Don’t hold your breath on Trump, he’s not getting jail time

I’m going to break the rules and give you all some good news: Trump and his two kids, Ivanka and Donald Jr, are being investigated by the New York Attorney General for their business practices. The Trumps will have to sit for depositions and have two weeks to hand over specific documents related to his 2016 campaign finances. 

So that’s the good news, but here’s the realistic part: it isn’t going to do anything. We all know he’s guilty; his first term was practically nothing but controversy and horrifically cruel legislation. It has taken five years in itself for this injustice to be given any amount of attention. And, yes, he was in office for four of those years, where he did much worse things that he will never be punished for.

Is tax fraud, lying about campaign finances, and insurance fraud bad? Yes, but were his policies worse? Obviously—they were some of the most inhumane things any U.S. president has done. Every post-war president has done some horrifically inhumane acts that are at the bare minimum prison-worthy, but Trump is a standout in committing those crimes.

Let’s first talk about Trump’s foreign policy and his status as a war criminal. Not only did Trump pardon the four Blackwater contractors who killed fourteen Iraqi civilians, but while he was campaigning, he boasted about how he would kill suspected terrorists and their families. This may sound good to some (terrorists are bad), but we have this idea in the American judicial system that people are innocent until proven guilty, and that even if they are guilty, that doesn’t make their families guilty. When serial killers are put on death row, we don’t put their families on death row.

This is to say nothing of his use of drones, which was similar to Obama’s, except Trump got rid of the rule that he had to report civilian casualties. Obama’s drone strikes killed civilians, and we knew about them—if Trump’s drone usage was similar to Obama’s, then the loss of hundreds of innocent lives would have been reported.

If evil exists, that would be the proper term to describe Trump’s foreign policy. According to Adam Serwer in his article “The War-Crimes President,” Trump truly revealed the brutality of his command in the U.S. Military—“This is not an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or a misrepresentation. As a candidate, the president regaled his audiences with vivid tales of brutality, some apocryphal, and vowed to imitate them.”

Trump’s domestic policy was similarly inhumane. Under the first Geneva Protocols of 1925, chemical gas was banned, including mustard gas as well as tear gas. Trump ordered the use of tear gas on Black Lives Matter Protesters. Gassing citizens with a gas that has been banned in war is a war crime, but Trump will never have to stand trial or face any punishment for that. 

McKenzie Sadeghi put it best in her article for USA Today, where she bluntly stated, “The use of tear gas at recent protests has brought forth frustration and turned into a political debate, stirring controversy on why police officers are allowed to use tear gas on civilians but not during war.”

Trump isn’t unique in his commitment of war crimes—every president since FDR, and even some before, did some horribly inhumane things. Obama increased the use of drone strikes, leading to thousands of civilian casualties; Bush lied us into a war which killed millions of innocent Iraqis; Clinton is a rapist; Bush senior and Reagan had a litany of horrible overseas activity; and, perhaps the most egregious, is the Iran-Contra affair, and Carter’s sanctions on Vietnam that led to thousands starving. 

Ford, Nixon and LBJ continued escalations in Vietnam, which the U.S. had no good reason to ever get involved with. Kennedy’s bay of pigs’ invasion was an act of aggression. Eisenhower had democratically elected presidents in South America overthrown in violent coups. The Truman doctrine kept us involved in wars for the rest of the twentieth century.

Noam Chomsky put it ever so delicately in his 1990 speech—“If the laws of the Nuremberg trials were applied then every post-war president would be hanged.” It’s not that Trump is an outlier in his cruelty, it's that America has a seriously inhumane political system that needs drastic reform for it to be remotely safe for the world. 

I’m simply sick of hearing and talking about Trump. Genuinely, how was he any different from someone like George Bush? Their policies were very similar, neither of them had the popular vote, they both said some of the dumbest things a politician has said, and most of all they didn’t improve the lives of the working class. The rich got richer and everyone else was screwed over. After these investigations, regardless of outcome, we should all just move on, and advocate for a more transparent and accountable U.S. government. 

If I’m wrong, I will eat my words (literally—this is being published and I will eat the newspaper if I am wrong). In fact, I want to be wrong—I want to live in a country that holds its leaders accountable for all the horrible things that they have done.