Donald Trump has suggested, on more than one occasion, that if elected once again, he will retaliate against the Democrats and the police agencies of the government for what they have attempted to do to him and to his allies. And this is a theme that has been taken up in at least some quarters of the MAGA movement. Attorney Mike Davis, for instance, has suggested statutes under which leading Democratic officials could be prosecuted for attempting to violate the constitutional liberties of their fellow Americans.
Not surprisingly, the Democrats shriek that Trump is threatening to go after his political opponents! I’ve heard this from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), and many others. Coming from them, this accusation carries no credibility or weight, because this is precisely what they have been doing for the past several years. They have been surveilling, censoring, targeting, persecuting, prosecuting, and locking up conservatives and Republicans who challenge and resist them.
Deploying force on behalf of the law is not the moral equivalent of deploying the forces of lawlessness.
But what about concerns, expressed by some Republicans, that Trump is simply after “vengeance” and that this is all about him?
It’s worth pointing out that in the old Western movies, vengeance is never a bad motive. Vengeance is always justified! The bad guys are so evil that it is simply unacceptable for the hero to do anything less than finish them off. It simply wouldn’t do to give them a beating and send them skulking out of town. And if this seems like an antique code from the 19th century, consider that it met the approval of movie audiences in the middle of the 20th century, so it’s not so antique after all.
Is Trump expected, in the face of what he has endured, to simply turn the other cheek? It’s worth remembering that Jesus didn’t always turn the other cheek himself. Consider the encounter with the high priests when Jesus is struck by one of the guards following his arrest at the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus doesn’t say, “That was a nice blow. Now give me another.” Rather, he says, “Why do you strike me?”
The moral question we face — one to which MAGA has already supplied its answer — is whether it is right for us to do to them what they have been doing to us.
Admittedly this question was unimaginable during the Reagan era. Reagan or George H.W. Bush would never dream, for example, of putting filmmaker Michael Moore in jail. But then neither would Jimmy Carter have dreamed of putting a conservative filmmaker like me in jail. In other words, we didn’t have to consider this solution in Reagan’s time because the problem did not exist.
But it existed in Abraham Lincoln’s time. Early in the Civil War, the Union Army for the first time deployed black troops. There weren’t many of them. The Civil War was, for the most part, a white man’s fight. But even so, there were some black soldiers, and the movie “Glory” memorializes their valor.
The Confederates were so outraged at the prospect of having to fight against blacks, however, that their leader, Jefferson Davis, issued an edict saying that any black Union soldier captured by the Confederacy would be shot. This did not apply to white Union soldiers, who would become normal prisoners of war. But for black captives, it would be a different fate.
Lincoln learned of this edict, and in 1863 — in a scene captured in one of my films, where Lincoln is on a train and enveloped in smoke — he signed what historians call the Order of Retaliation. In effect it said that for any black Union soldier captured and killed by the Confederacy, one Confederate captive would be executed.
Now why would Lincoln, a moderate man, issue an order of such barbarity? Why would he do something that would today be condemned under the Geneva Convention and the laws of war? The reason is obvious. Lincoln realized that he had to do to them what they had been doing to Union soldiers; otherwise they would never stop. And remarkably, the Confederates, upon learning of Lincoln’s order, did stop, and Lincoln promptly withdrew the order.
The lesson here is that it’s not about vengeance. It’s about how to stop the tyrannical abuses of the left.
Writing a strongly worded op-ed or putting out social media memes is not going to do the job. Bullies and outlaws understand a single language: the language of force. This is not to suggest that Trump or the MAGA movement is calling for lawlessness. On the contrary, they are calling for holding the outlaws accountable to the full force of the law.
They want to put the outlaws behind bars, both to discourage them from relying in future on outlaw ways and to deter other potential outlaws. And there is nothing immoral about this. Deploying force on behalf of the law is not the moral equivalent of deploying the forces of lawlessness. If it were, then the cops on the street would be the moral equivalent of the criminals.
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, “Vindicating Trump,” published by Regnery. D’Souza’s movie of the same title is in theaters nationwide September 27. Get tickets and pre-order the book at vindicatingtrump.com.
