There are many well-founded reasons to fear for the country once Donald Trump takes office in just over a month: his plans to appoint incompetents to key public health positions; his eagerness to gut the federal workforce and our government’s ability to function effectively; his intention to deport millions, which will wreak havoc on the economy and violate the rights of non-citizens and citizens alike; his interest in empowering Russia by helping it crush Ukraine; his clear aim to turn the federal government into a piggybank for the ultra-wealthy; his lack of interest in protecting the United States from the ravages of climate change.
With this tsunami of awful bearing down on us, it’s more necessary than ever to prioritize the relative badness of what’s in the pike so that opponents can strategize the most effective defenses against the incoming administration. And on this score, Donald Trump has been uncharacteristically helpful in recent weeks, as he gave his first post-election network TV interview to NBC News. In it, he said many terrible things, but one strand stands out above the others: his apparent commitment to resurrect the January 6 insurrection that most Americans probably think ended back in 2021.
Trump’s NBC interview further confirmed that for the president-elect, January 6 is a day that should forever live in infamy — because simply too many people have tried to hold Donald Trump to account for trying to overthrow American democracy. And so he claimed that the true criminals are those in Congress who investigated his insurrection, and that they deserve to be in jail. He averred that while he would not tell his Justice Department appointees to prosecute people like former Representative Liz Cheney, he expects them to do so nonetheless — a lame effort at plausible deniability by a man who has chosen to nominate corrupt and sycophantic individuals like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to be the nation’s highest law enforcement officials.
Pursuing this upside-down logic, Trump also repeated that he plans to pardon those convicted of storming Congress, beating police officers, and attempting to stop the transfer of power to his duly-elected successor. His obsession with busting out of jail these violent extremists shows that Donald Trump’s hatred of American democracy is boundless; to him, those who engaged in insurrection are heroes for the simple reason that they fought for him against the U.S. government. The January 6 rioters are his own rebel army; back on the streets, they will supply the new president with a legion of violent-minded foot soldiers steeped in the belief that they are above the law, with all the danger to public safety that flows from that.
Every other terrible thing that Trump intends to carry out once in office should be viewed through the context of his clearly stated intent to illegally prosecute his political opponents and free America’s enemies. For the moment such pardons and prosecutions commence, he will cede any legitimacy he might have re-gained by winning the presidential contest after trying to overturn our government four years ago. In particular, no acceptably democratic politics in the U.S. is possible while one party illegally prosecutes and jails members of the opposition party. And it would be be nearly as subversive of our politics to prosecute non-elected officials, such as Justice Department prosecutors, for attempting to enforce the law. Such actions would be show-stopping violations of the foundations of American democracy that would put the country on a path to one-party rule and autocracy. And the fact that they would be carried out in order to reverse the public understanding and historical record of his attempted coup, and to outright criminalize those who have defended the United States against its enemies, provides an easy-to-grasp guide to Trump’s intent.
That Trump’s wish to prosecute Democrats and other perceived enemies has its avowed roots in his failed coup attempt helps us understand the depth of the crisis that will open before us if and when such prosecutions begin. At the most immediate level, Trump would be seeking to criminalize those who have defended the United States against its enemies. More broadly, as the prosecutions inevitably grew to encompass those not directly involved in January 6 prosecutions and investigations, it would quickly become clear that for Trump, “illegality” has always translated to simply “opposing Donald Trump,” who by his insane personal reckoning should be able to do whatever he wants to maintain power.
Pardoning the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and going after those who prosecuted and investigated them are themselves insurrectionary acts. As Liz Cheney said in response to the recent interview, “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.” Donald Trump is attempting to pretend that his recent victory somehow erases his criminality in attempting to overthrow the last election — but in choosing to go after those who tried to hold him to account, he himself is reminding us of his own discrediting criminality (in a way, you could say that his obsession with making clear his own guilt is the one paradoxically honest thing about the man). Likewise, his commitment to pardoning insurrectionists would in a better world be an impeachable offense, an act so deranged that any senator committed to the Constitution would have no choice but to convict him.
Trump’s twinned prosecution and pardon intentions don’t just throw a dark shadow of criminality and treason over Trump himself and his second presidency. By remaining silent in the face of such promises, and refusing to stand against either the coddling of terrorists or the lawless persecution of America’s public servants, Republican elected officials make themselves complicit in the prior insurrection and the predictable lawlessness to come. This is a stain that the GOP cannot be allowed to wash off; this is what the party is. The Republican Party stands for insurrection, for the celebration of criminality, for the jailing of anyone who would defend the country against its enemies.
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Clearly, many Democratic Party elected officials and leaders feel like they are on defense following Trump’s victory. Some have gone even farther, and echoed Trump’s lies that he won a massive and historical win, a bizarre self-flagellation that betrays the millions of votes of those who want a future of freedom, equality, and security, not the chaos of Trumpism. Alongside this, there’s a tendency by some opponents of Trump to treat too much of his behavior as a fait accompli, a juggernaut that there’s no hope or — even worse — no point in trying to resist. But Trump’s plans to pardon insurrectionists and prosecute political enemies should shock Democrats out of such defeatism. Allowing Trump to do so unchallenged would be to concede far too much to his anti-democratic agenda, pass up vital opportunities to highlight his authoritarian aims, and fail to inflict real political damage or even defeats on his presidency.
Of the two strains of Trump’s January 6 payback schemes — the pardons and the prosecutions — the pardons are a simpler target for Democrats, in part because there is nothing Democrats can realistically do to stop them. Trump is going to exercise his pardon power as he has promised, in a sort of lawless show of force as his first act in office — but the fact that he can’t be stopped from doing this shouldn’t at all be confused with thinking he can’t be made to pay a high political price for doing so. Democrats need to get ready for his actions now; a well-calibrated strategy could do serious damage to Trump even before he issues the pardons.
Democrats could start by asking a simple question: Why is Trump’s highest priority to pardon those who sacked the Capitol and tried to hang his former vice president, and not, say, acting to lower the cost of living for Americans through the many magical solutions he has proposed? They should be guided by the basic idea that when your opponent tells you what is most important to him, and that thing involves incriminating beliefs regarding lawlessness, violence against police officers, and treason, then you should probably think of a way to communicate to the public about such flawed (and in this case, disqualifying) priorities.
More aggressively, Democrats could talk about how throwing open the jail cells of insurrectionists is a clear abuse of the pardon power, especially so when done in pursuit of Trump’s goal of convincing the American public that breaking the law and breaking democracy are legitimate pursuits in making America great again. It will be an enormous self-own on Trump’s part, and Democrats should be clear about both its inherent criminality and its ominous portent for how Trump will rule in his second term. Democrats could also argue that, in letting loose a terrorist army of America-haters, the pardons make a joke of Trump’s claims to an election “mandate.”
Democrats also need to bear in mind that the pardons of insurrectionists and the threatened prosecutions of party members are two sides of the same rotten coin; both are elements of a profound inversion of justice and patriotism. The pardons are a shocking and deeply illuminating demonstration of Trump’s lawlessness; calling these out for the abominations they are will in turn help delegitimize Trump administration prosecutions of political enemies, by calling out the common thread of corruption. It’s also worth noting that recent polling shows that opposition to Trump’s planned pardons is a majority position among Americans — and this is in the absence of anything like serious pushback from the Democrats so far.
But generally speaking, responding to threats and actions to prosecute innocent politicians and federal officials is a more complicated matter for the Democratic Party, in great part because it requires not just characterizing Trump’s actions (as with his insurrectionist pardons) but actually fighting to stop them. Before either can be done effectively, though, Democrats must first internalize the full implications of Trump’s threats. As I suggested earlier, there is no democratic future for the United States that includes the successful persecution of political opponents and the criminalization of those whose job is to defend the country against threats to its very existence. For the Democratic Party, Donald Trump’s apparent intention to attempt to jail elected officials like incoming California Senator Adam Schiff and others is impossible to reconcile with bipartisan, “find common ground” approaches to the Trump administration. You can’t compromise with someone who would break the law to put you in a jail cell; even the threat of doing so could pervert our politics if sufficient numbers of Democrats curbed their opposition to Trump out of fear of being illicitly prosecuted.
In forming strategies to counter and defeat Trumpist plans to prosecute the innocent, Democrats shouldn’t lose sight of the most basic point: that such prosecutions are themselves illegal and absurd, an abuse of power that renders their participants beyond the pale of American government. They cannot allow the idea to take hold among the public that the Justice Department can simply fabricate charges against Trump’s opponents. This is the behavior of Russian dictators and Hungarian strongmen, not normal Americans. Democrats need to approach such prosecutions with the aim of exposing the illegality and lawlessness of the Trump administration; they can leverage Trump’s apparent intention to keep public attention on January 6 to emphasize how Trump, not satisfied with trying to overthrow American democracy once, is now trying to complete the job by abusing his power and perverting the rule of law.
Democrats should also take a stance of defiance and contempt for the Trump administration’s illegal efforts, in order to communicate to the public that the party merits their trust in standing up to Trump. The worst thing for Democrats would be to cower before mere threats from the incoming president, as this would encourage fear and despair in those looking to the Democrats for leadership at this time of crisis. Ideally, Democrats would work to encourage the public’s anger and revulsion at tactics drawn straight out of banana republics and eastern European autocracies. And a smart politics would make clear to members of the public that Trump’s threats could very conceivably be directed at ordinary Americans (and indeed, Trump’s definition of his “enemies” essentially encompasses everyone who voted against him).
At a practical level, Donald Trump won his margin of victory over Kamala Harris by persuading a crucial number of Americans that he understands their concerns about the economy and the direction of the country, and would be responsive to those concerns. I would bet that a substantial number of those voters would be alarmed to learn that one of Trump’s highest priorities is not bringing down the cost of living, or making sure they have well-paying jobs, but in meting out “justice” to people who worked to investigate and convict terrorists who beat cops, trashed the Capitol, and came within a hair’s breadth of killing elected officials. They should be even more alarmed to learn that his very highest priority is pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists, which he recently said he will do within hours or even “minutes” of re-assuming the presidency.
A more self-restrained person than Trump might have acted with cunning and restraint regarding his prior crimes. He could have taken the win, having (incredibly) returned to the presidency after evading accountability for the worst political crime in U.S. history since the South seceded from the U.S. a century and a half ago. Instead, not satisfied with beating the rap, Trump is attempting to completely overturn the rule of law, to turn insurrection into righteousness and defense of the United States into treason. There can be no overstating the harm to the country that would flow from such a reversal of right and wrong, no overestimating the degree to which the bottom would give out in terms of presidential abuses of power and the ability of extremists to lord it over the rest of us.