Over the weekend, Donald Trump began branding Vice President Kamala Harris a criminal. “She should be charged and prosecuted for her actions,” he once claimed. At another, he pointedly paused his speech while the crowd chanted “Lock her up!”

It is, of course, not surprising that Trump would conjure up imaginary crimes committed by his political opponent. In 2016, he recorded “Lock her up!”, a signature campaign chant. In 2020, he branded Joe Biden a criminal. The pretext for the indictment of Harris is that, as vice president, she led the border protection policy that Trump rejected. The pretext in 2016 was Clinton’s violation of the State Department’s email protocol. In 2020, allegations that Biden benefited from his son’s business activities in Ukraine were debunked.

Clearly, none of the details of these allegations — in Harris’ case, Trump failed to even formulate a bogus criminal accusation — are of any importance to Trump. His view of the law is completely relativistic. Actions taken on Trump’s behalf are inherently legal, and actions taken against him are inherently illegal.

That’s why Trump repeatedly brands his political opponents as criminals. In addition to all three of his Democratic campaign opponents, Trump has called for criminal charges to be filed against a long list of targets, including (but not limited to) Barack Obama, John Kerry, Liz Cheney and anyone who criticizes pro-Trump judges, “lawyers, political.” “Activists, donors, illegal voters and corrupt election officials” who were involved in the 2024 election, among others.

Just this weekend, he called for charges against Google (for allegedly showing too many negative stories about him in searches) and Nancy Pelosi (for the second time; four years ago, he called for her to be impeached for tearing up a copy of his speech ). , and this weekend he said she should be investigated because her husband sold Visa stock ahead of an antitrust investigation into the company.

This is also why Trump continually encourages criminal behavior by his allies and defends it as lawful. Paul Manafort did “nothing” and was the victim of a “hoax.” The violent coup attempt by Trump allies on January 6, 2021 was actually an insurrection by overzealous police, and the criminals who carried it out were “hostages.” Trump frequently promises to pardon J6 criminals, consistent with his first-term policy of granting mass amnesty to political allies who committed crimes.

Trump’s view of criminality as an activity, which by definition includes any political or media activity detrimental to him and excludes any activity by him or his allies, is so extreme that few of his allies will defend it on their own. Sometimes they insist that his personalistic view of the justice system is not a reason to expel him from office, since his implementation efforts in the first term had more failures than successes.

More often, they deflect the issue by ignoring Trump’s obvious authoritarianism and instead focusing on Democrats’ trumped-up threats of authoritarianism. If you go to conservative (but still traditional Republican) Washington Examiner On the Opinion page you’ll find nothing about Trump’s ever-growing list of political enemies to be jailed. What you’ll see are editorials with headlines like “The Way the Left Is Attacking the Constitution” or “Biden’s Selective Persecution of Democrats” (claiming without evidence that New York Mayor Eric Adams is facing criminal charges because he questioned Biden’s immigration policies) or “Kamala Harris at war with the Constitution” or “Harris is still an authoritarian arms dealer” or “Harris’ promise to destroy our democratic norms should worry you.”

The purpose of these frenzied accusations is not so much to convince traditional Republicans that Harris is more authoritarian than Trump, but rather to stir up enough dust for them to call the issue a draw. Trump may be a bit over the top, but Harris is no better, so conservatives can vote for the candidate with the policies they prefer.

But anyone who takes even a cursory look can understand that, contrary to Republicans’ warnings, the Biden Justice Department has revived the traditional separation of charging decisions from the president, which is why numerous Democrats, including the president’s son, are facing federal charges. There is no way to predict how successful Trump would be at turning the Justice Department into an unprincipled weapon of revenge against his rivals and protecting his allies, but that is undeniably his intention.