After Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, it was hard to breathe too big a sigh of relief, given how close he had again come to an electoral college victory even while decisively losing the popular vote. The narrowness of his loss gave weight to arguments that the fight against Trump and Trumpism could hardly be considered over with his ejection from the White House — that the battle for American democracy against GOP authoritarianism was still in the balance, and that Democrats and others needed to push to reform American democracy itself in order to ensure that the majority continues to rule. And since the election, a wave of anti-voting measures in Republican-controlled states and legislatures has provided incontestable evidence that the onslaught continues even with Trump out of office.
One strategy for pushing back against this growing authoritarian movement was clear even while Trump was in office — ensuring that the Trump administration's offenses against the American people and government were made known to the public. And this likelihood stood out to me: that once Trump was out of office, we were sure to learn of new offenses that could be used to continue to build the case to Americans regarding the former president’s unfitness for office, and the culpability of Republican Party officeholders in refusing to disavow both the man and his presidency.
Over the past months, new revelations about Trump administration lawlessness have validated this assumption, and have built the case for continuing to tie the GOP to the derangements of the former president. The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein summarizes some of the biggest stories:
Emails show how both Trump and his White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pressured the Justice Department to support the former president’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020. A previously unheard tape captures how Rudolph Giuliani, as Trump’s attorney, explicitly pressured Ukraine to manufacture an investigation against Joe Biden—the issue that prompted the former president’s first impeachment. Even more ominous has been the disclosure that the Justice Department under Trump subpoenaed communications records of journalists, Democratic members and staffers in the House of Representatives, and even Trump’s own White House counsel, all without their knowledge.
Brownstein notes that even with these disclosures, we can be sure that much still remains hidden. And indeed, shortly after Brownstein wrote this piece, we learned that during White House discussions about civil rights protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, President Trump said that the military should “crack skulls” and “beat the fuck out” of protestors, and that soldiers should “just shoot them.” Trump’s desire to slaughter unarmed civilians, had it been known at the time, alone should have prompted a new impeachment effort to remove this monster from office.
I’m sympathetic with the impulse of many Democratic politicos to avoid making a quest for accountability of Trump administration actions too large a part of the party’s identity — after all, even those who most loathe the former president also want the country to move forward and thrive now that he’s out of office. But while there are valid concerns about politicizing the justice system by seeking punishment for the former president’s crimes and assaults on the constitutional order, an effort to investigate and publicize such matters so as to inform the public of exactly what this corrupt and evil man did is entirely proper for Democrats, and healthy for the republic — a powerful alignment of serving the public interest while also maximizing the political advantages to the Democratic Party and the political pain to the GOP.
Two obvious reasons for doing so jump out at me. First, since Trump left office, the GOP has if anything only increased its fealty to the former president, refusing any reckoning with or repudiation of his time in office. Instead, many in the GOP appear to see the president’s mix of white nationalism and assault on voting rights as key to the party’s future hold on power — a political game plan of racism-fueled authoritarianism. In doing so, they legitimize the Democrats’ efforts to uncover hidden Trump administration wrongdoing in order to demonstrate to the American people the true nature of this authoritarian party.
Second, there's a strong possibility that Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024 — a possibility for which Democrats would do well to prepare by ensuring that the fullest accounting of his corruption and moral turpitude is available to voters. In particular, Democrats should be thinking about how they might carve off a small but significant percentage of Republican voters in 2022 and 2024 — elections that will very possibly involve a field deeply tilted against Democrats due to Republican initiatives to suppress voting rights (particularly if Democrats fail to pass legislation along the lines of the For the People Act). As a basic insurance policy against a second Trump run for the White House, Democrats should do whatever they can to maintain and increase the doubts of Republican voters unsure if another Trump term is such a hot idea.
The new report of Trump’s eagerness to kill protestors in cold blood strikes me as the sort of news that can change minds and help the Democrats construct a powerful, and accurate, continuing narrative of the Trump presidency to counter possible Republican efforts to launder the historical record in anticipation of a 2024 run. In a similar vein, Democrats should be ready to link any future attacks by right-wing extremists to the encouragements of the former president, as well as to his administration’s efforts to downplay the threat of right-wing violence and prevent national security agencies from prioritizing the threat it poses. I base this on a faith that most, or at least a great many, Republican voters do not want to become complicit in violence against their fellow Americans. To this end, it’s essential to show that the former president — and by extension his current defenders in the GOP —are all too comfortable with the idea of killing, beating, and otherwise abusing their fellow Americans in order to maintain power. It would be absurd not to wield this anti-democratic, fascistic animus as a weapon against a GOP that continues to mainline some of the worst aspects of Trump's presidency.