Rep. Adam Schiff (D-N.Y.) warned us a year ago in prosecuting the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump before the U.S. Senate:
No constitution can protect us if right doesn’t matter anymore. And you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to.
And Trump did. He continues to. His enablers in Congress, those who voted to allow him to remain in office, enable Trump even now, with few exceptions. Even after a recording from last weekend showed Trump attempting to coerce the chief elections official in Georgia to falsify election results counted thrice and certified.
Although Trump deserves it, with his term expiring on Jan. 20, Democrats have little time or appetitie for attempting to impeach Trump again, even to make a moral statement. But justice demands judgment against Trump and the criminal actions he has taken in violation of his oath of office. If he walks away unpunished except by loss of his office, others will emulate him. Count on it.
“If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked,” writes Michele Goldberg, “we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.” The U.S. is already well down that road.
The problem with holding Trump to account, Goldberg observes, is “the psychopath’s advantage.” Mens rea makes it tough to prosecute someone insane enough to believe the law does not apoply to him and dumb enough to believe misinformation circulated by “QAnon followers, 8kun posters, and a random Twitter guy.” Practical politics, Goldberg continues, make it doubly difficult to prosecute a president voters have already thrown out of office:
Yet if there is no penalty for Republican cheating, there will be more of it. The structure of our politics — the huge advantages wielded by small states and rural voters — means that Democrats need substantial majorities to wield national power, so they can’t simply ignore the wishes of the electorate. Not so for Republicans, which is why they feel free to openly scheme against the majority.
During impeachment, Republicans who were unwilling to defend the president’s conduct, but also unwilling to penalize him, insisted that if Americans didn’t like his behavior they could vote him out. Americans did, and now Trump’s party is refusing to accept it. It’s evidence that you can’t rely on elections to punish attempts to subvert elections. Only the law can do that, even if it’s inconvenient.
In a 2004 interview with “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, former President Bill Clinton explained why Republicans keep deploying the politics of personal destruction:
Clinton: They had a calling operation in South Carolina in the primary in 2010 about how John McCain had a black baby, and they didn’t want the white voters to forget it.
[banter]
Stewart: Do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty … that these kinds of tactics become so prevalent that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote? Or this is the reason that we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?
Clinton: No, I think people do it because they think it works.
Stewart: That’s it? Simply a strategy?
Clinton: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.
Except no one has stopped them. Neither Democrats nor a once-watchdog press. Federal prosecution of white-collar criminals is the lowest level on record. Meaning actual criminal behavior by elites in and out of public office goes unpunished as well.
It did not stop with Pres. Richard Nixon; Pres. Gerald Ford pardoned him for Watergate. It did not stop after Iran-Contra; Pres. George H.W. Bush pardoned the high-level players and Pres. Ronald Reagan never faced serious sanction. It did not stop after officials in the George W. Bush administration sanctioned the torture of prisoners, or after Wall Street moguls brought the world economy to its knees peddling fraudulent financial products; Pres. Barack Obama’s administration preferred to “look forward, not back” and neither group faced prosecution.
David Atkins wrote here in 2013, “Unfortunately, that also makes us easy targets to relive the horrors of the past again and again while learning almost nothing from them.”
Trump must face punishment. Or at least a public accounting. In some fashion. In some way that matters. Even if it’s inconvenient. We’ve seen this movie too many times in half a century.