Enforcing Gag Orders
Terry H. Schwadron
April 3, 2024
We are learning over and over that it’s not just a matter of meaning well. To get results, it’s much more a matter of follow through — even if that means enforcement actions.
It’s true for expecting humanitarian aid into war zones, it’s true for damping down covid and other communicable diseases. And it’s true for getting Donald Trump to recognize that the courts have real rules that are supposed to apply to him as well as to you and me.
The horror that Israeli aircraft could pluck a World Central Kitchen vehicle for destruction on a dusty Gazan road was all but inevitable in a war where starvation has become a weapon. The first reports this week of a strange bird flu infecting cows and jumping to a human victim feel like harbingers for a lack of containment.
And, strangely, the very expectedness of another Trump mouth-off against another judge and his family reflects the inevitability for the widened gag order issued this week towards as attempt to retain respectfulness and safety for witnesses, jurors, and those whose job it is to bring about a trial.
Disaster Over Prevention
We’ve gotten used to shaking our heads over the inevitability of disasters from mass school shootings, trail derailments, even the dramatic bridge collapse in Baltimore harbor.
What the disasters share is that, generally, there were clues available beforehand, if only we had paid attention. There were laws and practices — or could have been — that could have been anticipated. There were corporations that could have spent more money on safety but didn’t or mental health practitioners who could have intervened but were restrained.
There is always a reason to wait, it seems. So we wait for lead-leaking drinking water pipes to be replaced, or we allow companies to go substantially unpunished for toxic dumps, or we fail to design our roads and bridges for an over-loaded cargo ship from running into a sustaining but vulnerable bridge support.
Our systems are built on trust that our institutions know what they are doing, and then we always are surprised that they forgot the most basic things.
A more humane policy by the Israeli Defense Forces towards effects on Palestinian civilians would have avoided the unforgivable deaths of international aid workers trying to feed two million people. Earlier intervention to halt communicable disease could have lessened the deaths and impact of the two-year pandemic, but we’re seeing similar blindness in this new threat.
And where Trump sees persecution, the rest of us see an attempt to skirt the rules for personal advancement. If Trump had wanted to avoid having to deal with courtroom rules, perhaps he should have thought more about undertaking the many behaviors that have spawned 88 criminal charges and any number of civil lawsuits.
Of course, Judge Juan Merchan should have widened Trump’s gag order in the pending hush money case due to open in two weeks. The daily issuance of social posts and broadside threats from Trump against anyone, or the families of anyone who dares to bring him to account on these criminal counts is patently obvious. Trump doesn’t seem to even have the smarts to let his lawyers fire the broadsides.
We’ve seen people hurt or doxed or threatened in direct proportion to The Mouth at work. It needs to stop, and finally it has been those very few judges in the unfortunate spotlight who have had to do what is clear to all.
Enforcing the Gag Orders
With these gag orders, judges are acting not for themselves but for the rest of us. They are speaking for the necessary order of the rule of law as well as for the potential jurors and witnesses.
The gag makes sense, however persecuting Trump feels it to be.
The question remains: Will there be follow through. Even yesterday, the day after the gag, Trump was still re-posting material that attacked the judge’s daughter as an anti-Trump political operative, which seems not to be entirely true on top of all else.
Trump is not going to stop to pay a fine — which he would pay with other people’s money in any case. Judge Merchan is going to have to take legal sanctions up to throwing Trump in jail. Trump sees too much political advantage in constant criticism of the court to stop and seems to want to push the court system to the point of undermining it to win his perpetual freedom to act outside the law.
Let’s look with open eyes at avoiding a disaster.
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