Trump had always been above the law, until it turned on him | Rebecca Solnit

And yet, some have always been below the law since the Declaration of Independence was written. That document speaks of men in ways that exclude women, who in that era were largely controlled by fathers and husbands, and the Black people who were enslaved for another 87 years, and the Native Americans who faced genocide and dispossession into the 20th and, arguably, the 21st centuries.

And of course some have been above it, whether by buying their way out of jail with expensive lawyers, by manipulating those who should enforce the law, by actually being those who are supposed to enforce it, or by being granted, as police and various governmental figures have been, various versions of immunity from the law.

The idea that a president should be immune from not just lawsuits while in office but consequences for crimes even afterward seems like a stepping stone to authoritarianism, but it has many defenders.

They see the law as a weapon, to be held by the in-group, pointed at the out-group, which is to say they are tribalists passionately committed to inequality. They find the idea of the out-group pointing the law at the in-group outrageous and upsetting. Thus their meltdown over an alleged criminal being charged with and arrested for his alleged crimes.