Get out of jail free — and collect $200
Justice in the Trump era
On March 23, 1903, Lizzie Magie applied for a patent to protect a board game she had invented.
The “Landlord’s Game” enabled players to buy and sell properties with play money. Railroads were located in the center of each side of the board. One of the corner spaces said, “No trespassing. Go to Jail.” The opposite corner was the Jail. Players who passed the corner marked “Labor upon Mother Earth produces wages” received $100. Magie’s patent was granted in 1904.
Three decades later and without credit to its original inventor, Parker Brothers made “Monopoly” one of the most popular games of all time. Players who passed Go collected $200 and while “go to jail” was still a dreaded space, people could always hope to pick up a “Get out of jail free” Chance card.
In 16 months, President Donald Trump’s administration has turned that card into an operating philosophy for the Justice Department — with one difference: It’s get out of jail free — and collect $200.
The rioters who were imprisoned for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol not only received presidential pardons but now may apply for compensation from a $1.776 billion fund created when Trump settled his lawsuit against the IRS.
The settlement, which seemed to have gained the approval only of Trump and his former personal lawyer — now Acting Attorney General — Todd Blanche, also gives Trump and his family immunity from any claims by the IRS over existing tax audits. That could save the president hundreds of millions of dollars. Layer this immunity on top of the immunity from prosecution the Supreme Court granted presidents for actions in their official capacity in its July, 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States.
The compensation fund is the latest of a series of scandals in the second Trump presidency.
Writing for Puck, Leigh Ann Caldwell summed up some of the others:
New financial disclosure documents, first reported by The New York Times, show that Trump made more than 3,600 individual stock trades during the first three months of this year, including in companies with regular business before the government; separately, he and his family have generated at least $2 billion through crypto ventures. Last October, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao after he helped get the president’s crypto company, World Liberty, off the ground. In April, Bijan Tehrani, an Australian billionaire who co-founded Stake, the largest crypto-backed online casino in the world, gave $1 million to MAGA Inc. As The New York Times reported today, the Trump administration has dropped almost all regulatory action and enforcement against crypto companies. Among the biggest beneficiaries were the Winklevoss twins, who have contributed to Trump’s ballroom and invested with the president’s sons. “It’s wild what’s happening, and they’re doing it with impunity,” one Republican strategist told me. (The White House has repeatedly said the president does not violate conflict-of-interest laws and thinks only of what’s best for the American people.)
President Bill Clinton was widely condemned for pardoning commodity trader Marc Rich, whose then-wife was a major Democratic party donor, on the president’s last day in office. Trump, by contrast, hasn’t tried to sneak clemency in at the last minute: he has rolled out pardons in broad daylight to people who have supported him.
Obeying the law
A foundation stone of America’s vibrant economy is the “rule of law.” What happens to that if the powerful and politically connected can get out of jail free?
Trump’s bending of the rules could be seen as so extreme and offensive that the next president will be focused on restoring ethical and legal guardrails. Or Trump’s actions could permanently upend the rule of law, opening the door to a culture of corruption. Which future is in store? The stakes are enormous.
Why do people obey the law? Tom R. Tyler, a professor of law and psychology, surveyed citizens in Chicago in 1984 to answer that question. The results showed that the legal mechanisms of prosecution and punishment are less significant than moral and political beliefs in prompting people to follow the law.
“If people view compliance with the law as appropriate because of their attitudes about how they should behave,” Tyler wrote in Why People Obey the Law, “they will voluntarily assume the obligation to follow legal rules. They will feel personally committed to obeying the law, irrespective of whether they risk punishment for breaking the law…normative commitment through personal morality means obeying a law because one feels the law is just; normative commitment through legitimacy means obeying a law because one feels that the authority enforcing the law has the right to dictate behavior.”
A game turned upside down
The inventor of the Landlord’s Game, Elizabeth Magie was a bright and ambitious woman, overqualified for her job as a stenographer at the nation’s Dead Letter Office in Washington. She was a follower of Henry George, an opponent of the flagrant inequality of the Gilded Age and of giant corporate monopolies. George argued that there should be a single form of taxes — on land, since that was a common good that really belongs to the community as a whole, rather than on income.
As Mary Pilon pointed out in her revealing book, The Monopolists, people could play the Landlord’s Game one of two ways: They could follow “anti-monopolist” rules “in which all were rewarded when wealth was created” or pro-monopolist rules in which “the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents”.
Magie’s game never became a hit, though it inspired many people around the country to play variations of it for decades. Nor did she succeed in making it an effective way of spreading Henry George’s political philosophy. Monopoly brings out the latent oligarch in most players rather than the social reformer.
By all rights, though, Magie should have been honored as the original inventor when Parker Brothers started producing Monopoly in the 1930s. Instead the game maker supported a Philadelphia man’s bogus claim to have invented the game.
It was Clarence Darrow who got thousands of dollars and an unending stream of residuals for Monopoly. To protect its bestseller, Parker Brothers eventually bought Lizzie Magie’s patent for only $500 and with no residuals.
The game maker’s narrative was challenged and ultimately invalidated as a result of a lawsuit by Ralph Anspach, an economics professor who developed the game “Anti-Monopoly” and who Parker Brothers targeted for allegedly infringing on their trademark. After a long battle, an appeals court ruled against the game maker, leading the company to settle with the professor.
Still, its owner, now Hasbro Inc., is laughing all the way to the bank. More than 275 million analog copies of the game have been sold in the last 90 years. Monopoly made the transition to the digital world effectively. Since mobile game maker Scopely launched Monopoly Go! under license from Hasbro in 2023, the game has generated more than $6 billion in revenue.
It’s remarkable that two games designed to remedy inequities in our economic system — the Landlord’s Game and Anti-Monopoly — led to the exposure of the Monopoly monopoly. And now we’ll see how Americans feel about living under a “get out of jail free” government.