Donald Trump’s 50 Years of Criminal Behavior and Criminal Hypocrisy

Hours after Donald Trump’s guilty verdict was announced, I wrote, “The trial made clear that Trump is not of decent character and has no fealty to the law.”

Of course, this isn’t exactly breaking news to anyone who has paid close attention to Trump.

But now that the former president and current Republican presidential nominee is officially a convicted felon, we should remind ourselves how, for decades, Trump not only indecently disregarded the law but also hypocritically portrayed himself as a zealous defender of law and order.

First, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly today:

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Days 22 and 23 of the Trump Trial: “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty” and 30 More “Guiltys”: Contributing Editor Jonathan Alter concludes his inside-the-courtroom dispatches from the Trump hush money trial. Click here for the full story.

What Was the Alito Flag Really About?: Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps follows Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s downward spiral. Click here for the full story.

Will Donald Trump End Up Behind Bars?: James D. Zirin, a former federal prosecutor, explains why he expects Trump’s sentence to include some imprisonment. Click here for the full story.

Trump’s Payoff to Stormy Was the Best $130,000 He Ever Spent: Contributing Writer Margaret Carlson credits the hush money payment for Trump’s 2016 victory. Click here for the full story.

The Cost of Exaggerating the Gaza Protests: Author David Masciotra shows how the media allowed the campus encampments to misrepresent public opinion. Click here for the full story.

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Trump’s hypocrisy on crime runs deep. His vocal outrage about sexual assault, illegal drugs, and release of prisoners is betrayed by his violent and disturbing actions.

Trump’s hypocrisy on sexual assault

Thirty-five years ago in April 1989, a female jogger was brutally raped in Central Park and six teenagers of color were indicted (wrongfully) for the crime.

Two weeks after the crime, Trump—in one of his first overtly political acts—took out full-page ads in four New York newspapers to publish a demagogic essay.

In the wake of a crime alleged to have been committed by kids aged between 14 and 16, Trump called for New York to reinstate the death penalty and to “unshackle” the police “from the constant chant of ‘police brutality.'”

And he bemoaned a “dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman and then laugh at her family’s anguish.”

About six years later, Trump raped writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room, as a civil jury concluded last year when finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation and ordering him to pay Carroll $83 million.

Trump not only continues to deny responsibility, but has repeatedly mocked her and encouraged his followers to laugh at her anguish.

(Trump also refused to apologize to those exonerated in the Central Park Jogger case for suggesting they deserved to be executed.)

On the infamous Access Hollywood tape, Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitalia without consequence. It was dismissed by his campaign as mere “locker room talk,” but that is harder to do after the Carroll verdict. Trump has faced other allegations of sexual misconduct although none of the others were fully adjudicated in the courtroom.

Trump’s hypocrisy on drug dealers

Trump’s strident approach to crime continued in his subsequent forays into politics, as did Trump’s selective, self-serving abandonment of his stated principles.

His 2000 book “The America We Deserve,” published during his brief pursuit of the Reform Party presidential nomination, decreed, “Crime is the biggest scandal of American life.” Trump lambasted leniency, arguing that “soft criminal sentences are based on the proposition that criminals are the victims of society” and that “criminals are often returned to society because of forgiving judges. This has to stop.”

Trump’s June 2015 presidential announcement is notorious for his bigoted claim about immigrants from Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And in March 2018, during his presidency, Trump proposed instituting the death penalty for drug dealers.

Three months later, after being lobbied by Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Trump commuted the life sentence of Alice Marie Johnson. She was a sympathetic case. While she was involved in a multi-million-dollar cocaine trafficking operation, she was an African-American grandmother who already served 21 years.

Trump was supposedly against being forgiving, but he also wanted more African-American votes.

Johnson would later endorse Trump at the 2020 Republican convention, and Trump reciprocated with a full pardon.

Two weeks ago, Trump pledged at the Libertarian Party convention to free another drug dealer serving a life sentence, Ross Ulbricht. As I wrote last week, this is a transparent abuse of pardon power used to woo voters. But it is not Trump’s first time doing so, nor is it the first time doing so on behalf of a major drug dealer.

Trump’s hypocrisy on freeing prisoners (and its consequences)

We already know Trump would abuse the pardon power as president, because he when has was president, he mainly used it to benefit his connected friends and his own political ambitions. His pardons included his former campaign aides Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos, his son-in-law’s farther Charles Kushner, and the far-right Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (The Washington Post ranked Trump’s “swampiest pardons” at the end of his presidency.)

Late in the 2020 race, Trump won the endorsement of African-American hip-hop artist Lil Wayne after an in-person meeting. At the time, Lil Wayne was under investigation for felony gun possession.

After the election in December, the rapper pled guilty. As this was not his first gun-related felony, he theoretically risked a 10-year sentence. But perhaps Lil Wayne knew otherwise. One month later, just before Trump left the Oval Office, Lil Wayne was pardoned.

Again, before Trump was president he railed against returning criminals to society out of an excess of forgiveness, making law-abiding citizens less safe.

So perhaps Trump wasn’t surprised to learn that, as ABC News reported in December 2022, out of the 238 people he pardoned or whose sentences he commuted, at least 10 “have since faced legal scrutiny — either because they are under investigation, are charged with a crime, or are already convicted.”

ABC News reported that the recidivism rate of Trump’s pardon recipients appears to be much higher than those of past presidents. Why? Most likely because, unlike past presidents, the vast majority of those he pardoned were not vetted and recommended for clemency by the Justice Department.

In this year’s campaign, Trump has repeatedly proposed pardoning the convicted and incarcerated January 6 insurrectionists, whom he calls “hostages” and “patriots.” The authoritarian nature of such a potential act justifiably shocks the conscience. But when considering Trump’s history of politicizing pardons, it’s not shocking at all.

Trump has the heart of an unrepentant criminal

Trump first ran afoul of the law over 50 years ago, when the Justice Department sued him and his father, then the respective President and Chair of Trump Management, for racial discrimination against apartment rental applicants—an early case of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

After the Trumps resisted for two years, the case was settled without admission of wrongdoing but with a consent agreement designed to prevent discrimination. In 1978, the Justice Department accused the Trumps of violating the agreement. The matter was dropped in 1982. (Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department was not known for aggressive enforcement of fair housing laws.)

Also in 1982, Trump Management was sued by the Open Housing Center for housing discrimination, leading to another settlement with desegregation provisions. But in many respects, Trump got away with it.

He continued to behave as if the law does not apply to him, surviving a slew of legal scrapes over the years regarding his business dealings. Only recently has Trump faced real legal consequences.

In addition to being found liable for sexually assaulting Carroll, Trump was hit with a $464 million judgment for fraudulently inflating his net worth, and his Trump Organization was found guilty of criminal tax fraud.

Only after Trump was convicted for falsification of business records can we refer to Trump as a felon. But his criminal nature was long plain to see.

His claim to be the candidate of “law and order” was always an Orwellian farce. He is literally the candidate of criminality and chaos.

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Best,

Bill Scher, Washington Monthly politics editor

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