Arresting political opponents amounts to fascism

 

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrested Istanbul Mayor and rival Ekrem İmamoğlu, mass protests erupted. But Erdoğan is hardly the only autocrat pulling that stunt.

“A major opposition leader and former prime minister of Chad was arrested early Friday, fueling fears of another crackdown on dissent in a country that has repeatedly used state power to silence critics,” the New York Times reported.

Meanwhile, CNN reports: “Tanzania’s main opposition leader Tundu Lissu told his supporters to have no fear as he appeared in court on Monday for the first time since his arrest on charges that include treason.”

Domestic critics of these autocrats and the international community rightly condemn such blatant abuse of power. So why has the reaction to Donald Trump’s arrest of political opponents and judges not been greeted with equal outrage?

Trump has now set a clear pattern that no other president in modern times has tried, at least since the Red Scare. Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested on spurious charges of obstructing an ICE arrest. ICE agents arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who accompanied members of Congress to investigate a detention center.

When that frivolous, unjustified trespassing charge failed, the Trump minions lashed out and arrested Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), who had engaged in her constitutional obligation to exercise oversight.

Democratic House leaders reacted with appropriate anger. “The criminal charge against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver is extreme, morally bankrupt and lacks any basis in law or fact,” they issued in a joint statement. “Members of Congress have a constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight of the executive branch wherever and whenever it is needed.”

They added, “We are lawfully permitted to show up at any federal facility unannounced to conduct an inspection on behalf of the American people.” Rather than assault anyone, the congressional members “were themselves aggressively mistreated by illegally masked individuals.”

If the corporate media could tear themselves away from selling hysterical tell-all books and kvetching over who knew what about former President Joe Biden’s aging, they might report to the American people that the current president is acting no better than autocrats in Turkey, Chad, or Tanzania.

Trump’s out-and-out thuggery, indistinguishable from dictators using state power to jail opponents, strikes at the heart of our democratic system. If we are to retain the rule of law, such conduct can never be countenanced.

The corporate media’s refusal to recognize and illuminate the scope of Trump’s tactics could not be more glaring. The story did not even make the front pages of the online New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. Republicans, who would have revealed a wave of fainting spells and cardiac arrests had Biden arrested a single Republican, remained mute, unsurprisingly.)

While Republicans cower and the billionaire media ignore the authoritarian menace, the American people cannot tolerate such lawlessness. The united pro-democracy community—including civil society organizations, judges, local and state leaders, and all people of conscience—should be peacefully marching and protesting political arrests, furiously contacting their elected representatives, and demanding that corporate media focus on the complete collapse of democratic norms.

Surely, we can respond to Trump at least as strenuously as Turkey’s anti-Erdogan coalition did to its autocrat.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian