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Karon Hylton-Brown’s only crime was driving a scooter on the sidewalk without a helmet. A 20-year-old black man in Washington, D.C., he was spotted by police on the evening of October 23, 2020, and an illegal chase ensued in which one cop, Officer Terence Sutton, trailed him in an unmarked car while a supervisor, Lt. Andrew Zabavsky, drove on parallel streets in a marked car. Hylton-Brown exited an alleyway and crashed into an SUV, killing him. Sutton and Zabavsky, who violated department policy and D.C. law by pursuing Hylton-Brown for a traffic violation, later tried to cover up their actions. The former was charged with second-degree murder, and both were charged with conspiracy and obstructing justice; they were found guilty and sentenced to five and a half years and four years, respectively.
To many, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, the outcome showed that the justice system—when applied correctly—could indeed hold police accountable for the deaths they cause. But on Wednesday, with the stroke of a pen, Donald Trump wiped away the D.C. cops’ convictions. It’s one of many actions the president has taken since his inauguration on Monday that convey, to select groups of Americans, that they can behave with impunity. Police can kill young black men. MAGA fanatics can attack government buildings. Men can objectify their female coworkers and abuse their wives. Employers can refuse to accept trans people. You can even be a drug kingpin who solicits murder-for-hire—just as long as you’re also a hero to the crypto-libertarian crowd.
In the police case above, Trump took the side of white cops. But two days earlier, he showed a somewhat different allegiance, pardoning nearly 1,600 January 6 rioters—including 89 people who’d pleaded guilty to felony assault of an officer and another 76 found guilty of assaulting, resisting, and obstructing officers during the attack. One was Julian Khater, who used bear spray against Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died from two strokes the next day. Others included D.J. Rodriguez, who attacked Officer Michael Fanone with a stun gun; Steven Chase Randolph, who assaulted Officer Caroline Edwards with a crowd control barrier; and Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes, the lead organizers of the attack.
The contrast reveals a pattern. Trump’s compassion—if it can be called that—seems only to extend to those who are part of the aggrieved, pro-MAGA class. To the right wing, Sutton and Zabavsky were victims of a nationwide post–George Floyd crusade against police that made it impossible for officers to do their jobs. (Hylton-Brown’s death led to heated protests at a local police station.) During the 2024 campaign, he spoke frequently about providing police officers with greater immunity, despite the fact that they’re already largely indemnified from civil suits, with one study finding that accused officers only had to pay 0.02 percent of payments received by plaintiffs in civil suits. Americans, by and large, oppose qualified immunity for officers: A Cato/YouGov poll from 2020 found 63 percent want to eliminate it. As for immunity from criminal charges, cops are almost never charged with murder even when the evidence against them is overwhelming.
Yet Trump is willing to take the side of police who violate rights over the citizens whose rights have been violated. He’s also intent on molding these transgressions into stories that suit his grand (and false) narratives. Right before pardoning Sutton and Zabavsky, Trump claimed that the two had been locked up because they “went after an illegal” and “something went wrong,” though a lawyer for the mother of Hylton-Brown’s child made clear that he was a “100 percent American-born young Black man.” Trump’s use of the passive voice is also revealing, subtly blaming the victim for his own death while absolving the two officers. It’s not unlike his efforts to rewrite the events of January 6, 2021, which, in his telling, was not a violent coup but a patriotic “day of love” to protest an election that was stolen from him. Here, again, the victims—which in this case included everyone who works in Congress, but also American democracy itself—are portrayed as the real criminals.
And so it goes with Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, which was an online black market through which $200 million of illicit drugs were sold. Prosecutors called Ulbricht “the kingpin of a worldwide digital drug-trafficking enterprise”—all transactions were done in Bitcoin—and also accused him of attempting to hire contract killers in six separate incidents, none of which panned out. He was serving two life sentences plus 40 years, but Trump, fulfilling a campaign promise he’d made to the Libertarian Party, pardoned Ulbricht and portrayed the FBI agents and prosecutors as the real villains—“scum,” as he put it. To Trump, these were the same people “involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me.”
LGBTQ+ people are useful to Trump in a much different way: as scapegoats. Following the Project 2025 playbook, which asserts that transgender people do not exist, Trump issued an executive order that defies both logic and biology, purposely conflating sex and gender and ordering all federal agencies to list only two sexes, male or female, and eliminating the “X” option on passports that allowed transgender people to protect themselves. Now these people will be forced to declare themselves the gender they were labeled at birth, which could cause massive legal problems and put them in danger. The order also seeks to override the Prison Rape Elimination Act’s protections for over 2,000 transgender federal prisoners, demanding that those who identify as female be housed with males, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
Trump did make sure to protect some people with this order, however: heterosexual conservatives who wish to assert their discriminatory views. The order included this Orwellian statement: “The Attorney General shall issue guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex and the right to single-sex spaces in workplaces and federally funded entities covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” So transgender people are not allowed to call themselves the gender they identify with, but people wishing to express the binary view of gender—though it goes against science—will be free to do so without any fear of repercussions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, of course, sought to protect minority groups from the majority, not the other way around.
Typical of Trump’s upside-down worldview, the order paints transgender people—who are more vulnerable to violence than almost anyone else in our society—as predators, and imagines victimhood where none exists. Titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” it states, “my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” Trump, a proven misogynist who has been accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women, and whom a jury has found liable for sexual abuse, is now claiming to be the protector of women against transgender people. Of course, there’s no evidence that transgender people are a threat to women; the biggest threat to women, as we all know, is men.
Which brings us to Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault, marital abuse, and alcoholism. A police report from 2017 shows that a woman accused Hegseth of sexual assaulting her in a California hotel room. (He denies the accusation, and settled with his accuser in 2023.) Earlier this week, his ex-sister-in-law told senators that her sister, who was Hegseth’s second wife, feared for her safety and had a code word to use with people close to her “if she felt she needed to get away from Hegseth.” Last month, The New Yorker’s Jane Meyer revealed that a whistleblower report on Hegseth, pertaining to his tenure as president of Concerned Veterans for America, “states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’”
It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to understand what Trump sees in Hegseth: a fellow-traveler in the brotherhood of pussy-grabbers. All the braying from Democrats about Hegseth’s inexperience, history of inebriation, and low opinion of women is just the product of the woke mind virus. Hegseth, see, is the actual victim here—the one in need of Trump’s protection. By nominating him for one of the government’s most important, powerful positions, Trump is sending the message that over the next four years this type of behavior will be tolerated, perhaps even celebrated—but certainly not punished. It’s a message that MAGA America undoubtedly hears loud and clear: Impunity for we, and none for thee.
