s going on and how we can - no, how we must - fight back.

The future of humanity is on the line. Literally.

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