This is seemingly the first time, though, that Trump has expressed anger about citizens having access to counsel. As Slate notes, access to counsel is "a bedrock principle of American legal history that actually predates the Bill of Rights itself." It's an explicit piece of the 6th Amendment, which says that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right … to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense." And it speaks to one of the Constitution's primary values—the protection of the individual from the power of the state. How better to prevent government tyranny than to ensure that defendants have Constitutional protections?

Although access to counsel has been part of the Bill of Rights since 1789, what "access" means has changed over the years. The most important change came in 1963, when the Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that the government had to provide a lawyer to defendants who could not afford one. While there are conditions attached to this ruling—among them, a lawyer is only guaranteed for defendants facing felony charges or charges that could result in jail time—Gideon still remains the most important decision related to access to counsel in American history. Criminal defendants tend to be poorer overall than the general population, and around 80 percent of defendants nationwide are eligible for a lawyer provided by the government.

Yet, the reality of access to counsel belies its importance as a constitutional principle. From the New York Times:

[S]tate and county spending on lawyers for the poor amounts to only $2.3 billion — barely 1 percent of the more than $200 billion governments spend annually on criminal justice. Worse, since 1995, real spending on indigent defense has fallen, by 2 percent, even as the number of felony cases has risen by approximately 40 percent. […] In Fresno, Calif., for instance, public defenders have caseloads that are four times the recommended maximum of around 150. In Minnesota, one public defender followed by a reporter estimated that he had about 12 minutes to devote to each client that day. There is no way these lawyers can manage the cases being thrown at them. In New Orleans, caseloads are so high that the parish’s public defender office has started to refuse to take cases, including murder cases. Public defender offices in other states, including Florida, Missouri, New York and Pennsylvania, have taken similar steps when caseloads have grown too heavy. To make things worse, 43 states now require indigent defendants to pay at least a portion of their lawyers’ fees, even though these defendants are by definition indisputably poor.

These statistics demonstrate that Trump's lament that Rahami will get an "outstanding lawyer" is not only un-American, it's completely out of touch.

It is true, of course, that Rahami is in the federal system, where public defense tends to be better funded than it is on the state and county level. But even federal public defenders suffer from staffing and funding shortages. From a 2013 article about the effect of budget cuts on federal public defense in the New York Times:

Faced with steep cuts to their budgets, federal public defenders around the country have furloughed or laid off hundreds of lawyers and other staff members, spent less on expert witnesses and cut back on case-related travel. The cuts for the 2014 fiscal year will most likely result in staff reductions of 30 percent to 50 percent, they said. And some public defenders are even considering closing their offices because of a lack of money. […] The 81 defender offices across the country, which represent 60 percent of all criminal defendants in the federal court system, have already had their budgets cut by 10 percent because of the sequester and other reductions this year and could face up to a 23 percent cut in 2014. Additional cost-cutting measures may result in a smaller cut, around 10 percent. Although the cuts are widespread across the government, public defenders say the reductions are hitting them particularly hard. Unlike other federal programs, the public defenders say, they have little fat to trim since most of their costs are for staff and rent. Just 10 percent of their budgets are devoted to expert witnesses, investigative costs and travel.

At the time, American Bar Association President James R. Silkenat said the budget cuts were “imperiling the delivery of effective legal representation for poor people accused of federal crimes.” He questioned how some members of Congress could be “so blind to the damage they are causing our communities by their current failure to provide adequate funding to courts."

While the most severe cuts were temporary, it’s clear that federal public defenders generally face some of the same inequities as their state and local counterparts. A report by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers found that the problems were ongoing.

That's not to say, of course, that there aren't good public defenders out there. There are thousands and thousands of public defenders who manage to represent their clients competently despite being enormously overworked and desperately underfunded. Yet, it’s undeniable that those people would provide even better representation if they were adequately resourced.

While our Constitution protects the individual, America in practice is a punishing nation. We are the most incarceratory nation in the world, hell-bent on excessive sentencing. Poor people and people of color have it particularly hard in this system, which has time and time again been proven to punish certain demographics and communities more than others.

Once again, America simply does not have a leniency problem. This is particularly true when it comes to suspected terrorism—take Tarek Mehanna, who in 2012 was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for providing material support to terrorists. Mehanna's conviction for translating materials that prosecutors said "promoted violent jihad" made headlines, and was denounced by many including the ACLU. In December 2013, The Nation stated that Mehanna had been convicted of a “thought crime” and noted that “as in Mehanna’s case, most national security prosecutions the government has trotted out involve no act of terrorism, or even a plan to carry such a plan out.” We can expect, then, that a person who commits an actual crime, as is alleged in Rahami’s case, will be punished severely. Whether or not he has the best lawyer in the world, Ahmad Rahami is likely to be convicted and sentenced to prison for many, many years.

Still, he is American. And in America, even people who commit heinous crimes are entitled to quality representation. For counsel to be outstanding, it requires that even the most amazing attorneys have resources and bandwidth that many government-funded lawyers simply do not have.

Of course, Trump has disregarded much of the Bill of Rights throughout his candidacy, and is known for his blatant and shameless manipulation of the court system in particular. This is just yet another example of how little he understands the value of those protections that apply to all individual citizens. The implication that Rahami does not deserve counsel when he's facing federal terrorism charges is simply un-American. The idea that government provides outstanding counsel to defendants is simply untrue.