Last Wednesday, Donald Trump announced the appointment of Peter Navarro as a senior counselor for trade and manufacturing during the second Trump administration. Ordinarily, appointments to posts as obscure as that one would hardly have caused a ripple. But Navarro is no ordinary appointee. He is the latest addition to the rogues gallery of felons and ne’er do wells who will populate the White House, the Trump Cabinet, and other posts starting on Jan. 20.
As Yahoo News reminds us, Navarro “was sentenced to four months in prison after a federal jury convicted him of refusing to comply with a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
It is unusual for executive branch officials to get in hot water for ignoring congressional subpoenas. But, prosecutors explained that Navarro’s “wholesale non-compliance with the lawmakers’ demands put him far afield from the back-and-forth other former officials typically have had with lawmakers over their participation in congressional probes.”
Navarro, released from prison barely four months ago, epitomizes Trump’s jailhouse-to-White House pipeline. Of course, Navarro is not alone in traversing that path.
Before discussing Trump’s rogue gallery and the jailhouse-to-White House pipeline, we want to explain why it matters and what it means for America’s democratic future. Much of the commentary on Trump’s appointments has focused on questions of their competence or what it would mean for the jobs they are being asked to do or the agencies they are being asked to lead.
Those are valid concerns. But there is another harm in Trump’s effort to construct a criminal state.
We want to call attention to the messages it sends to Americans, how it coarsens our civic life, encourages cynicism, and prepares the way for Trump’s distinctive brand of strong man rule.
Others who served time in prison and will have prominent government positions include Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, as ambassador to France. In 2005, Kushner went to prison after “pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations.”
According to MSNBC, as part of his scheme, the ambassador-designate “hired a prostitute to coax his brother-in-law — who’d agreed to testify against him — into a motel room and then sent a video recording of the sexual encounter to Kushner’s sister, all in the hopes of keeping him silent.” MSNBC quotes Chris Christie who led the prosecution of Kushner who called what Kushner did “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted.”
None of that deterred Trump from pardoning Kushner during his first term or rewarding him with a plumb ambassadorial appointment in his new administration.
As the first convicted felon ever to be elected president, Trump wants to create a government of and for people who, like Navarro and Kushner, will go “far afield” and even commit “loathsome, disgusting crimes” to do his bidding and aid his effort to bring American democracy to its knees. That is also why he wanted to make Matt Gaetz, who was the subject of a Justice Department sex-trafficking investigation last year and a House Ethics Committee's investigation into allegations sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, among other things, attorney general of the United States.
While Gaetz has not been charged with a crime, he is no poster boy for civic virtue.
That is why we would not be surprised to see Gaetz turn up in the Trump administration after the dust settles. For that matter, how long can it be before Steve Bannon, another ex-convict facing a criminal fraud trial in New York, returns to a prominent place in Trump’s orbit?
Keeping track of those with criminal records and reputations for underhanded ethics whom Trump is appointing is a Sisyphean task. But others are worthy of mention.
None more so than Pete Hegseth, whose nomination to be Secretary of Defense is hanging by a thread. Hegseth’s track record makes Gaetz look like a boy scout. His record, which includes a 2017 allegation that he committed a sexual assault, is so troubling that even some MAGA stalwarts in the Senate, like Iowa’s Joni Ernst, are pushing back.
Like Gaetz, Hegseth seems to have walked up to the edge of criminality. He apparently got close enough to pass Trump‘s qualifications test.
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer quotes Justin Higgins who “vetted Hegseth for under-secretary roles in the first Trump Administration,” and says that Hegseth “’was likely chosen because he seems willing to say and do anything Trump wants.’” It hadn’t hurt, Higgins added, that Hegseth belittled some war crimes.”
In addition, Mayer reports that “Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran…in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.”
“Financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct” sounds like it could be a description of Trump himself.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with giving people second chances after they have paid their debt to society. But, everyone Trump has nominated or appointed thinks they owe no debt to society. Each of them contends or is portrayed by Trump’s transition team as a victim of a political prosecution or a left-wing smear campaign. Typical was the way Trump characterized Navaro as “a man who was treated horribly by the Deep State, or whatever else you would like to call it.”
Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland world of Trump’s criminal state where up is down, criminals are victims, and soon-to-be-pardoned insurrectionists are “hostages” or “patriots.”
Our point is simple. There is no better way to construct a criminal state than to appoint criminals and “ne-er do wells” to positions of power and to pretend that they are something else. And most importantly, there is no better way to undermine democracy and the rule of law than by making criminals our political leaders.
What Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote almost one hundred years ago best captures this danger. “In a government of laws, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government,” Brandies said, “is the potent, the omnipresent teacher.”
“For good or for ill,” he continued, “it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
If Brandeis is right, when crimes are as quickly redescribed in the self-serving ways that Trump does, those in power are invited to ignore the law, commit crimes, and call them something else. Crimes so reinscribed become the basic building blocks for constructing a world in which crime becomes meaningless, in which the common sense understanding of the distinction between the lawful and the lawless is erased, and with it, the distinction between reality and illusion.
Such is the criminal state that prepares the way for authoritarianism. As the famous political theorist Hannah Arendt described it, the criminal state exists early on the path to totalitarianism. “[I]t must behave like a tyranny and raze the boundaries of man-made law.”
As Arendt understood, the criminal state eliminates one of the final barriers to absolute rule. It prepares the citizenry to accept anything from the government and turned into a passive and lonely mass, and fearful of the consequences of stepping out of line.
In the end, the promotion of criminals to places of power is a feature, not a bug, in Trump’s appointment strategy and one important step toward ending American democracy.
