Along with Michael Avenatti, Andrew Cuomo, and Rebekah Jones, the Trump-era media fraudster All-Star team includes Daniel Uhlfelder. You may not recognize the Florida man’s name — you probably know him better as “Idiot Grim Reaper Attorney.”
Tomorrow is primary day, and Uhlfelder could become the Democrats’ nominee for attorney general. His central campaign theme is that he will use his power to imprison his political enemies.
If Donald Trump looked up this morning, this is what he saw above Mar-A-Lago. This plane is a warning shot while he sits cozy in his mansion. When I’m Florida Attorney General, I’ll be his worst nightmare. pic.twitter.com/0RB4yhDbYl
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) August 21, 2022
For a party supposedly standing up for norms and saving democracy from usurpation, it has a lot of lust for locking up Republicans and using government power to punish people for their views and votes.
Investigating former President Donald Trump is perfectly reasonable. For starters, people in power need to be held to a higher level of scrutiny. Trump seemed to believe the opposite — that being elected president meant he got to do whatever he wanted with the government as if it were a small business he owned. Trump was also uniquely self-serving and dishonest, even by the standards of an industry (politics) that is itself extraordinarily self-serving.
But Uhlfelder is running to be the chief law enforcement officer of a state on the promise that he will imprison one of its residents, who happens to be (and I still cringe to say this) the leader of the opposing party. That’s the stuff of Third-World-tin-pot dictators.
A huge part of what made Trump so unfit for the job was contained within the “Lock Her Up!” chant that became a staple of his 2016 election campaign. I always said Hillary Clinton needed to be investigated. I always said that her deliberate and painstaking efforts to shirk public records laws were damning and even disqualifying. I also consistently said that no criminal investigation was warranted. One reason: Locking up political enemies has serious costs to democracy and the rule of law.
Now, here’s a contender for Florida’s attorney general, and a longtime favorite of CNN, running on “Lock Him Up.”
Uhlfelder, we can hope, will badly lose the Democratic primary. I don’t know anything about the other Democrats running, but even aside from his mini-Trump act, Uhlfelder ought to pay a political price for his harmful and idiotic pandemic behavior.
To the adulation of much of the national media, Uhlfelder appeared in a Grim Reaper outfit on Florida’s beaches. His argument was that Gov. Ron DeSantis was killing people by letting them go outside. This was always extremely dumb — trying to prevent folks from getting fresh air and exercise was harming people. To the extent Uhlfelder and his media accomplices convinced people that walking on open-air beaches was unsafe, he harmed people significantly, driving them indoors and perhaps even causing more spread of COVID-19.
With the pandemic and 95% of the restrictions now thankfully in the rearview mirror, it’s important that people who were very wrong and who contributed to undue lockdowns and mandates be held accountable for their behavior. But don’t lock them up, because it’s important for democracy that “Lock Em Up” not become a winning slogan for anyone.
