August 25, 2023 | Reading Time: 3 minutes
Why the mugshot ‘is justice’
It’s a righting of what’s wrong.
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The criminal former president turned himself in to authorities in Georgia yesterday. He was processed in connection to an indictment brought by Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, on charges related to his alleged attempt to interfere with that state’s elections two years ago.
That wasn’t the big news, though.
The big news was the mugshot that came out of that processing. Donald Trump has been indicted four times now, but this was the first time his photograph was taken and released to the public. That fact is now resonating deeply, especially among pundits like Joy Reid.
The host of “The ReidOut” was on an MSNBC panel last night, watching Trump’s arraignment in Atlanta. She explained what it means to see him being treated like any American accused of crimes, after decades of watching him “persecute Black and brown people” in New York City. Given this history, she said, Trump’s mugshot alone “is justice.”
Joy Reid said people like Trump “persecuted Black and brown people … for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure. They enjoyed it.” But she’s talking about more than bullies punching down on the weak. She’s talking about a political order in which the desire for suffering is key to its continuation. Cruelty isn’t the point. It’s a byproduct. Sadism is the point. It always has been.
Reid said that when she was young, Donald Trump signified “the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me, that hated and despised my cousins, my friends, everyone we knew …
“People like Trump persecuted Black and brown people in New York,” she said. “It’s what they did for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure. They enjoyed it. They enjoyed lording over people who had nothing, who had no millionaire-dollar lawyers, who couldn’t change lawyers at the drop of a hat, who couldn’t go out and make their case on Fox … (my italics)
“This is justice,” she said. “Fani Willis is a hero, because she’s the only one who said that wealthy, powerful, privileged men are just American citizens, and when they break the law, they will take that picture.”
That Trump’s mugshot “is justice” underscores a point I’ve been trying to make stick for years – that the point of illiberal politics is sadism.
When Black and brown people are treated equally, that’s not justice in illiberal politics. That’s an injustice, a wrong that must be made right. And by making it right, there’s pleasure. To make Black and brown people suffer is to restore “the way things are supposed to be.”
Cruelty, according to Adam Serwer, is the point of illiberal politics. While I agree with virtually everything he has said on the subject, I’ve always chafed at the absence of one element, which is the pleasure derived from watching people on the margins of society suffer.
Cruelty can be unintentional. Sadism is never unintentional.
It’s a reaction to liberal values and democratic politics. The more Black and brown people demand their rights, the more white reactionaries see a perversion of “the natural order” that must be corrected. With that correction comes the pleasure of seeing “justice” have its day.
That pleasure is the center of illiberal politics. If we don’t understand that, we don’t understand why the illiberals won’t leave Black and brown people alone. They can’t, because their suffering is linked to white freedom. The absence of suffering for them means the absence of “equality” for us. Black and brown liberation equals white slavery.
Reid said people like Trump “persecuted Black and brown people … for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure.” She’s talking about more than bullies punching down on the weak. She’s talking about a political order in which the desire for suffering is key to its continuation. Cruelty isn’t the point. It’s a byproduct. Sadism is the point. It always has been.
You could say that a mugshot is not anyone’s idea of justice, and there’s something to be said about that. But when you consider what a mugshot means to the illiberals who are outraged that Trump is being treated just like anyone else, you can see that it is indeed justice.
Whether that leads to conviction is another question.
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John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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