Trump fatigue is real. So real that Americans this month threw an incumbent president out of office by four percentage points and nearly six million votes. We all want a return to “normal.” Normal is not cooperating.
Like it or not, that is the environment into which the incoming Biden administration finds itself as well as the dangerously changing global one. Unless you are prepared to fold, you play with the cards you are dealt.
The Joe Biden administration is signaling it has learned nothing from the last Democratic administration’s desire “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Barack Obama’s Department of Justice would not investigate George W. Bush’s C.I.A. interrogation program and other potentially illegal actions. Biden’s team signaled Tuesday it would treat Trump malfeasance similarly, or at least at arm’s length:
President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn’t want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration.
Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations.
They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he “just wants to move on.”
An unnamed adviser told NBC News Biden’s DOJ would be independent of the Oval Office again. “[A]ny Trump-related investigations, the expectation is ‘it’s going to be very situational’ and ‘depending on the merits’.” So, some wiggle room.
But beginning with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon for the Watergate break-in and coverup, the history on looking forward not backwards suggest doing so means the next cycle of ethical decay will be worse than the last. *
At the time of the Nixon pardon, Ford wrote, “the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” Normal. We want to get back to normal.
And so, only Nixon underlings would face prosecution. What followed?
- Iran-contra followed Watergate (under Reagan)
- Torture, prisoner killings, and international kidnappings followed Iran-contra (under G.W. Bush)
- Obstruction of justice, human rights violations, and likely financial crimes and public corruption followed the torture (under Trump)
On approximately 15-year intervals, David Waldman (KagroX) added.
Yet, holding prior administrations accountable for law-breaking has been dismissed since the George H.W. Bush Iran-contra pardons as “the criminalization of policy differences.”
Jonathan Mahler in the New York Times Magazine catalogs some of Trump’s likely crimes: financial, election-law violations, obstruction of justice, and public corruption. He left out alleged crimes against humanity.
Mahler writes:
The nation may desire healing. But there is also the matter of justice, and there is no guarantee that what feels right now will look right through the longer lens of history. Ford was widely assailed for pardoning Nixon. But one of his most outspoken critics at the time, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, later honored Ford with a Profile in Courage award, explaining that he’d been moved to rethink his views after witnessing the sprawling and protracted investigation into President Clinton by the independent counsel Ken Starr. It may be time to rethink Ford’s decision once more; it’s hard not to wonder if a Trump presidency would have been possible if Nixon had been criminally prosecuted rather than pardoned.
In that sense, the problem that Trump poses for Biden may also present an opportunity, a chance to repair more than just the damage of the last four years. To begin with, this may require recognizing that when a president brazenly flouts the law, electoral defeat might not be enough of a punishment. “There’s a mind-set that we need to reset,” Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, told me. “Breaking the law is not a political difference.” It might also require recognizing that to really move on from Trump, “healing” may have to mean something fundamentally different from what it has in the past — and that without accountability, it may in fact be impossible.
Not looking back means a future with more of the same, only worse. Biden’s need to heal the country will only kick the can of accountability down the road. We have already seen the escalation in criminality correlating with (if not caused by) doing that over the last 50 years. In the name of moving on, we sacrifice principles of equal justice and the country decays from within.
Demanding accountability now with neo-fascists in the streets and a country bitterly divided risks ripping the country apart irreparably. Not addressing it now may only delay that eventuality. By that end, the country will be unrecognizable. At least fighting to demand justice and accepting the risks, the U.S.A. if it fails could fade into history with some of its dignity intact.
These are the cards Joe Biden must play if he has the guts for it.
*We did not know at the time of Nixon’s “treason” in sabotaging the Vietnam war peace talks in 1968. LBJ did and covered it up, as did Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey who believed it would be “too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason.” Fifty years later, here we are.