Nelson is a retired attorney and served as an associate justice of the Montana Supreme Court from 1993 through 2012.
An article caught my eye, and at first I read it as a simple news item, probably of not much interest to most people.
That is, until the irony hit me.
Here’s the story, as reported by CNN on Jan. 29:
The man who stole and leaked former President Donald Trump and thousands of others’ tax records has been sentenced to five years in prison.
[The 38-year-old defendant] pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized disclosures of income tax returns. According to his plea agreement, he stole Trump’s tax returns along with the tax data of “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people,” while working for a consulting firm with contracts with the Internal Revenue Service. ...
Judge Ana Reyes highlighted the gravity of the crime, saying multiple times that it amounted to an attack against the US and its legal foundation.
“What you did in attacking the sitting president of the United States was an attack on our constitutional democracy,” Reyes said. “We’re talking about someone who ... pulled off the biggest heist in IRS history.”
The judge compared the defendant’s actions to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, saying, “your actions were also a threat to our democracy.”
The defendant, Charles Littlejohn, accepted responsibility: “My actions undermine the fragile faith” in the government.
So, the defendant committed a crime (and tried to cover it up), was caught, accepted responsibility for his conduct, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve five years in prison.
Yes, justice was served. But here’s the irony.
As reported in various media, Donald Trump purloined and willfully retained hundreds of classified documents from the federal government when he left office in 2021, and then conspired to prevent their return to U.S. officials. These records contained national defense information, including a “plan of attack” prepared by the Pentagon that he shared with a publisher and writer. A month or so later at his Bedminster golf club, Trump showed a representative of a political action committee “a classified map related to a military operation.”
Trump was charged with over 30 felony counts of willful retention of national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act. The charges are based on documents that the government says contain classified information ranging from top secret to secret, the two highest classification levels for national security information. Also charged was Trump’s valet, Walter Nauta, who faces several of the same charges as his boss, with whom he allegedly conspired to keep classified records and hide them from a federal grand jury.
Trump (who has been accused of instigating the Jan. 6 insurrection) has called the charges a “witch hunt.” He has never accepted responsibility for his conduct — the same sort of conduct that has landed military personnel and civilians in prison. And the judge in charge of Trump’s case (whom he appointed to the bench) has seemingly done everything possible to delay the trial and favor Trump over the government prosecutors.
The rule of law should apply equally to all who violate it. But, obviously, it doesn’t. Steal from the wealthy, you get nailed; if you’re wealthy and steal, well, that’s a witch hunt.
Abraham Lincoln believed that unpunished willful and repeated violations of the rule of law would destroy democracy. To protect the rule of law and support the Constitution was a sacred obligation of every citizen.
Indeed, Lincoln called for Americans to exercise “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
He added” “Let reverence for the laws ... become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
In other words, no different rules for different folks.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.