Armoured, balaclavad, “enforcement” divisions carrying assault rifles and shotguns belong to paramilitary campaigns, belong to civil wars, belong to repressive political dictatorships and their partisan militias. They are also part of the iconography of Trump’s America.
These groups, photographed manhandling shackled prisoners at the Salvadorean concentration camp, CECOT, or filmed hurling members of the public to the asphalt in California while their loved ones cry and plead and beg, are a manifestation of state terrorism. Their appearance, mode of conduct, violent impunity, is expressly designed to inspire terror, to advertise the state’s monopoly on violence, to suggest that that violence can be turned against anyone, anywhere, at the discretion not just of the state, but specifically of the executive: the Trump White House.
The apparel and balaclavas are more than just a form of aesthetic intimidation, the anonymity, and the refusal of the officers to identify themselves or justify their authority, is also intended to evade accountability and legal redress. It is to insinuate that all this might be extra-legal, that legal rights may not actually mean anything at all, that demanding justice is merely shouting into the void; the silent, expressionless balaclavas insist that we are done with all of that. Enough. Now the only law is physical strength, and that monopoly that I mentioned.
The American state’s monopoly on violence is seen most starkly in its penal code, which permits it to put its own citizens to death, not just in a moment of high-drama or risk-to-life – a shooting rampage, say, or an armed insurrection – but as part of a formal procedure: capital punishment. And it is in that procedure that accountability, the rule of law, the integrity of the judiciary, and the right of redress in the courts are absolutely critical, because the kind of bellicosity, impunity and disregard for legal process that the Trump White House has exhibited thus far, will lead to the arbitrary murder of innocent people.
I am currently working on a film about the system and experience of capital punishment – how the mechanisms of putting people to death operate, and what it is like to go through the process. I have heard of harrowing stories in which innocent people have been condemned to death and struggled to achieve justice.
Ahead of the election last November, I wrote an article which highlighted the recent execution of a man who was likely innocent, and expressed concern that many more people (both the innocent and the guilty) would be put to death by the state should Donald Trump return to the White House. I was, and remain, surprised that the issue of state killing is not more salient in US politics.
I am against capital punishment, mainly for moral reasons, but I think that where I and those supportive of capital punishment definitely agree, is on the principle that innocent people should not be murdered by the state, and that no efforts should be spared in seeking to cure miscarriages of justice when someone’s life is at stake.
In my previous article I highlighted Trump’s enthusiasm for executions during his first stint in the White House and my fears around his return:
Unsurprisingly for someone who has shown nothing but contempt and disregard for the lives of others, Trump initiated a killing spree during his first term in office. More people were executed under Trump than under the previous ten presidents combined. In the final, hysterical days of his presidency, the bloodlust escalated as Trump broke with over a century of precedent, in which Federal executions are paused during a presidential transition, and executed five people before Joe Biden assumed office.
Trump’s language of extreme vengeance, threats to imprison and execute his opponents, exact violence against groups that he disapproves of, a thirst to condemn and kill that predates his political career, means that state killing, to include the murder of innocent men and women, will likely expand from the first day that he assumes office.
Some of these fears were pre-empted by Joe Biden, who commuted the sentences of almost all Federal death row inmates prior to his departure, but of course Biden had no jurisdiction over the fate of those condemned to die by state, rather than Federal, courts.
Since Trump’s return, executions in the states have surged. Robert Dunham, Director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, published an article on Substack on August the 4th entitled Executions are Up but the Sky is Not Falling. In his article Dunham argues that despite the new Trump surge, the trend is towards a decline in both executions and public support for the death penalty. Given those trends, Dunham asks, “what accounts for the increase in executions, and what is skewing the numbers?”. Unsurprisingly, he concludes that the answer is not just, Trump, but Trumpism:
It is a Trump effect — but not in the manner that the media is reporting… I believe the stacking of a now extremist Supreme Court, which has emboldened and empowered states to flout the constitution on a broad range of issues, is the main driver of the rise in executions… The death penalty is a canary in the coal mine of the assault on decency and democracy currently underway in the United States. The norm-shattering federal execution spree in the final months of the first Trump term was a harbinger of the Court’s now habitual abandonment of its constitutionally assigned institutional role as a protector of the rule of law.
On August the 18th, the investigative journalist Radley Balko published on his Substack Paul House has died -- a wrongly convicted man whom John Roberts gave the okay to execute. The article is a detailed account (which I recommend reading in full) of the exoneration of a death row inmate following a narrow, 2006 US Supreme Court decision in favour of his petition; the dissenting opinion was authored by John Roberts prior to his elevation as Chief Justice. For what I understand to be pedantic procedural reasons, Roberts preferred to see a possibly innocent man put to death rather than disturb his own academic notions of propriety within the hierarchy of the legal system.
Of course, Roberts is now Chief Justice, and his court has proved to be exceptionally accommodating to the views of the Trump White House, particularly when it comes to the limits of executive authority and due process of law. In his article on the House case, Balko observes:
Roberts’s dissent would have made it extremely difficult for the wrongly convicted to get any federal review at all… It seems likely that if today’s Supreme Court had been in place when Paul House’s case came before them in 2006, he’d have died on death row — or been executed.
This is the court which will determine if the summary arrests and renditions, the troops in the streets, the cold terror of the unexpected knock on the door and balaclavas waiting beyond it are legal. This is the court expected to defend the US constitution. The testimonies that I have been gathering from innocent people condemned to die show what happens when operation of the law becomes arbitrary, casual and capricious. For Americans, the fear must be that these same tendencies overwhelm the state and the integrity of rights granted under its constitution; as Dunham says, “the death penalty is a canary in the coal mine of the assault on decency and democracy”. The renewed enthusiasm for the death penalty, at both Federal and state level, is bigger than the inadequacies of the system, bigger than doubts over the guilt of people who will be put to death by the state, bigger than the way in which capital cases are adjudicated in the courts; it is a symptom of Trumpism, and the creeping degradation of civil, legal and human rights.
As a European looking at Trump’s America from the outside, I notice that the cancer of Trumpism is steadily metastasizing within our own societies, and I worry that we are not taking it seriously enough.