Donald Trump’s recently announced Arizona rally is fueling speculation he may go through with pardoning Crooked Joe Arpaio, recently found guilty of criminal contempt of court for disobeying a federal judge’s order to stop racial profiling Latino and immigrant drivers in Maricopa County in order to turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But the fact that Trump may pardon Arpaio while he himself is in the midst of self-inflicted chaos following Charlottesville should be a shock to no one. This is who Donald Trump is. While he may have initially been cajoled into some words of condemnation following the terror attack, don’t be fooled, because his subsequent, unscripted embrace of white supremacists shows who he really is. His “both sides-ing” of decent people and Nazis shows who he really is. His openness to pardoning a racist, lawless thug like Joe Arpaio shows who he really is:
You’ll probably remember that the president often pines for a time in the past when violence was doled out to the powerless without any accountability. During campaign rallies, he would respond to protesters by telling his supporters to “knock the crap out of ’em, would you?”, and at times specifically cited that kind of mob violence as the mark of a lost and better time: “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. It’s true. … I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.”
Trump wasn’t only complaining about the “political correctness” of social mores; he was also lamenting the fact that legal protections against violence and discrimination have grown stronger in recent decades (granting that they aren’t nearly strong enough). For his part, Arpaio looked for nostalgic ways to humiliate and brutalize the prisoners in his care, making them wear old-fashioned striped uniforms and putting them into roadside chain gangs. He too was someone who saw the “good old days” as a better time, when racial minorities knew that laws and institutions would not protect them from powerful people who wanted to put them in their place — indeed, those laws and institutions would be wielded against them, civil rights be damned.
“That’s the person Trump is considering making the first recipient of a pardon in his presidency: someone with a long history of racist actions and racist policies, who was finally convicted of a crime he proudly owned up to,” writes Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman. The fact is Trump and Arpaio are one and the same: power-hungry authoritarians who have been perfectly willing to demonize Mexicans and immigrants as criminals and “rapists,” while enacting nativist policies that have in fact exacerbated problems we face as a nation. During Arpaio’s reign of terror, more than 400 sex crimes went ignored or under-investigated. And citing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fears, Latinos and immigrants are no longer reporting when they’ve been the victims of sexual assault.
Trump and Arpaio want “law and order” all right, but a version that ensures white supremacy’s survival, and that means a wink to his base by both physically and symbolically rescuing Arpaio from his due justice. “While his Twitter activity may get the most attention,” Paul Waldman continues, “Trump has sent another clear signal to his most avid supporters that his support of white nationalism and xenophobia has not diminished a whit.” Again, this is who Donald Trump is. So believe him.