Trump may never answer for his crimes — but these people will

Dear Trump Administration Official,

I’m writing to you not as a political opponent, but as a historian who’s spent a lifetime studying what happens when democracies flirt with strongmen and otherwise decent people convince themselves that loyalty to Dear Leader today will be rewarded by safety and protection tomorrow.

It almost never is.

You’re out there defending Donald Trump’s lawbreaking, cheering his attacks on judges, prosecutors, immigrants, journalists, and even the Constitution itself. You defend his bribe-taking, the jet from Qatar, the violence of ICE, and his hotel and crypto grifts. You say it’s necessary for him to abuse power to “get things done,” that the other side is worse, that he’s strong and that’s what the American people need.

History is littered with people who believed the same things: let’s start close to home.

Richard Nixon didn’t go to prison: his loyalists did.

His attorney general John Mitchell did hard time in a federal prison. His chief of staff H.R. Haldeman did hard time, as did John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and his White House attorney John Dean. The burglars did time, as did the fixers. The 40 Nixon officials who went to prison even included two members of Nixon’s cabinet, Mitchell and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans.

The people who “just followed orders” or egged Nixon on — like you’re doing now with Trump — were the ones who went to jail, while Nixon walked away to a quiet retirement.

That’s the pattern history shows us over and over, all the way back to the Roman Republic: the boss either dies or escapes while his helpers become the long-term fall guys.

Every authoritarian system runs on the same fuel you’re today giving Trump: people who believe that by protecting the leader they’re protecting themselves and their families. Tragically, at least for them, it never works out that way.

When Hitler’s regime collapsed, he was dead but his inner circle faced tribunals, prison cells, and even the gallows.

The men who signed orders, ran ministries, moved trains, seized property, and “made it all legal” discovered that when corrupt administrations fall, their paperwork trail lasts longer than their leader’s loyalty. Their defense of “I was serving my country” or “just taking orders” didn’t save them: it convicted them.

Mussolini’s story is even darker. As his own crimes caught up with him, his own allies turned and ran. He was executed by people horrified by his excesses. His son-in-law, once his foreign minister and a loyal insider, was put up against a wall and shot after a show trial. Dictators never go down alone: they take their flunkies with them and it’s typically the flunkies who bear the harshest punishments.

Chile’s Pinochet managed to dodge some justice himself, but the men who ran his torture chambers and death squads didn’t. Years later they were dragged into court, convicted, and sent to prison. Time didn’t save them, and neither did politics or the loyalty they expected from the good general. And it won’t save you.

The same happened after Saddam Hussein fell; his henchmen were tried and executed or died in prison. In Romania, the Ceauşescus were hunted down and shot but their senior officials faced courts, disgrace, and decades in prison. Across history, when the music stops, the people closest to the guy at the top inevitably find there aren’t enough chairs.

Here’s the uncomfortable (for you) truth: authoritarian leaders like Trump and Putin treat loyalty like a disposable resource. Just look at all the Republicans who served in Trump’s first term and he’s now trying to throw into prison. Loyalty, for narcissists and authoritarians like Trump, is always a one-way street.

So long as you’re useful, you’re protected, but the moment Dear Leader no longer commands power you’ll become a liability, an offering to be thrown out to appease the angry mob.

And when the prosecutors come calling for you after Trump’s gone, they won’t start with your elegant speeches or proclamations that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” They start with your memos, phone calls, pressure campaigns, documents, and quiet threats; they’ll go after your “find the votes” activities, the cooked reports, the arrests without cause, the orders that violated others’ civil rights.

They’ll start, in other words, with the people who made Trump’s crimes happen: people like you. That’s how conspiracies are proven in a court of law: not by vibes, but by nailing the insiders.

Right now you may feel powerful. You’re on TV, retweeted, and praised by Trump. The base cheers, the fundraising money pours in, the billionaires are chummy, and it feels like history is being written by your side.

But history has a funny way of circling back:

• Nixon’s aides told themselves they were protecting the presidency, but they destroyed their own lives instead.
• The seniormost Nazis told themselves they were saving Germany, but they were prosecuted as war criminals.
• Mussolini’s ministers told themselves they were stabilizing Italy, but they ended up dead or disgraced.
• Pinochet’s enforcers told themselves they were fighting communism, but they ended up in prison.

There’s a simple and perennial reason why prosecutors always say, “Follow the money” and “follow the paper trail”: abusive power always leaves fingerprints.

And there’s no statute of limitations on some of the crimes you’re now waving away.

Obstruction of justice. Conspiracy. Civil rights violations. Election interference. Murder under color of authority. Bribery. Abuse of power. False statements. Unlawful detention. Retaliation against whistleblowers. Collusion with foreign enemies.

These aren’t political talking points that I’m trying to wave around to score with public opinion or scare you, they’re criminal statutes.

You may tell yourself — like all those people before you told themselves — that Trump will protect you. But Nixon didn’t protect his people; he left the White House and never looked back to watch his underlings fall. History’s strongmen never look back. When the heat gets intense enough, they point at others, not themselves.

Already we’re seeing this pattern with dozens of people who’ve left Trump’s first term employ, from his Attorney General, CIA director, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary, and FBI Director all the way down to functionaries in the Oval Office:

“I didn’t know he was that crazy.”

“They acted on their own.”

“I was advised incorrectly.”

“They went too far.”

Every authoritarian uses the same script and Trump has already proven that he’s no different. Do you think he’s suddenly going to decide to protect you rather than run off with the goodies? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

Seriously, here’s the part nobody in the cheering crowd has bothered to tell you: when regimes fall — or even just lose power, like Nixon did — the leader’s efforts become solely about his own personal survival. Your life, as a disposable underling, becomes a tool he can use to redirect blame and avoid accountability.

The courts won’t ask whether you believed in the cause: they’ll ask what you did.

Did you pressure an official? Did you sign that order? Did you participate in killing those fishermen with a missile? Did you move the funds? Did you authorize those deportations to foreign torture centers? Did you look the other way? Did you help cover up the child rapes?

That’s when you’ll discover the very real difference between a political appointee and the defendant you’ll become.

I’m not asking you to become a Democrat, to abandon your “conservative” principles, or even to leave your party. Instead, I want you to realize that the Constitution is older than Donald Trump and far more durable than any cult of personality.

There’s a reason the Founders feared concentrated power and split it among three branches of government: like their advisor Montesquieu, they’d also studied history.

Strongmen always promise protection to the people they con into doing their dirty work. What they deliver to those folks, though, is always collateral damage.

Right now you’re standing close to a light that feels bright and powerful. History suggests, however, that it’ll end by burning the people nearest to it. Including you.

Presidents can walk away, but staffers, lawyers, deputies, agency heads, cabinet officials, and enablers can’t.

You still have time to choose which side of history you’re on, and which side of a courtroom you never want to sit in.

Because the lesson of every fallen strongman is the same: abusive power-by-association today becomes criminal liability tomorrow.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.