We’ve Never Been Here Before: The Zero-Accountability Presidency
So here we are, at another one of those Trump moments that by now can only be called boringly surreal: The president-elect is to be sentenced Friday in New York in the hush-money trial, 10 days before he takes the oath of office. He’s expected to be given something called an “unconditional discharge.” At least he’ll have to appear, either in person or virtually. Amazingly, the Supreme Court, this once, did not bail him out, although four justices were ready to.
Nothing is shocking anymore. Trump refused to rule out invading Denmark (to take Greenland). Well, of course he did. What else should we expect? That he also wouldn’t rule out invading Panama (to take the canal) took me by surprise, I admit. But only for about three seconds. By the fourth second, it made perfect sense: Jimmy Carter’s decision to give the canal to Panama has been a festering boil on the right ever since it happened.
To say we’re in an unprecedented place is vastly understating it. We are in a place where no proper democracy has ever been or should ever be. We are about to have a president for whom there are utterly and literally no expectations. No one expects him to behave well. No one expects him to uphold normal standards of decency. If he muses one day about bombing London, or bombing Vancouver, or for that matter bombing Detroit, he will surprise no one. The panelists on The Five will just joke that there are certain sections of Detroit that a good bombing would only improve. Ha ha.
Trump will enter office facing no accountability, and with virtually no chance that he will ever be held accountable. You think I’m exaggerating? OK. Let’s play out a hypothetical. Let’s say President Trump gives nuclear secrets to North Korea. The New York Times breaks the story, let’s say. What would happen?
We know all too well what would happen. One of two things. Either he’d lie and call it fake news, in which case the right-wing agitprop machine would grind its gears in his defense. They’d unload on the Times. They’d snoop around and find out that the reporter on the story cheated on an algebra test in tenth grade. Fox and the others would have the story “debunked” within about two days, and the Times and the rest of the mainstream media would be overpowered.
Under scenario two, Trump would simply admit that he did it and explain why it was a very stable-genius-y thing to do, how everybody’s saying so, and Fox et al. would immediately take up that drumbeat. And over at the Times and on MSNBC and CNN (and I originally added The Washington Post to this list, but these days, one isn’t so sure, alas), everyone would be in high dudgeon about a sitting president sharing nuclear secrets with a regime that has repeatedly stated a deep hostility to the United States, but none of it would matter.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill? We’d see the same pattern. Democrats would be up in arms, while the only thing the Republicans would be doing with their arms would be to lock them. A few of them would express “concern” (hi, Susan Collins), but in time, they’d announce their faith in the president’s sound judgment.
And in the event someone sued and it got to the Supreme Court? The court may not have interceded for the prepresidential Trump, but it has already held that the presidential Trump can do anything.
Trump will be a completely unaccountable president, then, for this very simple reason: The only three power systems capable of holding him to account—the right-wing media, Republicans in Congress, and the Supreme Court—have no interest in doing so. The mainstream media will try to hold him to account, or at least we hope it will; but the mainstream media means nothing to Trump, his party, and his base. Ditto Democrats in Congress.
I can’t imagine a single scenario in which the right-wing media or the GOP Congress or the high court will show backbone or independence. In the meantime, these three entities, especially the right-wing media, have by now been trained to immediately and reflexively aim their fire at Democrats and liberals for every single thing that may go wrong during Trump’s presidency.
We’re getting a little taste of that now. Once upon a sweet old time, the barely imaginable horror of the Los Angeles fires would have been given a little time to marinate before us as a merely human tragedy. It’s entirely appropriate to ask questions and hold leaders accountable—of course. But historically, we tend to get a few days of unified mourning before we get to that. And those days of unified mourning serve a civic and national purpose of reminding us that we are one people.
No longer. Within hours or even minutes of the fires spreading, conservatives took to social media to let the world know that there was nothing accidental or capricious about any of it—it was all the fault of Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass and, most of all, DEI, which stripped the LAFD of the kind of manly white men whom the fires would have taken one look at and retreated back to the hills in fear.
As I said, obviously, it’s necessary to ask questions of leaders (which the GOP will never do with Trump). But it’s equally necessary not to instantly and excessively politicize events that obviously have nonpolitical elements to them. Newsom, Bass, and fire chief Kristen Crowley aren’t in control of the winds, or of the climate change that’s making these wildfires more common and more severe.
This is what the new Trump era will be like, and it’s what Democrats need to know they will be up against. There is a powerful disinformation and propaganda apparatus (1) for which Trump can do no wrong and (2) which, in all cases of conflict, will instantly advance a narrative, whether true or false or somewhere in between, that it’s the fault of Democrats, liberals, or the woke left. Thus the paradox of the new Trump era: The only institutions that will try to hold Trump accountable are powerless to do so, while the only ones with the power to punish him will never do it.
Powerlessness does not, however, imply surrender. Quite the contrary. The republic is in the hands of Democrats and mainstream and progressive institutions. They, we, must fight harder than ever. It’s just going to be maddening, watching a convicted felon president tell lies and corrupt our values. We have to believe that a day of reckoning will come. Without that belief, he wins.