Thanks to Joe Biden’s 1986 crime bill increasing mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders involved in cocaine trafficking, Alice Marie Johnson, then a single mother and first-time offender who had only been drawn into a drug scheme after losing her job, was sentenced to life, and eventually death, in prison. Only after then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates approved a pilot program for female inmates to make video calls to the outside world did Johnson land under the radar first of Mic, then Kim Kardashian West and, through her, President Trump himself.
And so the story goes: Our frequently curmudgeonly commander in chief, both enraptured by the genuine passion of the ethereal social media mogul and the heart-wrenching plight of the unfairly incarcerated grandmother and great-grandmother, commuted Johnson’s prison sentence and set her free, putting his administration on course to abandon plans to beef up the border with tools considered too inhumane for literal war zones and instead pass the first piece of sweeping criminal justice reform legislation in generations.
Trump’s pivot just paid off in dividends. On the fourth and final night of the unprecedented, mostly virtual Republican National Convention, a radiant Johnson made the single simplest case for Trump: His genuine response to personal tragedy.
“I was once told that the only way I would ever be reunited with my family would be as a corpse,” Johnson said. “But by the grace of God and the compassion of President Donald John Trump, I stand before you tonight, and I assure you, I’m not a ghost! I am alive, I am well, and, most importantly, I am free.”
Johnson spent her tenure in prison — again, one originally with no hope of leaving before her own death — becoming an exemplary member of her odd community, studying her way to be both an ordained minister and a certified hospice worker. But instead of dying in prison, she was freed — not on the basis of some obscure legal theory or to make some partisan political point. Instead, Trump simply responded to the pain that Kim Kardashian West forced him to observe.
“When President Trump heard about me, about the injustice of my story, he saw me as a person,” Johnson said. “He had compassion. And he acted. Free in body thanks to President Trump. But free in mind thanks to the almighty God. I couldn’t believe it. I always remembered that God knew my name, even in my darkest hour. But I never thought a president would!”
If Trump wins come November, it won’t be because the majority of black voters, let alone the general electorate, believes he’s some extraordinarily empathetic individual. But perhaps it will be because many do indeed realize that unlike swamp monsters such as Biden, who could deem themselves social justice warriors while locking up nonviolent drug offenders in jail, at least Trump has either the decency or the simplicity to take accountability for abuses of the state.
