Donald Trump is not hypocritical when he defends criminals he knows ...

[SimpleDon]

... while championing law and order, getting tough on criminals.

Donald Trump ran as the law and order candidate to an extent we haven't seen since Nixon. He has called for the death penalty for large-scale drug traffickers, suspension of due process for numerous crimes and rounding up illegal immigrants because some small percentage of them are "bad hombres" because other countries don't send us their best people, except Norway, of course.

And yet he defends wife abusers like Rob Porter*, perjurers like Mike Flynn and child molesters like Roy Moore* when he knows them. Not to mention the good people there are in a tiki torch carrying parade of Nazis. And Trump's* own admissions of sexual assaults are nothing more than locker room talk.

* denies the accusations

While "tempting as it is to hammer Mr. Trump for his epic hypocrisy, it is a mistake" argues this oped in the New York Times, what Law and Order Means to Trump.

It is the expression of a consistent worldview that he campaigned on and has pursued in office.

In this view, crime is not defined by a specific offense. Crime is defined by who commits it. If a young black man grabs a white woman by the crotch, he’s a thug and deserves to be roughed up by police officers. But if Donald Trump grabs a white woman by the crotch in a nightclub (as he’s accused of doing, and denies), it’s locker-room high jinks.

<snip>​

A political movement that rails against “immigrant crime” while defending alleged abusers and child molesters is one that has stopped pretending to have any universalist aspirations. The president’s moral framework springs from an American tradition of cultivating fear and contempt among its white citizens against immigrants, indigenous people and people of color, who are placed on the other side of “the law.” It’s a practice that has taken on new strength at a time when many white people fear they may be outnumbered, outvoted and out of time.

This is the opposite of what we like to tell ourselves is the traditional American civic creed: one symbolized by a blindfolded Lady Justice who applies the law without fear or favor to whoever may come before her. It is one of Mr. Trump’s most insidious victories that he has given his supporters permission to drop any pretense of insisting that their actions and views should conform to this principle.

This is the argument. It rings true to me. To Trump, it is a question not of hypocrisy but of a tradition of class, of maintaining the established social order. The very dictionary definition of a "conservative."

And in practice, it is what it always has been, dividing us to maintain the status quo. Empathizing our differences so that we forget our far greater common interests.

Trump is a victim of his upbringing, of his father's racism and of his upholding of the tradition of class and male superiority taught in the exclusive private schools that he attended.

Is Trump just a hypocrite? Or is his two-tiered approach to law and order justified? Is one of the privileges of the upper class that their crimes are overlooked or minimized while the crimes of the lower class are demonized?

Or is there an acceptable middle ground, that Hayes and I are not seeing?

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The author of this op-ed is Chris Hayes, a liberal commentator with a regular show on MSNBC, which presumably disqualifies anything that he says from serious consideration by my conservative friends here. But I urge that they look past his social justice warrior credentials and to address the conclusion that he draws, that Trump is an unrepentant victim of his upbringing and not a hypocrite who knowingly applies different criteria to the different groups that he has been taught to see in our society.