During the final full month of Donald Trump’s first and potentially only term in the White House — as the coronavirus pandemic still raged and as the outgoing president worked to overturn an election that he clearly lost — he was also hosting a series of meetings and phone calls to decide whether or not a man should be put to death before Christmas.
The U.S. government had executed just three federal prisoners in the 60 years prior to 2020. In a six-month span during Trump’s final year in office, he and Attorney General Bill Barr’s Justice Department put to death 13 inmates, in what defense attorneys and criminal justice activists described as a “bloodbath” and historic “killing spree.”
One of those inmates was a man named Brandon Bernard, who at a young age had been involved in a grisly double murder. In the years since his incarceration, Bernard had become an international cause célèbre of anti-death-penalty advocates — including major celebrities like Kim Kardashian — many of whom felt he was an exemplar of remorse and deserved clemency.
But as Trump sat in the White House, holding Bernard’s fate in the palm of his hand, he had a pressing question for his staff, according to a former Trump administration official and another source intimately familiar with the matter: Trump wanted to know if one of the murder victim’s parents, who were urging him to allow the scheduled execution to go forward, had voted for him. At the same time, he was refusing to hear pleas from Kardashian on Bernard’s behalf — all because he saw her social-media post celebrating Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.
Bernard was executed on Dec. 10, at a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Bernard’s death came at a time when the nation was consumed with the chaos of Trump’s final few months in office following the election, making it especially easy for Bernard’s story to get buried under an avalanche of other news. It was also just one of many examples of how Trump allowed raw partisanship — and self-obsessed considerations about who did or didn’t vote for him — to influence his decision-making in life-or-death situations while in office.
Trump’s decision wasn’t an isolated incident of personal grievance or cruel preference. The former president using whether Americans support him or not to make life-or-death decisions is an actual, serious prescription for federal policies that reaches far beyond just one inmate and one execution.
In recent weeks, Trump has been explicitly campaigning on a platform of turbo-charging that attitude in regard to how a second Trump administration would help or not help his fellow Americans — including in dire emergency scenarios.
The former president has on multiple occasions down the stretch of the 2024 campaign threatened to withhold federal disaster relief from California — putting the lives of its citizens at risk — unless the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, gives in to his demands. He made the threat as recently as last weekend during a rally in California’s Coachella Valley, telling supporters that if Newsom doesn’t get on board with Trump’s water policy, “we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have. It’s not hard to do.”
“We’ll force it down his throat,” Trump said.
Trump made the same threat while speaking from his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes in September. “If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.”
Newsom warned on X that Trump would apply the same quid-pro-quo to the rest of the nation. Trump “just admitted he will block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas,” the governor wrote. “Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina or flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself.”
Hurricane Helene rocked the Southeast a few weeks later. Trump responded by pushing conspiracy theories about the federal response, including an absurd accusation that the Biden administration was deliberately withholding aid from Republican areas. There was no basis whatsoever for the claim, but it isn’t hard to understand why this is where Trump’s mind went.
Politico later reported that while president in 2018, Trump initially refused to approve federal aid for California to fight wildfires because he felt some of the affected regions didn’t support him. It was only after Trump was shown data about the regions voting for him that he approved the relief. “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Mark Harvey, then Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told Politico.
A year earlier, Trump blocked congressionally approved aid to Puerto Rico, an American territory populated by American citizens, in the wake of Hurricane Maria — during which Trump was publicly attacking Carmen Yulín Cruz, then the mayor of San Juan, for not being more grateful to him — and then tried to obstruct an investigation into what happened to the money.
Trump also notably tried to intimidate Democratic governors during the Covid-19 pandemic, when states were desperate for federal aid. “It’s a two-way street,” Trump said of offering New York and other states federal help as the crisis continued to claim American lives. “They have to treat us well, too.”
If Trump secures a second term next month, there are a number of reasons why the twice-impeached former president and convicted felon and his lieutenants aren’t entirely worried about this kind of strong-amring and preferential treatment passing constitutional muster.
Beyond the comfort of enjoying a federal judiciary and Supreme Court that Trump and the Republican Party stacked with Trump allies and staunch conservatives during his first term in office, multiple lawyers and political advisers close to Trump who have examined the issue and discussed it with the ex-president tell Rolling Stone that they can argue in court that such actions are akin to other administrations conditioning federal funds on state governments behaving a certain way. They have cited the highly controversial 1994 crime bill — which dangled financial incentives to states that, for instance, erected or expanded their prisons — as an example.
Beyond threatening to withhold disaster relief, Trump has repeatedly fantasized about taking revenge against his political opponents, should he retake the White House. He’s spoken of doing so in terms of federal investigations, but his rhetoric has intensified as Election Day has neared. Last weekend on Fox News, the morning after he told Californias that he would let the state burn unless Newsom cowed to his demands, Trump said the military should be used on “radical left,” which he described as the “enemy within.” He doubled down on the comments a few days later, citing California Rep. Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as examples of the nation’s enemies, calling them “evil.”
Republicans have tried to spin Trump’s comments as no big deal, but there’s plenty of evidence that he doesn’t view Americans who don’t support him as worthy of the same rights as those who do — not the pursuit of happiness, not liberty, and, in some cases, not even life.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
