The United States finds itself as Exhibit A in a real-world political science experiment, but not a fun one like studying the correlation between city manager-style government and the effective provision of public goods. As we watch the guardrails of democracy dissolve on a daily basis, and a president act more and more openly as an authoritarian leader, the question of how to stop the destruction of a democracy doesn’t so much loom as burn madly like a cross set afire by white supremacists. A sense of disorientation, a civic nausea, choke our days, as presidential crime, immoral policy, and assertions of unchecked power recur without apparent consequence. A failed impeachment several months ago seems only to have emboldened the president’s worst tendencies, even as the coronavirus pandemic has rendered his incompetence and malice deadly on a mass scale.
So the November election looms as our chief opportunity to stop the slide, to return to the presidency to someone committed to American democracy, rather than intent on its destruction. But as has been broadly noted, a Joe Biden victory would not shut down hard questions about how to repair the damage done to the political system. As just one example — important norms broken by Donald Trump will need to be embodied in legislation, so that in the future, a president who attempts to break them will be not only breaking with tradition but also breaking the law.
But the single most vexing question about how to repair American government involves how to handle the past crimes and offenses of the Trump administration. As observers like Jeet Heer and Josh Marshall have recently written, the country has an urgent need to expose the corrupt acts of the Trump administration to public view. Heer quotes a government reform expert, Sam Berger, as saying that, “Ignoring the Trump administration’s attacks on the rule of law will only invite further attacks—and likely even more brazen and threatening ones.” Jeer endorses the need for investigations, not only as a means of upholding the law, but also as a way to educate the public, “shame” those who engaged in bad behavior, and provide momentum for new anti-corruption laws.
A basic challenge to such inquiries is that a new presidential administration investigating the previous one would seem to be just the sort of banana republic-style shenanigans that we’re trying to get out of. I’ve described this as a sort of “democracy paradox” — in order to preserve the rule of law, a political party is forced to investigate its political opponents in ways that both set a bad precedent and may seem illegitimate to voters of the investigated party. On the second point, it is a given that the Republican Party would in fact label any Democratic investigations of the Trump administration as politicized witch hunts, and would work to smear them as mere partisan attacks.
But such protestations on the part of the GOP should not be taken at face value as an honest defense of democratic values — not by the citizenry, the media, or the Democratic Party. The GOP’s lack of credibility, though, as well as the overall project of holding the Trump administration to account for its corruption and crimes, is best served by making careful and accurate distinctions among the types of corruption it has practiced. There has obviously been an enormous amount of financial self-dealing among Trump and his allies, from the president profiting off the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. to the steering of lucrative contracts to donors. But alongside such offenses, the president has also employed and abused the U.S. government for illicit political ends. These acts encompass subverting accountability for the Russian attacks on the 2016 election and undermining our ability to conduct free and fair elections in 2020; deploying federal troops against American citizens in Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon for re-election purposes; and making murderous decisions about the coronavirus pandemic in an effort to damage the political prospect of Democratic governors. In other words, we need to distinguish between corrupt behavior that involved more mundane efforts to profit off the presidency, and behavior that amounted to an attack on both the government and the people of the United States.
Making such a distinction in what we mean by “corruption” can help navigate the inherent dangers to a new presidential administration and Congress investigating the previous president. Ultimately, both “corruption” and “crime” are general terms that obscure the specific offense for which Donald Trump most needs to be held accountable: his full-scale assault on American democracy and the American people. And this is the point at which Democrats also cannot avoid confronting a basic truth: such an assault has been aided and abetted by Republican senators and representatives for going on four years. Through both active support and tacit approval, the GOP has enabled the president’s work at tearing down accountable government and faith in elections. In turn, Donald Trump has overtly followed in the footsteps of previous Republican presidents and politicos, following the logic of white supremacism, voter suppression, and prioritization of oligarchic interests to their inevitable authoritarian ends.
The GOP’s enabling of Donald Trump was put on display most vividly when all but one Republican senator voted to acquit him in his impeachment trial, despite incontrovertible evidence that the president had used the power of the U.S. government to threaten an ally to gin up a fake narrative about his then-likely opponent in the 2020 election. Efforts by Republican senators to spread a false narrative about Joe Biden and Ukraine, based on Russian disinformation efforts, continue to this day. This is certainly corruption, but it is also an abuse of power, an attack on free and fair elections, and an effort in tandem with the president’s own work to undermine the November election.
Acknowledging that the United States faces not just a Donald Trump crisis but a Republican Party crisis, in which the corrupt acts constitute an existential threat to democratic rule, clarifies how we need to think about post-Trump administration investigations. The Democrats need to internalize this basic fact: the point must be not simply to restore some abstract “rule of law,” or punish generic “corruption,” but to inflict maximum political damage on a political party that has set itself in opposition to democratic government in this country. As I’ve written before, this is a case where the Democrats’ partisan interests and duties as defenders of the constitutional order fully align. Continuing to behave as if the GOP is a party committed to fair political competition and democratic values would be delusional after its embrace of Donald Trump over the past four years.
To facilitate this take-no-prisoners approach, Josh Marshall’s argument for prioritizing a massive airing of the facts and extent of Donald Trump’s corrupt acts, rather that emphasizing investigations that lead to prosecutions, feels increasingly persuasive. The crux of his argument is that the American people, given the full facts of what happened, will be able to render appropriate political judgments on Trump and the Republican Party that will be more consequential than whether those who committed crimes in the Trump administration go to jail. The fact that such an exposure could be accomplished much more quickly than investigations, so that the political impact would be accelerated, also seems to be a major consideration.
But a fact-finding approach will only be effective if the Democrats prioritize and provide a proper narrative to what they investigate and what they unearth. The Trump administration has committed and enabled countless acts worthy of investigation; emphasis must be placed on those acts that most directly harmed American government and that disqualify Trump’s political allies from holding political office. The American people have a unquestionable right to know what bad acts were done in their name; but the Democrats have a political imperative to specifically press the case that Trump and the GOP committed political offenses that are simply unforgivable if we want to call ourselves a democracy.