Distressed Justice Around the Flagpole
There is now no doubt that the upside-down American flag, which the wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew in their yard after the January 6 insurrection, has evolved into a right-wing attack on the rule of law. Not an international distress signal. Not a thing that both sides are doing. Not a thing one does when one is mad at the neighbors.
Trump diehards have been flying and posting the flag in the days following his conviction last week in a New York court on 34 felony counts of falsification of business records to influence the 2016 election. According to the AP, since the verdict, Trump's family members, including his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, along with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, various Fox News contributors, Stop the Steal propagandist Ali Alexander, the Heritage Foundation, and others have shared and promoted the inverted flag.
Trump's supporters are making it very clear that this flag is not a symbol of mere distress with the state of our politics. It represents their lies that Trump was wrongfully accused and convicted, that he is a victim of a corrupt legal system, and that a civil war may in the offing in order to vindicate their savior Trump and restore him to power.
While it had been used as a symbol of Trump's stolen election lie, the flag is now also a statement that Trump is above the law. It is a statement of loyalty to a would-be dictator. In this context, it is again an indisputably right-wing extremist symbol.
But Trump's followers are also using it to normalize it, and their claims. If the wife of a Supreme Court justice flew it, how extreme can it be? That's also the gist of this NPR story about it now being "mainstream" because of her actions, and her husband's. Justice Alito deemed her use of it to be not a big deal (consistent with his view that women are not a big deal).
Despite the timing of his wife flying the flag in January 2021, Alito has claimed that he was unaware of its usage or meaning. Instead, he insists that his wife was triggered by unpleasant interactions with anti-Trump neighbors. According to a story in the Washington Post, which failed to report on the incident for over three years, on Inauguration Day 2021, Martha-Ann Alito "yelled" at its reporter that the flag was "an international signal of distress!”
Let's be clear, though: her dispute with the neighbors was over them expressing their anti-Trump views. It wasn't about dog poop or noise or the other mundane miscellanies that can roil suburban Washington neighborhoods.
Alito treated it as the sort of tiff that would dismay any proper patriot. His rebuff of Democratic senators calling for his recusal amounted to: The wife flew the flag. It was over a neighborhood dispute. The neighbors were nasty. I didn't know the flag's meaning. Therefore, it's absurd to suggest that I wouldn't look impartial when I decide the January 6 cases, including Trump's immunity claims, pending before the court. (This is a paraphrase, of course; you can read Alito's letter here.)
Trump promptly congratulated Alito on Truth Social, undermining Alito's claim that the flag had anything to do with politics, or in particular, him. Trump wrote that Alito had "INTELLIGENCE, COURAGE, and ‘GUTS’" and contrasting his "GRIT" to other leaders in "A BADLY FAILING NATION, headed by the Worst President in American History, Crooked Joe Biden!”
The next day, Trump became the first former president of the United States to be convicted of a crime. Three days later, in a Truth Social post of lies about prosecutor Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan, Trump demanded that the high court "MUST DECIDE" before his sentencing.
Trump, and surely his lawyers, know that the Supreme Court is not going to intervene in a state trial court's sentencing of a defendant convicted in a jury trial. But that's not what he's actually trying to accomplish. Trump wants to create the illusion that there are judges for him (the Supreme Court majority) and judges against him (e.g., Judge Merchan) and one group is smart and gritty and the other clueless and corrupt. Similarly, House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested he knew the Supreme Court would get involved. It creates the appearance that Trump and his allies have the country's top jurists on their side. (And, alarmingly, in many cases they do!)
Trump's followers are using the inverted flag as a dual-purpose meme. It is at once a provocation to the civil war-promoting far right, and but it's also meaningless decorative pabulum displayed by the wife of one of the most powerful people in America. Alito has already given them cover for using the flag: it has so many meanings how could anyone even know them all, and therefore how could it even reveal any bias? That's why MAGA is pretending they're saving America with it, even while they are planning to tear America apart. Make America Great Again by turning it all upside-down.