Evading Accountability
By 
The Mississippi Free Press notes that there is nothing new under the sun about Donald Trump evading accountability for his crimes. In fact, it’s completely normal in this country, from the president on down.
Though nothing in the U.S. Constitution suggests that presidents cannot be prosecuted, the U.S. Department of Justice has said since 1973 that presidents are immune from prosecution while in office. The president at the time the DOJ adopted that rule was Richard Nixon who, even after resigning, evaded criminal charges for the Watergate scandal when his successor, Republican President Gerald Ford, pardoned him, saying it was for the good of the country.
Other presidents who faced serious allegations of wrongdoing in the years since but who never faced charges include Republican Ronald Reagan for his role in the Iran-Contra affair; Democrat Bill Clinton for lying under oath; and Republican George W. Bush for leading the U.S. into war in Iraq based on the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
As with Trump, a combination of congressional partisanship and institutional deference helped foreclose any serious possibility that any of these men would be punished even if they were guilty of crimes.
It’s not just presidents who can avoid accountability. Others, either by virtue of badge or circumstance, have long been able to evade consequences in America—especially when serving the cause of white supremacy.
Take the men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955: Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. Despite significant evidence, an all-white, all-male jury in Tallahatchie County acquitted them for the slaying of the 14-year-old Black child; the accused would months later confirm their guilt and describe the murder in an interview with Look magazine.
Several years afterward, the jurors told Hugh Stephen Whitaker that they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty, but “regarded killing a black male for insulting a white woman as not serious enough to merit the prescribed punishment,” as David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito wrote in the 2009 book, “Black Maverick.”
As many Americans know, especially Black Americans, police officers in the United States are often held above the law for gross abuses of power, violence and unjustifiable killings—all under the court-created doctrine of “qualified immunity.” Allegations of police violence are, regrettably but necessarily, frequent subjects of our reporting at the Mississippi Free Press.
The anger over America’s ongoing problem with unaccountable police brutality bubbled over in 2020, leading millions to take to the street across the country and around the world during that hot, pandemic summer. But despite the collective cry for justice, the government has utterly failed to do anything to change the status quo.
In fact, police killings rose in 2021, in 2022 and in 2023.
In fact, white men avoiding accountability is the actual definition of Make America Great Again. All Donald Trump provides is a reflection of this nation’s ugliness.