Trump Embraces Lawlessness, but in the Name of a Higher Law

Donald Trump is often denounced in terms that suggest he poses an existential threat to the American political tradition. He is a fascist, a Russian agent, an aspiring caudillo: something foreign and menacing. To his critics, the four criminal indictments he faces are further evidence that he is a danger to democracy.

Mr. Trump and his associates may seem to welcome this characterization. He celebrates himself (inaccurately, as it happens) as a man who has been investigated “more than Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Al Capone combined.” He has praised James as “a great bank robber” and urged his fans to watch the 1932 film “Scarface,” based on Capone’s career. Donald Trump Jr. sells T-shirts that display his father’s mug shot with the words “Wanted — for president.”

For Mr. Trump’s detractors, such an open embrace of lawlessness confirms the danger he presents. But this understanding of his newfound criminal persona, a persona his legal opponents have helped to thrust upon him, overlooks something important: Mr. Trump may pose a threat to our political system as it now exists, but it is a threat animated by a democratic spirit. It is the threat of the outlaw hero, a figure of defiance with deep roots in American culture who exposes the injustices and hypocrisies of a corrupt system.

The outlaws in whose image Mr. Trump styles himself gained fame in the United States because they seemed to embody freedom and spontaneity, along with mistrust of authority and indifference to polite convention. They appealed to democratic impulses, however perversely. As the folklorist Stephen Knight has observed, the core values of the figure of the good outlaw are “liberty and equality.” These outlaws were lawless, yes, but in the name of a higher law. It is no coincidence that Mr. Trump recently described himself as the “public enemy of a rogue regime.”

The imagery is politically salient. Insofar as it resonates with his supporters, it may be an indication not that they are indifferent to our political tradition but rather that they are drawn to one of its core mythologies — and it suggests that attempts to use the legal system to defeat him politically will backfire.

From the beginning, Mr. Trump’s admirers have compared him to a paradigmatic outlaw hero, Robin Hood. In 2017, Sebastian Gorka, an official in the Trump administration, described Mr. Trump as “a Robin Hood taking over the empire” — an outsider who suddenly found himself on the inside, supported only by his “small band of merry men and women.” Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, has compared President Biden to Robin Hood’s antagonist Prince John.