DT Members are not immune to persecution, but because DT members are trusted they are not as inclined to scam or conduct scummy behavior.

One of many cases of the negative affects associated with this exploit can be found here. Briefly, default trust member, master-p, built up his trust rating by infiltrating one of these networks to build up his reputation and scalp users to his escrow service. Once he attained a considerable amount of business, he scurried away with all the funds held in his trust. Now, it's not clear who else profited within his network but what is clear is that the trust system mechanism set up on the forum facilitated this scam. If it were not for this exploit of bitcointalk.org's forum reputation system, this event would have never been possible. While there are numerous examples of of this type of behavior, they are just symptoms of the greater problem which is much more covert and menacing to the community.

The more menacing problem of this syndicated system on bitcointalk is that there seems to be a collusive effort by many of bitcointalk's default trust leaders to manipulate content, therefore consensus, to conform to their goals. Aside from the normal complaints of censorship to favor one side or the other in the blocksize debate (references found here and here), these thugs will immediately jump on any member who has a dissenting opinion or legitimate concern as to the direction of a topic on the forum, and they will contrive a reason to mark that member with "red" trust to discredit them. The fear alone of that event happening is enough to shape the opinions on the forum, thus the direction of bitcoin.