There’s Only One Way to Eradicate Trumpism for Good

One of the weirder journalistic spectacles of the Trump era has been watching mainstream news organizations parachute into the hinterlands to try to understand the voters who ushered in, and continue to support, this age of cruelty in America. A recent classic was The New York Times’ herculean effort to find one Minnesota diner whose patrons were willing to talk shit about the ICE resistance in Minneapolis. There has not, however, been an equivalent effort to reveal the everyday people who saw the dangers of Trumpism coming. But this week, TNR contributor Toby Buckle returned to these pages to do just that.

I’m petty enough to enjoy a good round of “I told you so.” One of the better value propositions of your TNR subscription is that you’ll more frequently find yourself in the company of writers who recognized the dangers of Trumpism from several miles off and unflinchingly told the truth about it. That’s why Buckle’s warning that a mere election victory won’t be sufficient to right this ship has stuck in my mind: “We must undertake an ambitious program of accountability and reform in order to create liberal democracy in America again.” So here’s something else I’m going to be right about in advance: The failure to hold the malefactors of Trumpist fascism to account will only ensure its return.

This isn’t some loose theory. Perhaps the best proof of this fundamental fact can be found in recent history, as both Trump’s rise and his return were preceded by Democratic administrations that showed little regard for civic accountability. The Obama administration made the conscious decision to make “looking forward, not backward” the order of the day, to the great relief of Wall Street crooks and war-on-terror torturers. Obama extended grace to those who capsized the economy, and kept showing extreme deference to them throughout his administration.

As The American Prospect’s David Dayen reported this week, an email from recently disgraced Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Ruemmler to pedo-oligarch Jeffrey Epstein—in which she seeks advice on how to defend Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’d been stoking outrage about White’s constant granting of deferred prosecution agreements to corporate criminals—is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the Obama administration’s laxity. This vacuum of accountability was filled by Trump’s right-wing faux-populism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Much of this could have been headed off.

And while there were some significant areas in which Joe Biden seemed to learn from his former boss’s mistakes, the need for a more robust campaign of accountability was not one of them. Despite the ample reasons to launch investigations and obtain redress for past corruption, Attorney General Merrick Garland did little more than attempt to radiate an ambient virtue, perpetually endeavoring to shield his agency and the Biden administration from the perception that they were seeking purely political prosecutions. Not that this ever stopped Trump from crying foul about witch hunts! Garland’s first major investigation into Trump’s misconduct wasn’t launched until three days after Trump announced his reelection campaign—the very thing that the Biden administration should have been trying in earnest to prevent after the Senate failed in its duty to impeach him. Once Trump entered the safe harbor of a presidential candidacy, efforts to hold him responsible fizzled—and the Supreme Court all but crowned him king.

As I’ve argued before, these “look the other way and cross your fingers” ways of the past aren’t going to cut it anymore. There shouldn’t be Democrats running for election anywhere who aren’t fully committed to using their regained power to take Trumpism down. That means large-scale investigations and hearings. That means pursuing criminal charges and jail sentences. Yes, that means everyone currently employed by ICE gets a pink slip. And that means doling out punishments to the corporate scofflaws and institutional enablers that allowed Trumpian misrule to flourish.

Axios reported this week that corporate America is being warned that the “subpoenas are coming.” I want that to be true; if we end up with political leaders on the left who are too timid to do what needs to be done, we will fall short. The Beltway-brained are perennially concerned with “political capital,” the allegedly short supply of which creates the perpetual demand for scaling back Democratic ambitions. Future party leaders need to shed these phantasmal fears. And they need to be ready for the political press to lobby hard against these efforts. After all, the sight of so many people being held accountable will raise serious questions of how much went wrong on their watch.

All that said, I continue to be buoyed by the sense that Democratic voters are bent on elevating real fighters—and cheered by the sight of those whom they’ve been elevating repaying that faith. There is already ample material to fuel the ambitions of would-be warriors. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that massive swaths of Americans are using brutal terminology to describe the Trump administration: 47 percent of respondents say they would describe Trump as “racist,” 49 percent would characterize him as “corrupt,” and 46 percent would describe him as “cruel.”

These numbers indicate a very favorable environment for Democrats to attack Trump on these fronts—to explicitly say that Trump is a cruel and corrupt racist who’s enriched himself in office at the expense of the American people while egging on a secret police force that is increasingly evil in the purest sense of the word. It will take effort and commitment to provide real accountability, but the prize at the end of the quest is a democracy with restored resilience and a repellent right-wing movement beaten back into irrelevance. If it’s done correctly, the next time anyone goes looking for the point of view of Trump voters, they won’t be able to find anyone willing to admit they ever supported him.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.