In Donald Trump’s world, we are beginning to understand, everybody is either a servile flatterer or a Rosie O’Donnell. Kiss the man’s feet or get a punch.
And that goes for federal judges just doing their jobs.
In maybe the biggest sign yet — it’s hard to keep track — that Trump is utterly unsuited to be president, the huckster from New York now has declared that an entire ethnic group, Mexican Americans, cannot be trusted to serve as judges, at least not in matters involving defendant Donald J. Trump.
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This is a slander against Mexican Americans, of course, including the hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans who live and work in Chicago. It is a slander, as well, against every American who understands just what we are — a nation of immigrants — and why that is terrific. We are bound by an ideal, human equality, not a bloodline or religion.
Trump was a disaster all week long, only belatedly coming through on a promised charitable gift to veterans, childishly calling reporters names for daring to ask questions about that gift, and defending his sham Trump University after documents revealed that it apparently preyed on the ignorant, the clueless and the desperate.
But Trump achieved a new low when he attacked the federal judge presiding over civil fraud lawsuits against Trump University.
The attack began on May 27 when Trump, at a rally in San Diego, called federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel “a hater of Donald Trump” who is filled with “tremendous hostility” toward Trump’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican-American border. What evidence led Trump to such a conclusion? Well, he noted, Curiel is “Mexican.”
For the record, Curiel was born in Indiana, a son of Mexican immigrants.
Then on Thursday, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump dug in his heels despite howls of protest from people who actually have a sense of decency. He said Judge Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the litigation given that he was “of Mexican heritage” and a member of a Latino lawyers’ association. “I’m building a wall,” Trump said. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.”
Trump also said that Curiel had a conflict of interest because he was friends with one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. The lawyer told The Wall Street Journal, however, that they had been federal prosecutors in the same office years ago, but had never seen each other socially.
Politicians, including presidents, knock judges all the time, but usually over the merits of a ruling on some larger constitutional issue. President Franklin D. Roosevelt complained about Supreme Court rulings that slowed his New Deal agenda. Southern governors ripped the Court for its Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed racially segregated schools. President Barack Obama chastised the high court — to the justices’ faces during a State of the Union address — for the Citizens United ruling that opened a floodgate of political spending by corporations.
That’s fair enough, though Obama was a little rude.
But to question a judge’s integrity solely on the basis of his ethnicity, that’s something else. That’s pure bigotry.
The irony here, as other commentators have noted, is that Curiel probably has done more to secure our nation’s borders than Trump will ever do — and at great personal risk.
As a federal prosecutor in California in the 1990s, Curiel worked with informants and sometimes-corrupt Mexican officials to win convictions against members of a murderous Mexican drug cartel that was running narcotics into the western United States. Years later, when it was learned he had been marked for murder by the cartel, Curiel was forced to live for awhile in secret locations under the protection of U.S. marshals.
Here’s a guess: Trump didn’t know that. Nor would he care.
Trump’s primary measure of another person is how “nice” or “not nice” they are to him. And given what a predatory joke Trump University is shaking out to be, Trump can’t feel at all confident Curiel will be nice to him — so he’s on the attack. Documents released Tuesday appear to show that Trump University used the hard-sell to peddle largely worthless real estate classes to people who often could not afford them.
Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsed Trump for president on Thursday, then denounced him on Friday for his comments about Curiel.
Ryan was nice, but then not nice.
We await the angry, pouting tweet.
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