Donald Trump Is Anti-Constitution and Anti-Liberty
I have a lot of reasons for not voting for Donald Trump. I mean, a LOT of reasons. I tried to come up with an exhaustive list once but after it hit five pages I simply had to move on with my life because I have a small child to tend to.
What with the recent, completely unsurprising revelations of the 2005 Access Hollywood video, and my reaction to them, some people seem to have gotten the impression that the “sex stuff” is the only reason I have for not jumping on the Trump Train. To be clear, yes, the “sex stuff” all by itself would be plenty enough to keep me from boarding the Trump Train, but it is only one of many problems any one of which would, all by itself, keep me from voting for him.
In the interest of brevity, I will try in this article to focus only on those reasons which have to do with our Constitutional rights and liberties.
One of the arguments that many Trump supporters consider to be a “clincher” is the danger that Hillary Clinton poses to our Second Amendment rights. I will readily agree to this, and I will readily agree that this, among many other things, renders her unfit for the office of President. However, if I am to consider Hillary Clinton unfit because of her opposition to Second Amendment rights, I am all the more obliged to consider Donald Trump unfit because of his opposition to the First, the Fourth, the Fifth, and the Sixth Amendments.
Let’s start with the First Amendment:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Because the scope of the First Amendment is so broad, it will take some time to get into all the ways that Donald Trump’s stated policies, opinions, and past actions have illustrated that he is directly opposed to these kind of freedoms.
- Freedom of Religion: Donald Trump’s suggestion that we should be performing surveillance on Muslim Mosques, for no other reason than that they are a Muslim place of worship, constitutes government harassment of a religious group. As Christians, leaving aside the fact that it is unethical for us to demand our right to exercise our religion in privacy and safety while demanding that the government suspend, limit, or altogether take away the protection of another religious group, it is also incredibly naive to think that, once religious liberty is compromised, we will not eventually suffer for it as well. There is no “freedom of religion for some”. We either have freedom of religion or we do not. Once we have lost that, even if a President Donald Trump would protect Christians from religious persecution, the precedent would be set for future administrations who might not be so friendly to Christianity.
- Freedom of Speech/Freedom of the Press: In February of this year, Trump made waves at a Texas rally by saying that he intended to “open up libel laws” so that it would be possible to win libel lawsuits against media outlets for publishing “hit pieces”.
This is an issue that is near and dear to Trump’s heart since he has brought lawsuits against media members various times throughout his career for negative press. Let’s take a look at one example where Trump thought he was justified in suing a member of the press for libel:
In 1990, Trump was preparing to open the Taj Mahal, a luxury casino in Atlantic City that represented billions of dollars of investment. A financial analyst named Marvin Roffman made a negative prediction about the Casino’s financial future which was published in the Wall Street Journal:
“ When this property opens, he will have had so much free publicity he will break every record in the books in April, June, and July. But once the cold winds blow from October to February, it won’t make it. The market just isn’t there.”
Under current libel laws, there must be proof that the publication knowingly and maliciously printed false information. Obviously, what Roffman said could not fall under this category because he was not stating false facts, he was making a prediction — stating his opinion (an opinion, which, by the way, turned out to be accurate).
This did not stop Trump from threatening to sue Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, the firm that Roffman worked for, unless Roffman apologized or was fired. The firm fired Roffman. Trump could not have won the lawsuit against Janney Montgomery Scott, but he found a way to “win” by causing Roffman to lose his job.
More recently, Trump famously threatened to sue the New York Times for publishing the accounts of women who claimed they had been subjected to unwanted sexual advances from him. Think about what this means: whether you think that Trump’s accusers are lying or not, he thinks it would be proper to be able to sue the paper just for publishing their story. The NY Times did not report that Trump had actually assaulted women, they simply reported that these women said he assaulted them. They say he did, he says he didn’t. It is the privilege and duty of the Press to judge when something is newsworthy and relevant — it is absolutely, positively, never the place of the President to attempt to limit this right, especially since it involves such an obvious conflict of interests. To do so does more than sound like authoritarianism — it is authoritarianism. It is censorship straight up.
The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable searches and unwarranted breaches of privacy:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I mentioned earlier Trump’s suggestion that we should be performing surveillance on Mosques. This is not only a violation of the freedom of religion as protected in the First Amendment, but an even clearer violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits the government from arbitrarily violating the privacy of citizens to search their premises. If you are having a hard time grasping how this is a problem, imagine if this kind of surveillance was being suggested for say, every Baptist Church in the U.S. It is a clear breach of citizens’ rights to privacy.
Donald Trump has also supported the practice of “stop and frisk”, which allows police officers to randomly stop citizens who, in their judgment, seem to be a threat, whether they are actually breaking any law or not. This practice has enabled police officers to profile citizens and harass them for simply “looking suspicious”, which could mean anything from acting abnormally to being a certain ethnicity, depending on the judgment of the police officer in question. Trump asserted his support of stop and frisk because in his judgment it had been effective in stopping crime, but the question is not about whether or not it is effective, but whether it is Constitutional, which it is not.
The Fifth Amendment guarantees each citizen equal protection under the law. The section I want to address relates to due process:
“… nor [shall any person be] deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
Trump supports the practice of eminent domain — not surprising since he has personally benefited from it in the past. The Fifth Amendment allows for the possibility of private property being taken “for public use”, with the stipulation that the owner be fairly compensated, but it does NOT allow for the government to enable one individual to help themselves to another citizen’s private property for something that is not for “public use”. Trump has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to use eminent domain in order to develop on land that belonged to someone else on multiple occasions. In 1994, he convinced the mayor of Bridgeport, CT, to condemn the property of five business owners who held land in an area where he wanted to build an entertainment complex. The plan was for the city to condemn the properties, and then for Trump to purchase the properties from the city. The deal ultimately fell through, but it demonstrates Trump’s complete willingness to bully his way into other people’s property.
In another instance, Trump attempted to use the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority to forcibly take land from three individuals who had rejected his offer to purchase their property, which he needed in order to build a limousine parking lot for his casino, the Trump Plaza. Speaking in defense of this practice, Trump said at the time: “Cities have the right to condemn for the good of the city. Everybody coming into Atlantic City sees this terrible house instead of staring at beautiful fountains and beautiful other things that would be good.” So in essence, the private property of individuals or business owners must be sacrificed so that we can have “big, beautiful fountains” and gaudy, Trump-esque entertainment venues. Trump also said that the owners would have made enormous profits from the sale, but that is entirely beside the point: if you do not have the right to keep your own property, regardless of whether you are being amply compensated or not, that is a gross breach of Constitutional rights.
(For more details on Trump’s use of eminent domain, check out this excellent article)
The Sixth Amendment has to do with the rights of citizens being tried in criminal prosecutions:
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where the crime shall have been committed; which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witness against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.”
Trump talks a lot about “rule of law”, but it is clear that by this he envisions a United States where “guilty unto proven innocent” is the rule. In 1989, Trump saw fit to use his money and celebrity platform to comment on the widely publicized “Central Park Jogger” rape and assault case. Five teenage boys (all underage) were being accused of the crime, which had left a New York woman fighting for her life with severe injuries. Trump took out a full-page ad in several major newspapers calling for the death penalty to be brought back. The ad, in inflammatory terms that clearly assumed the guilt of the accused, asserted that the death penalty should be brought back to punish such crimes and to deter others from committing them. He scorned the idea of “police brutality”, and, in words reminiscent of rhetoric from his rallies regarding protesters, hearkened back to a time when police could do whatever they wanted to criminals. In TV interviews he expressed that he “hated” the boys, and that “we should all hate them, and maybe hate is what we need if we’re going to get something done”. “The problem with our society,” he said in an interview with Larry King, “is that the victim has absolutely no rights, and the criminal has unbelievable rights … and I say it has to stop.”
Incidentally, the five boys were later exonerated through DNA testing and a confession from a serial-rapist and murderer who admitted to committing the crime alone (Trump still refuses to believe they were not guilty, which calls his judgment into serious question, but that’s an article for another day). But in this article, I do not bring it up because he was wrong about whether or not the boys committed the crime, but because it reveals a very troubling look into his ideal for a justice system. A system where the police are always presumed to be right, and concerns about “police brutality” are laughed off. A system where the criminal — or simply the accused — has no rights. Of all people, Donald Trump should know that anyone can be accused of a crime, and even under our current laws, the justice system gets it wrong more often than we’d like to think about. Should I use the same logic as Trump as he faces his accuser in December, who claims that he repeatedly and violently raped her when she was 14 years old? These are serious allegations — appalling if they are true. Should I hate him, and let that hatred determine whether he is guilty or not, and what his punishment should be if he is?
Hatred has no place in our justice system. A civilized society rests upon at least the attempt to serve out justice equally and dispassionately. A person who does not understand or believe in this has no place holding any office in a free society.
Trump’s ideal of an “unshackled” police also has sinister implications. The Fifth Amendment establishes that no criminal can be punished for a crime without due process. It is not up to the police to decide, from a few seconds of observing a situation, if a person is deserving of punishment, and then to inflict it on them. The police’s duty is to serve and protect — bringing suspects to justice, which is to be served out by the courts. Sometimes in order to protect the public or themselves the police have to use force to perform their duties, but “giving the bad guy what he had coming” should never be any part of policing. Trump’s idea of making the police judge, jury, and executioner is totally outside of Constitutional thinking.
I do not necessarily think that Donald Trump is knowingly opposed to the Constitution. I find it much more plausible that he is simply unaware of what it says beyond a few words of the Second Amendment. But whether he knows it or not, he is very much opposed to its ideas. When he says he is going to defend the Constitution, ask yourself if there is any reason, given the above, to believe him?
I do not see a choice between Trump and Hillary as, in any way, a choice between liberty and tyranny. At best, it is a choice between Tyrant A and Tyrant B.
Note: I am not advocating voting for Hillary Clinton, or not voting. I am simply attempting to explain and defend why I will not vote for Donald Trump. I am planning to vote for Evan McMullin, who is an official write-in in my state of Oregon.
