There's a Darker Purpose Behind Trump's Latest Law Enforcement Against Political Foes
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On Thursday, Alex Padilla—a US senator—was handcuffed and pinned to the ground when he interrupted a press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “I'm Senator Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary,” Padilla began as two men, presumably Secret Service agents, pushed him backward. “I have questions for the secretary. Because the fact of the matter is—” the senator continued, but whatever came next was muffled as more guards pushed him out of the room and into the hallway. Padilla is a tall man, and he took another three officers—around half a dozen in total through the altercation—to shove him to the ground and handcuff him behind his back.
It was a frightening moment, and the sort of thing we say with increasingly unconvincing regularity doesn't happen in America. In a press conference afterwards, Padilla, angry and seemingly holding back tears, said : “If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question … You can only imagine what they are doing to farmworkers, to cooks, to day laborers throughout the Los Angeles community, and throughout California and throughout the country.”
Democratic members of Congress expressed their support for Padilla, and their horror at what he experienced. So too did the usual Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. Murkowski said that this was “not the America I know,” and Collins fretted that “it's hard to imagine a justification” for the incident. But the vast majority of conservatives, as expected, fell in line. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that “if you think you can disrupt or violate those laws and get away with it just because you're in elected office, is ludicrous.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said of Padilla: “He should be charged. He should be prosecuted.” And Tim Pool, the hatted right-wing conspiracy theorist, had an idea: “Charge him with obstructing an official proceeding and lock him up for 3 years.”
Pool's exceedingly specific suggestion was no accident. It was a reference to 18 USC Section 1512(c)(2), which was one of the laws that we in the Justice Department used to prosecute rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. From a legal perspective, Pool's proposal didn't make much sense: A press conference probably is not an “official proceeding” under the law, nor would Padilla's interruption constitute obstruction of it. Pool's suggestion, though, was not legal, but rather political: The Trump administration, he was proposing, should use the tools we used to defend democracy to undermine it. And the administration is listening.
For this isn't the first time the president's supporters—or the president himself—have appropriated the language of the Jan. 6 prosecutions. Earlier this week, for instance, President Donald Trump called protesters in Los Angeles “ insurrectionists .” On Tuesday, the Justice Department dictated Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver for allegedly assaulting a federal officer—one of the statutes used to charge Capitol rioters—when she protested at an ICE detention facility. And just Thursday, the Trump administration charged a pro-immigrant protester who distributed face shields with aiding in “civil disorder,” another statute used to prosecute crimes at the Capitol.
There are a number of problems with these prosecutions. In the case of Rep. McIver, she—unlike the Capitol rioters— had the right to be at the detention center where she was arrested, so it may in fact have been the officers who pushed her out who used illegal force. In the case of the Los Angeles protest, there's little evidence in the charging document that he knew that the face shields he distributed would be—or were—used by people who engaged in civil disorder. Like a number of the administration's other prosecutions , these too might collapse under the weight of judicial and public scrutiny.
But these cases don't need to succeed legally to succeed politically. One goal is simply to create the impression that both sides are in the business of prosecuting their political enemies, thus delegitimizing the prosecutions of the people who raided America's Capitol building as part of an effort to overturn an election. This matters a great deal to the president and those whose careers depend on him, because democratic norms (if not our actual democracy ) are fairly popular in America: It's not yet acceptable to admit that the candidate you support has tried to overthrow an election.
So, the president and his supporters continue to undermine democracy using the language and tools of those who tried to save it. It's frustrating to watch, because while the president's prosecutions are about saving himself, the Jan. 6 prosecutions were about saving our republic. (As evidence that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden was not simply targeting political enemies, one need only look at the aggressive prosecutions of protesters during the summer of 2020, for whom the average sentences, the Associated Press found , were longer than those of Jan. 6 defendants).
The administration's actions are also scary to watch, because it can be hard for the media not to accept false equivalencies. Fortunately, this time it doesn't seem to be working. Scott MacFarlane at CBS has reported on Trump's vastly different reactions to the protests in Los Angeles and the attacks on Jan. 6, and Ankush Khardori at Politico explained why the case against Rep. McIver may fall apart.
Still, the administration is just beginning, and the physical and legal attacks against Sen. Padilla and Rep. McIver, not to mention against countless less powerful Americans, will only grow more common. As they do, the administration will continue to use the language and tools of Jan. 6 to both justify the present and rewrite the past. This is because every illiberal government, from Russia to Argentina to Brazil , tries to erase the violence of its own founding. So it is for this administration, which must invert the history of Jan. 6 in order to survive. As such, for Trump and his supporters, press conferences, detention centers, and the streets of Los Angeles are all battlefields. So is history itself.
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