Cause for concern

Dahlia Lithwick shares concerns that without consequences for Trump & Co. the country puts itself at greater risk. His administration and his Department of Justice engaged in practices that might have made Richard Nixon blush:

In the past few days we have learned—among other object horrors—that Donald Trump’s Justice Department seized metadata records for members of the House Intelligence Committee and their families, whom it suspected of leaking. We learned that Trump supporters have been leveling crippling death threats against state election workers. We learned that White House counsel Don McGahn had been instructed to fire Robert Mueller. We learned that in 2019, Rudy Giuliani, acting in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer, pressed Ukraine to announce baseless investigations about alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. And yet as Richard Painter and Claire O. Finkelstein showed last week, the Justice Department has worked to stymie investigations and litigation that would unearth at least some of these truths, in a quest to protect institutional prerogatives and values.

Meaning the Trump administration ain’t over until the legal paperwork is complete. Republicans on Capitol Hill are working to prevent that. The Biden administration so far seems to be in “moving on” mode. A significant fraction of Americans still believe the sitting president is illegitimate. Republican legislatures that previously used voter fraud as a pretext for restricting voting rights are now moving to allow election rigging by law: theirs.

Without consequences, a Josh Hawley or a Marco Rubio might do it again, Lithwick warns. The Boston Globe urged prosecution. “That’s not a recommendation made lightly,” the Glode wrote:

In the case of Trump, prosecutors would have plenty of potential crimes from which to choose. While Trump may be prosecuted for financial crimes he potentially committed before he became president, what is most important to go after are his actions during his time in office, especially those after the 2020 election, which culminated in fomenting a full-on, violent assault on American democracy.

To assemble a bill of particulars for Trump’s crimes in office, one merely needs a set of newspaper clippings. Putting that all behind us is the kind of behavior the Silents were known for. Joe Biden is one of them. But even they knew enough to prosecute Nixon and enact a set of reforms in the wake of Watergate.

Sweeping Trump under the rug is an invitation to disaster, just as the Savings and Loan debacle presaged the Great Recession. Hundreds went to jail for what was then “one-seventieth the size” of the 2008 financial meltdown that triggered the Great Recession. The Obama administration let the latter financial crimes go virtually unpunished.

Then came Trump, a man who cut his teeth on financial crimes and went on to crimes against the Constitution:

Pretending Trump was a crazy dream and it’s all normal again is now a bipartisan sport. As David Graham warned last week, the only thing more dangerous than the claims that “this is not normal” that pervaded the Trump years is the thin veneer of “normalcy” that characterizes the present illiberal moment. But what is most bizarre, troubling, and painful about this current attempt to move forward and revert to normal without properly reckoning with what has happened is that the message is emanating from the Biden Justice Department and White House. They are now the folks arguing that everything that happened over the course of the Trump years was an aberration and a one-off, and that the best response to all of that is to ignore, ignore, ignore.

Lithwick has no better idea than I of how to de-radicalize a Trump electorate in the throws of mass hysteria. But letting Trump off the hook will further destroy the links between reality and fantasy, truth and lies:

With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, and being told to get over it is just as jarring when it comes from inside the guardrails of democracy as it was when it came from the smirking authoritarians that has replaced. That’s why it doesn’t feel any better. If anything, gaslighting about ongoing threats to democracy might be even scarier when it comes from the very people who were supposed to protect us.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is a Boomer, not a Silent. Any suggestion that his department should just not get involved in Trump investigations because that might seem political deserves a shouted, “OK, Boomer!”