The O.J. Murder Trial and the Election of Trump Are Mirror Events

O.J. Simpson made parole yesterday. Had enough of the hot takes yet? Here’s one more: The exoneration of O.J. Simpson and the election of Donald Trump are mirror events.

This isn’t just a Lincoln-Kennedy gimmick. For those who remember the original O.J. trial, or who maybe saw the recent documentary (worth the watch) or Netflix series (also worth the watch), the election of Donald Trump should have rung a few bells at the Hertz counter of your memory. It’s pretty safe to say the social forces that enabled the rise of Mr. Trump have reshaped our culture entirely (it’s perhaps the defining cultural moment of my 35 years as an American) but in many ways it was nothing new. The scale and fallout are unmatched, but the basics are familiar, and maybe, in the context of American history, quite normal.

O.J.’s parole offers us a chance to step back and look at Mr. Trump beyond the typical baffled, absurdist, throw-your-hands-up-and-go-get-a-bourbon way. It’s a mistake to look at Mr. Trump as a novelty because, political freak show he may be, this limits our understanding. It presupposes that Trump as President is an anomaly, an irrational event that can’t be understood. That’s simply not the case, and that type of thinking blinds us. We have many great reasons to insist that we not allow Mr. Trump to be normalized, but maybe one reason isn’t so great: We can’t admit or even accept that Trump’s election might actually be a normal event in America. That’s not the same as saying it’s okay, but if you’re out there holding up a “this is not normal” sign, there might be more to it. The comparison between Trump and O.J. Simpson, of all people, is enlightening because it reveals some unchanging truths about the contradictory nature of power, privilege, and justice in America, and how and where it all goes wrong. Again, and again, and again.

The best way I can put it is the way someone else has already put it. The morning after Trump was elected, this line from Langston Hughes rushed to the front of my brain, and it hasn’t left: “America never was America to me.”

Ladies and gentlemen, all rise for the People vs. D.J. Trumpson.

The Role of Women

In both events, it’s notable that women play a peripheral, countering role. If you think this is a coincidence, you haven’t been paying much attention to America. The O.J. jury (and a lot of Americans) didn’t like lead prosecutor Marcia Clark for the same reasons a lot of people didn’t like Hillary Clinton: a strong, ambitious woman who doesn’t smile enough and won’t dress the part.

Clark, a gifted and serious deputy district attorney prosecuting the most high-profile case in recent memory, famously “made tabloids”: http://starcasm.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Marcia_Clark_tabloid_covers.jpg because people thought her hair looked weird. Clark called the media attention “the hell of the trial,” and said she’d gotten “famous in a way that was kind of terrifying.” She’d been described as “grim, humorless, even angry,” and was advised to “talk softer, dress softer, wear pastels.” Clinton, of course, has waged an unceasing battle against her public image for decades now.

Both women were tenacious, serious, formidable opponents. Both tried to focus on the issues, the facts at hand, to varying degrees of success. In fact, it’s well worth noting that Marcia Clark and Hillary Clinton both symbolized reason, and both were beaten. This should raise some flags: Neither case was really about rationality or truth. Both women met their match not in rational debate, but in bombastic, outrageous caricatures of men (Johnnie Cochran and Mr. Trump) who reduced the seriousness and complexity of the issues to catch phrases (“if the glove won’t fit…”; “crooked Hillary”). Both were defeated by verdicts or votes that threw reason and truth out entirely: These were emotional, irrational events born of a deep, enduring resentment.

And Mr. Trump, a serial misogynist and philanderer accused several times over of sexual assault, embodies Simpson’s own long record of domestic abuse. In both cases this made absolutely no difference. And Bill Clinton’s misogyny and serial cheating, to put it lightly and non-libelly, haven’t damaged his likability in the public eye; however, those same crimes were held against his wife years after they’d been relevant.

Celebrity and Privilege

Both O.J. Simpson and Mr. Trump are larger than life personalities, and both have the media to thank for it. In fact, you could say that Simpson’s 1995 trial, which at the time was on every waiting room and bedroom TV, helped give birth to reality TV. And reality TV, of course, helped give birth to Trump’s candidacy. We were addicted to the O.J. story in the same way we’re now addicted to Mr. Trump. It’s a timeless storytelling trope, which screenwriters call “fish out of water.” Someone we think everybody knows well is thrust into a new situation that tests that person, revealing things about him previously unknown or unseen. We can’t look away. It’s a script, a tale as old as time.

But there’s more substantial stuff here. O.J. and Mr. Trump have both traded on their celebrity to cash in on privileges not available to anyone else. Court officers, plural, reportedly asked Mr. Simpson for his autograph as he awaited the verdict. Simpson’s celebrity by all accounts earned him special treatment every step of the way. O.J.’s experience of the justice system, at least at that point, was nothing like a regular American’s. Mr. Trump has ridden his celebrity status, wealth, and privilege right through multiple bankruptcies and criminal and civil court cases and a borderline treasonous campaign all the way to the fucking White House. The man knows dick about business, but, because he read a script on a “reality” show for a few years and slapped his name on buildings and products that are all more or less shells for debt collateral or laundering operations, he got elected for his shrewd negotiating abilities that people remembered from “The Apprentice.” He’s so stupid that people forgive his stupidity because he’s a celebrity in over his head! This is, obviously, insane.

But in this way, both men were brilliant self-promoters. They might not have known that their image would one day exonerate them (Simpson from murder; Mr. Trump from a long list of crimes, blunders, lies, graft, gaffes, insults, mistakes, compromising national security, etc etc), but each of them knew the value of a brand, and they knew how stupid, gullible, and malleable a screen can make an audience. Americans let O.J. Simpson literally get away with murder because we saw him only as the characters he played. We’re doing an even worse job with Mr. Trump.

Race & Class

Both elections were irrational statements about race and class.

First, you could see the election (and continuing support) of Mr. Trump as an exoneration in its own right, a national, though narrow, “not guilty” verdict. Conversely, you can also see the jury’s exoneration of O.J. as an election: he won the necessary electoral votes, so to speak, and the fact that he might have lost the popular vote didn’t matter. But because we’re ultimately trying to understand Mr. Trump, let’s call both of these events elections. (Though saying Trump’s election/support is essentially a “not guilty” verdict is pretty tempting to stick with.)

There’s a lot of great writing on O.J.’s complex relationship with race from black writers and white writers with more authority than me. It’s worth a good look, because it gets at a complex irony, perhaps the fundamental irony, at the heart of both O.J. and Trump: O.J. Simpson was living as much of the poor black experience as Donald Trump has lived of the white working class.

Simpson grew up in a poor black community in the 1960s, but he was hardly an activist and in fact seemed pretty strongly opposed to it. After his Heisman-winning run at USC and launch to NFL stardom, he hit escape velocity, headed away from the black community and didn’t look back. He married a black woman when he was younger but after achieving stardom largely avoided associating with black people. He became a Hollywood star. Hell, he became a Hollywood producer. He dated white, married white, lived in a gated white community in Los Angeles, one of the most racially diverse cities in America.

Some people, mostly white, might point to Simpson as being post-racial much in the way some people, mostly white, will point to Barack Obama as being post-racial. But Simpson was pre-racial. O.J. didn’t identify himself as anything beyond O.J.

“My biggest accomplishment is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man. I was at a wedding … and I overheard a lady say, ‘Look, there’s O.J. Simpson and some nigger.’ That sort of thing hurts me, even though it’s what I strive for.”

Or in the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, “O.J. Simpson wasn’t black.” The charitable explanation is that O.J. didn’t want to be held up as a symbol of race not out of some post-racial expansiveness of character, but because his ego wouldn’t tolerate it. He only wanted to be held up as O.J., the greatest. O.J. is the symbol of O.J. The cultural symbolism and responsibility of being black would only dilute the Juice.

But then came the insane irony of his trial—his election—and the entire modern black experience was suddenly projected onto his bigscreen forehead. This wasn’t what O.J. ever wanted, and he sure didn’t deserve it. He’s not exactly the incarnation of the American black experience: a black man charged with double murder, then being let go, chain-free, and asked politely (and trusted) to turn himself in a few days later; a black man who chose to live in an elite, white, gated community, but who got his trial venue moved to a black part of town, where the jury was more likely to be stacked, in racial terms, to his favor.

But O.J., and many people in the black community, were happy to have the opportunity. Many people, though certainly not all, would argue that race was the deciding factor in the Simpson verdict. An actual juror, a black woman, says it wasn’t. But look at what the reactions were across the country. Your feelings about the O.J. verdict are a pretty good predictor of whether you’re white. This crime had nothing to do with race, but that didn’t stop the trial from becoming about it.

Similarly, many people, especially Trump voters for some weird reason!, will tell you Mr. Trump’s election didn’t have as much to do with racism as it did with economic anxiety, Wisconsin, steel, middle America, coastal elites, jobs jobs jobs, blah blah blah. The data, and common sense, show that’s not true. (Google away.)

In other words, both candidates, willingly or not, became much more than symbols of race and class in America. They became expressions of those things: the anxiety; the guilt; the violence; the anger; the humiliation; the resentment; vengeance.

And they had disingenuous contracts. Everyone looked the other way. The candidates exploited what their voters were willing to let them exploit. The voters exploited what their candidate was willing to let them exploit. In both elections people who felt historically marginalized wanted to give the finger to an institution they feel has been screwing them over for years, even if it meant blinding and binding themselves to a clearly flawed person.

Justice vs. Fairness

This is the hardest part for me to come to grips with. Americans, I don’t think, value justice (a moral obligation to try to do what is objectively right) as much as we value fairness, which is subjective, an opinion. Justice is “what is right.” Fairness is “what ought to be right,” what “should” be. Our civil rights are oriented at the most fundamental level to how things “should” be. Our adherence to fairness, in fact, is what allows us to make whatever laws we want to describe or define how things should be.

How many times does the concept of “justice” come up in the Constitution? Once. Literally. In the preamble: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice… But after this we get no guidance on justice or how to “establish” it. There’s no further emphasis or explanation anywhere. The entire Bill of Rights, though, is in there for the sake of fairness.

This is fucked up.

To be clear, both of these values are virtuous, and both have led us to create safeguards that protect less fortunate and less powerful citizens. Those same safeguards, however, also offer loopholes that empower people with the resources to find, understand, and exploit them, but which are unavailable to all. “Fairness” means the law as it’s currently written. Words, after all, are indiscriminate and in that way fair. But that doesn’t mean the words are just. The loopholes in those words are also “fair,” then, and I don’t know about you, but it seems to me people hire lawyers to take advantage of “fairness.” The less fortunate among us all too often can’t afford such fairness.

Look at the Supreme Court building: “Equal justice under the law.” “Justice under the law” ought to be enough if we truly were a just people.

But we’re not. O.J. gets off. Rich white kids get off on technicalities that their family lawyers know about. Mr. Trump subverts his many offenses with procedural technicalities (e.g., “separating” himself from his business in name only, while retaining access to his profits; settling out of court; sealing documents; attacking the “illegal leaks,” and the bias or duplicity of Comey/Obama/Yates/Clapper/Rosenstein/Sessions/the media/the Dems/your name here, all undermine the Russia investigation; the whataboutism that’s now become a social rot). And we let him! He’s “smart” for cheating the nation on his taxes! That’s not just, but it’s fair!

But notice how frequently Mr. Trump complains about unfairness. It’s constant. Two days ago he said it was unfair to him that Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

To point out the totally obvious: Mr. Trump is in deep shit with Russia. All defenses of Mr. Trump’s conspiracy with Russia hinge on fairness, not on justice: Okay, maybe there’s evidence of attempted collusion, but it was just DJTJ, not Mr. Trump, and it was just intent, and not really a crime because nothing technically came of it.

Well, mayyyybe O.J. didn’t do it. We don’t have a picture of him murdering anyone.

Well, here’s a picture of Donald Trump giving a speech the evening of June 7. In this speech he promised he would provide the American people with dirt on Hillary Clinton and her illicit dealings with the Russian government. Just a few hours before this speech, literally, Donald Trump Jr. had confirmed a meeting with representatives of the Russian government offering dirt on Hillary Clinton’s dealings with the Russian government.

Now, who was onstage during this speech?

It’s Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.! So the question now is: Did Mr. Trump know his campaign was attempting to collude with the Russians? “Maybe not!” you say. “This picture proves nothing.” To believe this you must at the very least believe that his son, standing right next to him as he promised America dirt on Clinton, did not tell him after hearing this speech that just a few hours earlier he’d coincidentally confirmed a meeting with actual Russians about the very thing his dad was promising to deliver. If you honestly believe there’s a meaningful possibility this is true, you’re deluding yourself.

The truth is that this is as close to photographic evidence as we have (so far) that Trump himself sanctioned collusion, yet you’d probably still say it wouldn’t hold up in a court of law. Would you be proud of your country if it didn’t hold up? Go USA!

I ask you now why this is. Why do we have a legal system that can always shift around to be “fair,” but not always just? Why is it the way America works that the rich and powerful almost always get away with these things? Is that just? No. Is it fair? To the letter of the law, yes, it is.

In the O.J. verdict, black America found the chance to make a statement. This statement was long overdue, but in the scheme of things it wasn’t much. Regardless, it had nothing to do with O.J., and O.J. had nothing to do with it. Overwhelming evidence be damned. Facts be damned. And in Trump’s presidency, we see these same strains.

As our societies continue our self-propelling, self-fulfilling fracturing into warring tribes, our beliefs about facts are increasingly turning to questions about how we identify ourselves and how we distinguish ourselves from each other. “Fairness,” in its subjectivity, becomes an act of forgiveness: We find loopholes in our beliefs and open them for people who are like us. In this way these loopholes become wormholes to alternative realities. Fairness is a gateway to whatever the fuck.

Put that on my tombstone.

Justice, though, is about the truth. We’re afraid of it and always have been, because America was built on injustice. It’s our great vulnerability, and Trump and O.J. both revealed it. But Trump’s election differs from O.J.’s verdict in one very important way: Justice is done, but democracy is a process. That is, we can do something about this. We can right the wrong. We can make America again.