This isn’t the first time Trump claimed his judgement was superior to the courts
The aspiring dictator and the Central Park 5
Trump’s dictatorial tendency, manifest as a disdain for judicial process, his sense of victimhood and grievance, and his tendency to profile based on skin color and perceived otherness has been on display for decades.
On April 19, 1989, a female jogger was brutally assaulted, raped, and left unconscious in Central Park. Five black youths, later to be known as The Central Park 5 were quickly arrested and charged with the crime. Less than two weeks later on May 1, 1989, Donald Trump, then a real estate magnate in Manhattan, spent an estimated $216,000 (in 2024 dollars) to place full-page advertisements in four NYC newspapers. The ads called for a return to the death penalty. The ads were widely understood—and later confirmed by Trump—to be a call for the death penalty for the Central Park 5. The ad read, in part [the all-caps are, characteristically, Trump’s]:
How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!
Lest there be any doubt of what Trump’s all-caps call for the end of CIVIL LIBERTIES means, here’s the dictionary definition: “individual rights protected by law from unjust governmental or other interference.”
The Central Park 5 were convicted and sent to prison. (The detailed story can be read here in Wikipedia. It is quite a saga.) In 2002, thirteen years later, a completely different man, Matias Reyes, came forward and confessed to prison officials to the assault and rape of a jogger in Central Park on April 19, 1989. Reyes was then serving time at the Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York for an assault, rape, and burglary spree in which he engaged in the spring and summer of 1989—and for which he wasn’t arrested until later in the summer of that year.
Reyes’ DNA matched that of the still existing samples from victim of the original assault and rape for which the Central Park 5 were then serving time. In a rather lengthy process based on Reyes’ confession and the DNA match, the Central Park 5 were exonerated, their confessions judged to be coerced.
Donald Trump, then as now, insisted that he knew better than the courts, Reyes’ confession, and the DNA. For Trump, his judgment takes precedence over that of the judiciary. His instincts, his very being, are those of a dictator—a man who is never wrong.
From a October 7, 2016, CNN report:
Trump, however, still is not buying their innocence.
“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said this week in a statement to CNN’s Miguel Marquez. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”
Trump obviously still believes that the Central Park 5 are guilty, so it cannot be said he is lying or even misleading. But he is undoubtedly holding steadfast to an opinion in the face of DNA evidence to the contrary and the fact that the Central Park 5 have been exonerated by the legal system.
Ken Burns, who co-directed a 2012 documentary on the case, tweeted Friday: “Apparently Mr. Trump is unfamiliar with the concept of wrongful conviction.”
Had Trump, our would-be dictator, had his way with execution of the Central Park 5 the rest of the story would now be lost to history—rather than serving as a cautionary tale of the elusiveness of the truth.
We are now witnessing chilling echoes of this story in Trump’s, Stephen Miller’s, Pam Bondi’s and others’ desperately trying to get away with their serving as in lieu of due process in their summary rendition of people to Bukele’s concentration camp in El Salvador.
We cannot let this stand, not in the America in which we grew up.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry