The crimes of Donald Trump and his cronies should be prosecuted because they are crimes, but there’s a more important reason, which Peter Baker of the New York Times touches on here:
The nightmarish scenario of widespread doubt and denial of the legitimacy of the election would cap a period in American history when truth itself has seemed at stake under a president who has strayed so far from the normal bounds that he creates what allies call his own reality. Even if the election ends with a clear victory or defeat for Mr. Trump, scholars and players alike say the very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during his tenure with potentially long-term ramifications.
“You can mitigate the damage, but you can’t bring it back to 100 percent the way it was before,” said Lee McIntyre, the author of “Post-Truth” and a philosopher at Boston University. “And I think that’s going to be Trump’s legacy. I think there’s going to be lingering damage to the processes by which we vet truths for decades. People are going to be saying, ‘Oh, that’s fake news.’ The confusion between skepticism and denialism, the idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have to believe it, that’s really damaging and that’s going to last.”
I see the Trump administration in the same rough category as South Africa’s Apartheid regime, and we have plenty to learn from postwar Germany, too. Before we can move on, we have to reckon with what happened. We have to document everything exhaustively. We have to hold people accountable. We have to enact reforms that will prevent a repeat. Above all, we can’t just say everything is okay because the people woke up and voted against the thing they had voted for four years earlier. This isn’t a political dispute. This is the near destruction of our country,
First and foremost, Trump cannot be allowed to run for president again. That should be impossible for him because he’ll be in prison, but to be sure he should be impeached and convicted even after he’s out of office so that he is never again allowed to hold a position of trust or power in the federal government.
If we don’t treat this as a national horror that must defined as such, then Baker’s predictions will prove true, and we can’t allow that without a fight.
I agree with everything you wrote. But it didn’t begin with Trump. The rot goes way back. Even beyond Nixon. And not just within one party though the Republicans have turned corruption into an artform. Tom Delay was prosecuted but ultimately never held fully accountable. And Bush and Cheney. And on and on.
In earlier times, these men would have been ashamed to raise their heads in public. These days it seems anything goes. We need a deeper social cleansing. One in which a person’s word and reputation mean something.
Amen, brother.
It is not enough – there are 100s of really morally corrupt enablers of Trumpification of reality all across the 6 years. Should Sean Spicer go scot free? Huckabee-Sanders, Grisham, McEnany? They should all be prosecuted for their Baghdad Bob acts!
Bill Barr should rot in jail for the rest of his miserable life. Make Whittaker, and Sessions accountable. Sessions should never see the light of a political day ever again!
Ryan Zinke. Scott Pruitt. Andrew Wheeler. Mark Meadows. Muck Mulvaney.
Gina Haspel. Pompeo (both for CIA and SoS)
And the rats in the White House and Trump’s campaigns, IF they are not already in jail, should be flooded out!
I will celebrate the day I see Stephen Miller in jail!
There must be a thorough-going investigation of all corners of the executive branch for the past 4 years, simply because the chief executive of TrumpAmerica, Inc. was both a lifelong conman and serial lawbreaker. He openly said the president could do whatever he wanted, the law be damned. He ran a government of toadies, not law. So the only way to survive in the Trumpite regime was to be a willing and inventive lawbreaker as well. “Working towards the Fuhrer” was the concept in the Nazi state. You anticipated what the Fuhrer wanted. This gave a certain plausible deniability to Hitler (and now his idolator Trump.)
So there must be a national accounting, probably carried out by a special prosecutor. To the extent criminal laws were broken, then the felonious Trumpites must be tried, as Suvro says. But equally important, the executive branch itself must be De-Trumpified, just as Germany was DeNazified after WWII. Civil servants will have to be cashiered should they have exhibited personal Trump support.
The biggest problem, though, is the Trumpified federal appellate courts, which now simply churn out partisan “conservative” decisions, no matter how terrible the “arguments” for them may be. The result is all that matters now. So the Judiciary committees need to review the most egregious rulings and identify (by name) all the democratically-illegitimate federal judges crammed thorough by the dictator and his willing Reichstag enabler, McConnell. Until the courts are true neutral arbiters again, democratic (and Democratic) governance will be impossible.
(This comment itself is really engaging in wishful thinking, because the Trump Supreme Court majority has already announced how Trump will attempt to steal the election by throwing out critical caches of “late arriving” ballots in MN, PA, NC, and now TX. If the Biden margin of victory in those states depends on these later arriving ballots, then Trump will “win” the electoral college once again.) The fate of the nation basically depends on what happens in GA and FL (and perhaps OH) tomorrow.
Much as I would like to see this all unfold as you presented it, it will not happen unless citizens hold their representatives feet to the fire. Without that the general approach in Washington will be that it’s all a distraction from governing, that the people are tired of fighting and just want something done to make their lives better. Trump may end up in jail eventually on tax evasion or something similar, but the true damage he did to the country will, like with W. and his war crimes, never be prosecuted UNLESS people rise up and make it so.