With Congress in summer recess, we’ve gotten a little respite from the agonizing complaints from Republicans that Donald Trump is the victim of a two-tiered justice system: one goes after him and others in their party, and the other favors the Democrats. , who supposedly run the entire barber shop from the White House.

But with a fourth indictment against the former president likely to come any day, you can expect his chorus of sycophants to pick up the chant again.

The claim would be laughable if it weren’t so sadly cynical. The country does indeed have a two-tier system, and it has long been recognized no matter which party is in power: it favors the rich and the prominent and for everyone else, especially poor Americans and people of color, not so much.

That system has not only benefited Trump throughout his life, it has defined him and helped him build a daunting reputation as a warrior in business and politics.

When he was

a real estate developer and casino owner, Trump essentially got away with all sorts of alleged deceptions dating back to his days as his father’s understudy, thanks to Trump’s penchant for hiring crafty lawyers and exhausting prosecutors with delaying tactics and countersuits. The son drew an early lesson from the Trumps’ long battle in the early 1970s against federal charges of racial bias in renting their New York apartments, for which they hired shady and eventually disbarred attorney Roy Cohn.

As Trump would later write, we eventually settled out of court without admitting any guilt.

He had much more to rejoice over in the ensuing decades of cases that held the Trump Organization liable but not its owner, or ended with legal settlements and fines he could pay and largely shrug off. The company was guilty of tax evasion. He embezzled money from his charitable foundation. He cheated students at his fake real estate college. And Trump and his companies have been hit with hundreds of liens and judgments over time for failing to pay contractors, suppliers, employees and others.

For Trump, the fines and legal fees were just the cost of doing business.

Even as Trump bypassed legal boundaries in New York and New Jersey, he was always a high-society voice for harsh crime tactics against everyone else, remember his 1989 conviction of the five black and Latino teens who were wrongly convicted for raping a Central Park jogger.

Given his successes in exploiting the system as a businessman who pushes envelopes, crosses lines and skates away from severe punishment, why wouldn’t Trump think he could operate in the same way as a politician and president? Accountability to you, but not to me.

The man who now barks daily about President Biden arming the government

against him,

led campaign rallies in 2016 in chants of Lock er up! against his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. As president, he unsuccessfully pressured senior government officials to get the Justice Department and the IRS to press ahead, and not just against Clinton.

He used to tell me we should use the FBI and the IRS to go after people, it was constant and obsessive and it’s exactly what he claims is being done to him now, John F. Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, told House. the New York Times. Former Ace. General William Barr and former National Security Adviser John Bolton, among other appointees, reportedly received similar pressure from Trump.

Ironically, this beneficiary of a system that favors the wealthy and well-connected built its political appeal by capitalizing on the average American’s grievances against opportunistic elites. It takes one to know one, Trump has told them, and his numbers are accurate. After eight years of this demagoguery, they believe him when he nonsensely says after every indictment that government thugs are after you and that I’m just in their way. . And they send hundreds of millions to his political treasury.

It’s because Trump has such staunch support from so many Republican voters that most party officials, including his rivals for the 2024 presidential nomination, are also defending him. They reflect his false whataboutism, equating his own predicament with Biden’s alleged impunity and Hunter Biden’s supposed sweetheart deal over tax and gun charges.

Above all, they reflect his twisted definition of the bipartisan justice system. Trump recently collated dozens of quotes from the Republicans in an email; it’s almost comical to see such fidelity to the Dear Leaders’ talking points on one screen. One of the quotes, of course, is from Speaker My Kevin McCarthy: House Republicans Will Tell the Truth About Biden Inc. and continue to explore the two tier justice system.

But such echoes are staggering. Here’s which South Carolina presidential candidate and Senator Tim Scott said after Trump’s indictment for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, what we are seeing today are two different tracks of justice. One for political opponents and one for the current president’s son. Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican, certainly knows better than to define the inequalities in the justice system that way.

Missing from almost all Republican rhetoric is the mention of the more than 1,000 Americans who have been indicted so far for answering Trump’s call to come to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. If they noticed that fact, the politicians might have to explain why all those people have been held accountable, but not the man who misled them to keep him in power.

And then those Republican politicians would talk about the

Real

two-tier legal system. They can’t have that.

@jackiekcalmes