Perhaps no single group suffered more, though, from Roosevelt’s policies than Japanese Americans. In a moment of wartime paranoia, Roosevelt blatantly disregarded the civil rights of over 120,000 Japanese people, two thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, and sent them to internment camps. Beito does not hold back in his description of the dreadful conditions they faced. He outlines Roosevelt’s genuine racial animus against East Asians, which he describes as “amateur eugenicist views,” and successfully argues that the president was “the man who was chiefly responsible” for these outright tyrannies. Beito even compares the internment camps to the concentration camps established by communist and fascist regimes around the same time.

Japanese internment is among the darkest moments in American history, and Beito does a real service confronting its sordid realities. The United States government did not right these wrongs until President Reagan signed a bill providing restitution to surviving victims, and even today the crimes committed by Roosevelt’s regime are too often forgotten. The episode should serve as a bleak reminder of what happens when the Bill of Rights is thrown out.

Donald Trump has spent years complaining that American police and the criminal legal system should be “very much tougher”, arguing that some criminals should not be protected by civil liberties, police should rough up suspects and a much wider range of people should face the death penalty for breaking the law.

Now that the former president has been convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records, Trump is arguing that the US legal system is out of control. “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” he said on Friday.

Here’s a recap of some of Trump’s notable comments about “felons” and “criminals” – and a look at how the convict himself has actually been treated.