Why Trump Must be Made to Pay for His Crimes

 Many of us have experienced in our lifetimes two instances of presidents who were so corrupt that they deserved removal from office.  Richard Nixon was forced to resign rather than being impeached as eventually a bipartisan conclusion was reached that his secret machinations were intolerable.  Donald Trump, whose dastardly machinations were mostly public—and proudly proclaimed—was ultimately the more dangerous to our nation, yet he received approval from one of our two political parties and almost half the population.  What has happened to us in the intervening period?  Fintan O’Toole considers that question in Democracy’s Afterlife: Trump,the GOP, and the rise of zombie politics, an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books.

When Nixon left office there was a general feeling that the nation had survived a difficult and dangerous time and could now look forward to a return to a normalcy.

“In 1974 upon his inauguration as president, just half an hour after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford declared, ‘My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.’ He implied that the lawlessness and derangement of Nixon’s presidency, laid bare in the Watergate scandal, had been more traumatic for the United States even than the violence of the Vietnam War, its wounds ‘more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars.’ Yet he also suggested that Nixon’s departure had left the country in a good place: ‘Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.’ With its institutions intact, the US could quickly return to its natural condition of mutual benevolence: ‘Let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate’.”

But Nixon went away.  Trump will never go away.  He was terrible as a businessman.  He found his calling as an entertainer: he could play a businessman on television.  He loved it and made a lot of money doing it.  The same emotions make him love being president: empowerment of role and the adulation of his fans.  He’s addicted.  He can turn this lost election into a victory by convincing his fans that he only lost because of a deep conspiracy against him.  He couldn’t quite defeat the conspirators in his first term, but give him another chance and surely he will.  Trump will continue to poison our national life as long as he can draw a breath.

“In this frame of mind, there can never be a result of the 2020 election. One thing we can be sure of is that for Trump and his followers there are not five stages of grief, leading from denial to acceptance. The furthest their sense of it can go is to the second stage, anger. Just as there is ‘long Covid,’ there is long Trump. The staying power of his destructiveness lies in the way that disputed defeat suits him almost as much as victory. It vindicates the self-pity that he has encouraged among his supporters, the belief that everything is rigged against them, that the world is a plot to steal from them their natural due as Americans.

“If Trump is eventually removed from the Oval Office, the study of revenge and immortal hate, not sober self-criticism, will be the response in Trumpworld. There will be no chastening, just a further injection of resentment and conspiracy-mongering.”

What Trump has accomplished is to capture a Republican Party that was morphing into something disgusting and accelerate its transformation into something which is an existential threat to the nation we have assumed ourselves to be. 

“This is zombie politics—the life-after-death of a former conservative party. And as Gothic stories tell us, it is very hard to kill the undead. One half of a two-party system has passed over into a post-democratic state. This reality has to be recognized, and a crucial aspect of that recognition is to accept that the claim Ford could make in 1974—'Our Constitution works’—no longer applies. After the long national nightmare of Watergate, America could rub its eyes and awaken to a renewed confidence in its system of checks and balances.” 

“But the Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There may be much we do not yet know, but what is known (and in most cases openly flaunted) is more than enough: the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal, the flagrant self-dealing, the tax evasion, the children stolen from their parents, the encouragement of neo-Nazis, Trump’s admission that he deliberately played down the seriousness of the coronavirus. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this. They saw it all and let it happen.”

“There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.”

Biden has a problem on his hands.  It is his duty to protect our country from any invaders or others who would do us harm.  Trump, as the effective head of the Republican Party, has every intent to do us harm.  What should Biden do about it?  What can Biden do about it?  He is said to have claimed that he did not want to spend his term in office running after Trump.  He does not have a choice. 

“The dominant power in the land, the undead Republican Party, has made majority rule aberrant, a notion that transgresses the new norms it has created. From the perspective of this system, it is Biden, and his criminal voters, who are the deviant ones. This is the irony: Trump, the purest of political opportunists, driven only by his own instincts and interests, has entrenched an anti-democratic culture that, unless it is uprooted, will thrive in the long term. It is there in his court appointments, in his creation of a solid minority of at least 45 percent animated by resentment and revenge, but above all in his unabashed demonstration of the relatively unbounded possibilities of an American autocracy.”

“As a devout Catholic, Joe Biden believes in the afterlife. But he needs to confront an afterlife that is not in the next world but in this one—the long posterity of Donald Trump.” 

It seems Biden must somehow induce the Republican Party to return to obeying democratic principles and stop aiding and assisting in fomenting the political hatred that exists today between the two parties; or, he must so discredit Trump that Republican legislators will be too embarrassed  to associate with him.  With Trump’s long history of ethical, moral, and legal transgressions, the latter path seems the most promising.  Consider his hourly complaints about fraud in our election systems.  It is a crime to provide false information about a supposed crime.  That might be a fruitful place to start.