It’s official: Donald Trump will reenter the White House without facing any punishment for his 34 felony convictions in New York after Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan, a Democrat, sentenced him with an unconditional discharge.
Meanwhile, his former attorney, Michael Cohen, served three years in federal prison, received a $50,000 fine and was disbarred for his role in the same scheme.
Trump will also once again assume the awesome powers of the presidency without ever going to trial for the dozens of other criminal charges he faced for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection or his mishandling of classified documents.
‘A King Above the Law’
One of the awesome powers presidents have, at least in the United States, is that they are above the law and cannot even be prosecuted while in office.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority made that clear last July when they ruled, in a party-line 6-3 decision, that presidents are largely immune from prosecution for crimes committed under the umbrella of “official acts” while in office.
“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an appointee of Democratic president Barack Obama, wrote in a blistering dissent joined by the two other Democratic appointees on the court.
But despite the frequent refrain that “no one is above the law in America,” both from idealistic Democrats and some Republicans, it has long been the case in practice that American presidents are outside the law’s reach.
Though nothing in the U.S. Constitution suggests that presidents cannot be prosecuted, the U.S. Department of Justice has said since 1973 that presidents are immune from prosecution while in office. The president at the time the DOJ adopted that rule was Richard Nixon who, even after resigning, evaded criminal charges for the Watergate scandal when his successor, Republican President Gerald Ford, pardoned him, saying it was for the good of the country.
Other presidents who faced serious allegations of wrongdoing in the years since but who never faced charges include Republican Ronald Reagan for his role in the Iran-Contra affair; Democrat Bill Clinton for lying under oath; and Republican George W. Bush for leading the U.S. into war in Iraq based on the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
As with Trump, a combination of congressional partisanship and institutional deference helped foreclose any serious possibility that any of these men would be punished even if they were guilty of crimes.
Not Just Presidents Evade Accountability
It’s not just presidents who can avoid accountability. Others, either by virtue of badge or circumstance, have long been able to evade consequences in America—especially when serving the cause of white supremacy.
Take the men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955: Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. Despite significant evidence, an all-white, all-male jury in Tallahatchie County acquitted them for the slaying of the 14-year-old Black child; the accused would months later confirm their guilt and describe the murder in an interview with Look magazine.
Several years afterward, the jurors told Hugh Stephen Whitaker that they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty, but “regarded killing a black male for insulting a white woman as not serious enough to merit the prescribed punishment,” as David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito wrote in the 2009 book, “Black Maverick.”
As many Americans know, especially Black Americans, police officers in the United States are often held above the law for gross abuses of power, violence and unjustifiable killings—all under the court-created doctrine of “qualified immunity.” Allegations of police violence are, regrettably but necessarily, frequent subjects of our reporting at the Mississippi Free Press.
The anger over America’s ongoing problem with unaccountable police brutality bubbled over in 2020, leading millions to take to the street across the country and around the world during that hot, pandemic summer. But despite the collective cry for justice, the government has utterly failed to do anything to change the status quo.
In fact, police killings rose in 2021, in 2022 and in 2023.
While George Floyd’s killer was tried and convicted, most officers who unjustifiably kill Americans are never indicted, much less tried. That is not a system in which “no one is above the law.”
And yet, to become a true and full democracy, we must build a country where “nobody is above the law” is a truth for everyone from the lowest deputy to the occupant of the highest office in the land—not just an ideal to aspire to or a doe-eyed platitude to pull out of one’s hat when giving a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style speech. But before we can make our country live up to those ideals, we must first pause the star-spangled poetic waxing long enough to admit that it currently does not.
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This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to kiden@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
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