My big historical take here is that America has many echoes of basically Confederates and their spiritual (and often actual) successors never facing accountability for their crimes against the Union, because of the simple fact that they are willing to wage a full spectrum insurgency — political, legal, cultural, paramilitary, and beyond — against any attempt to do so.
They do not want to be a part of the Union, they want to control it, lest it liberalize them (in the classical sense).
The failure of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow. The Business Plot and their disproportionate hatred of FDR. Nixon. Now Trump.
America has never done the kind of accountability you ask for, Brian, because the Confederates have always been willing to wait out the rest of us and turn accountability into a quagmire.
I believe that this historical view doesn’t make your ask any less morally correct; I just suspect that the solutions may be different from the direct paths we imagine, requiring a different mindset and a different understanding of the challenge ahead. That is to say, if we prepare for a jury trial and instead get an uprising on our hands, we will lose and be confused why we lost despite having aimed to do the correct thing (put them on trial). Worse, we will not be prepared to deal with the actual uprising!
This is kind of what happened on J6, and probably what would’ve happened at state capitols again if Kamala had won and Trump tried to mobilize against swing states’ electoral vote sessions.
Brian, we keep getting caught off guard because we don’t recognize that we are fighting the Confederacy.
And the Confederacy is basically America’s Afghanistan: a region that is unconquerable.
Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out that failure to prosecute the leaders of the confederacy allowed their narrative to persist and fester for generations—which in part led us to this point. So, yes, sad to say Biden and Garland catastrophically missed the boat on J-6 and other MAGAt malfeasance, too worried about any appearance of partisanship to protect us against the actual partisanship bent on wrecking our government.
I hope the voters make it impossible for future leaders to default to these outdated norms, which is STILL happening in the Senate; as recently as last week Dems used an outdated, transparently cynical old play to pretend they didn’t really want to re-open the government, but were regrettably let down by a handful of foolhardy renegades. (Does ANYONE believe Dick Durbin is a foolhardy renegade?) We simply are not playing against the same opponent we had before Newt Gingrich waddled into the fray during the 1980’s. Now, both voters and political leaders have to operate like we are up against criminals and liars—because we are. It is a whole different game and the survival of our Republic depends on our commitment to doing whatever it takes to win on a very tilted playing field.
And on that topic, something I’ve thought about since the Dems caved on re-opening the government: how different would it have looked if the Senate Dems had ALL voted to re-open the government, with the message that they were ‘shocked, SHOCKED’ to find that their R colleagues were willing to let millions of Americans go hungry so they could keep tax breaks for billionaires instead of helping Americans keep their health insurance. “The Democrats in this body condemn our R colleagues for their heartless, cowardly refusal to help their own constituents. We will continue fighting for healthcare access, but not by starving our fellow citizens.” (Picture Mitch McConnell standing at a press conference, looking wounded and saddened at discovering Democrats ‘playing politics, AGAIN!’) Would Democrats have looked strong instead of weak? Yes. And they did the same old shit, instead. Feckless fools.
Or, alternatively, Democrats could have let Team Cave vote as they did, on their own, waited until Johnson swore Grijalva into office, and then announced that they'd hoodwinked the Republicans: gotten services back for Americans while leaving the GOP trapped into voting for healthcare anyway, out loud, but just a little later. And oh, by the way, here's the vote to release the Epstein files while we're at it.
But sadly they followed neither your idea nor that one. Knife/gun fight
This entire essay, exceptional. this is the(ir) motivating factor:
"We know from the experience of 2020 that Trump and the people around him would sooner end the United States than accept consequences. They can not be allowed to catch the country sleeping again."
I think the person who wins the 2028 Democratic primary will be the one who puts forth a plan to bring us this kind of accountability.
Rehiring people who were fired from the Justice department, firing anyone who took a loyalty oath to trump, doing everything possible to remove Emil Bove from the bench, prosecuting anyone who doesn't have presidential immunity, working with blue states to prosecute people for State crimes so they can't be pardoned by a future president, investigating the crypto scam, turning the Qatar jet into a coral reef, etc.
These things may not matter to the general election electorate; they will be swayed by whatever narrative is prominent at the time. But these are an important filter mechanism for our nominee. Democratic primary voters want to see some folks get locked up.
I hope you are right about what it will take to win the primary. You know, that the consultants will be yelling at them about affordability and how voters hate partisanship. Smh!
"The oath of office is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. What greater abdication of that duty could there be than turning a blind eye after watching the U.S. democracy narrowly dodge a fatal blow?"
Well, if you really want to know, the greater abdication of duty was fomenting January 6th.
Josh Marshall's idea of forming a "DOJ In Exile" that (very) publicly keeps a list of potentially illegal acts that will be investigated when Democrats return to the White House is akin to this Off Message post. And I, for one, think it's a great idea. Marshall's written that he's not the person to make this happen, for a variety of very fair reasons, but the idea's valuable in the same vein as Beutler's post.
The evil wizard Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series was so feared that he was often referred to as “he who must not be named”. Can someone please explain to me why the Trump v United States (TVUS) SCOTUS decision has become the “case that must not be discussed?” I see article after article referring to Trump’s corruption and lawlessness with no mention whatsoever that SCOTUS granted presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts as president.
When the TVUS decision came down on July 1, 2024 I thought it was a huge political gift to Democrats. Biden said it was a terrible decision and that he wouldn’t break the law. Then nothing. The press covered it for a few days, then nothing. Harris said “I know your type” referring to Trump, then nothing. For a while there was a slogan floating around positioning the choice for president as “the prosecutor versus the perpetrator” but there never seemed to be any connection made to the TVUS decision and the dangers it created. The risk that we elect a lawless presidential candidate to the newly established lawless presidency was never made an animating theme of the election. This choice may have cost Harris the election.
The GOP made the Roe v Wade decision an animating and winning linchpin of their movement for decades. Why can’t the Dems do the same with Trump v United States. Trump’s lawlessness has been accelerated and amplified by the decision. A focus on TVUS offers a way to flip the “soft on crime” narrative back onto Republicans. A focus on TVUS is a good way to set up discussion of SCOTUS reform. The No Kings rallies show that it is a decision that animates the base. Can anyone help me understand why the decision has been swept under the rug?
I have very little faith that enough elected dems will be willing to do the loud, hard work of holding people in and out of this administration accountable, it just doesn’t seem to be in their nature.
I guess it’s possible that a dem somehow wins the presidency and unilaterally directs inquiries into all of the wrongdoing but to the detriment of a majority of the population and the country, the desire to ‘move forward’ is strong among elected dems.
I also have very little faith that repubs won’t bend the knee again and fully coalesce around trump/MAGA in the next month or two as that is their nature.
The earliest the Dems could retake the executive branch would be in 2028, by which point everyone capable of prosecuting Trump will have been purged and all that's left will be loyalist stooges. it will take decades to rebuild anything approaching a functional DOJ.
Yet the point of the article holds.
There will need to be accountability, and we should start thinking about how to prosecute that with the legal system in shambles.
After Trump left office the first time a lot of Americans just wanted to settle back into the comfortable rhythm of normality. Biden obliged them. It was believed we’d faced the danger and licked it. And now we’re facing a menace many times worse than Trump I. I read this post and the thought crosses my mind that we’re now faced with a choice between autocracy or civil war. Until a large and loud majority of Americans finally see and feel where this is headed, until the pendulum so obviously swings away from Trump II, we’re in a mortal limbo. Accountability will only come when the number of people who wish for it is vast enough to overcome this terrible inertia.
The way to not be caught sleeping is to be wide awake now. Which means that current office holders should go about the business of defending the country as best they can from inside the system. But there also needs to be some cohesive group that is outside the system (what’s the model for this? Hm, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 comes to mind) that is making the plan and gaming out the strategy. This would, of course, be separate from whatever other group was setting the legislative/ideological future agenda. The group I’m talking about is one that would be focused on sketching out a vision not only for what retribution looks like but also, how meting out real consequences to our current bad actors eventually serves the purpose of repairing the republic and making it stronger in the places we have found it to be weak. But, again, this is not the job of those currently holding office. They have other holes they have to plug in the dam.
Had Hillary won in 2016 we would have bypassed the authoritarian threats we now see and be in a far better place because she would have swung the majority on the Supreme Court. The Voting Rights Act would be preserved and political contributions might be limited, among other freedom-preserving differences that would exist.
Democrats need to find some candidate that even the Republicans can tolerate. This is how it is usually done in countries that democratize after periods of dictatorship - the new government must assure previous rulers that their freedoms, families and wealth will not be harmed. Only then they can be persuaded to let go of power. Even Merrick Garland, soft as he is, was a obstacle to this process. America don't have the luxury to repeat this mistake.
"It’s three years until the election, but two years from now, if not sooner, a much larger and wealthier entourage of criminals will devote their efforts to election theft on the theory that:
if they lose the election, they’ll face legal risk;"
Arguably, Elon Musk already signaled this was a factor in 2024 - may have just been rhetoric, but he did say in Oct 2024 that he was all in on Trump because he thought he'd be in prison under a Harris administration.
The crimes, violations of norms and blatant, knowing hypocrisy of Trump, nearly all Republican Senators and Representatives and the GOP "elite" are so disgusting to me that I cannot focus too much on them for fear of blowing a brain gasket. This isn't the idyllic "America" of my youth. Of course, I was white, raised in the Midwest and "privileged" (yeah, I hate that word, too, even though I know it to be true [because I'm not a supporter of "I'm a victim"]), but I guess I believe people when they said, "character matters."
My big historical take here is that America has many echoes of basically Confederates and their spiritual (and often actual) successors never facing accountability for their crimes against the Union, because of the simple fact that they are willing to wage a full spectrum insurgency — political, legal, cultural, paramilitary, and beyond — against any attempt to do so.
They do not want to be a part of the Union, they want to control it, lest it liberalize them (in the classical sense).
The failure of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow. The Business Plot and their disproportionate hatred of FDR. Nixon. Now Trump.
America has never done the kind of accountability you ask for, Brian, because the Confederates have always been willing to wait out the rest of us and turn accountability into a quagmire.
I believe that this historical view doesn’t make your ask any less morally correct; I just suspect that the solutions may be different from the direct paths we imagine, requiring a different mindset and a different understanding of the challenge ahead. That is to say, if we prepare for a jury trial and instead get an uprising on our hands, we will lose and be confused why we lost despite having aimed to do the correct thing (put them on trial). Worse, we will not be prepared to deal with the actual uprising!
This is kind of what happened on J6, and probably what would’ve happened at state capitols again if Kamala had won and Trump tried to mobilize against swing states’ electoral vote sessions.
Brian, we keep getting caught off guard because we don’t recognize that we are fighting the Confederacy.
And the Confederacy is basically America’s Afghanistan: a region that is unconquerable.
Lincoln said it best: they want “rule or ruin.”
Why do all these guys in the photo
seem to have “resting Nuremberg face”?
Miller looks like he is trying to squeeze out a loaf!
Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out that failure to prosecute the leaders of the confederacy allowed their narrative to persist and fester for generations—which in part led us to this point. So, yes, sad to say Biden and Garland catastrophically missed the boat on J-6 and other MAGAt malfeasance, too worried about any appearance of partisanship to protect us against the actual partisanship bent on wrecking our government.
I hope the voters make it impossible for future leaders to default to these outdated norms, which is STILL happening in the Senate; as recently as last week Dems used an outdated, transparently cynical old play to pretend they didn’t really want to re-open the government, but were regrettably let down by a handful of foolhardy renegades. (Does ANYONE believe Dick Durbin is a foolhardy renegade?) We simply are not playing against the same opponent we had before Newt Gingrich waddled into the fray during the 1980’s. Now, both voters and political leaders have to operate like we are up against criminals and liars—because we are. It is a whole different game and the survival of our Republic depends on our commitment to doing whatever it takes to win on a very tilted playing field.
And on that topic, something I’ve thought about since the Dems caved on re-opening the government: how different would it have looked if the Senate Dems had ALL voted to re-open the government, with the message that they were ‘shocked, SHOCKED’ to find that their R colleagues were willing to let millions of Americans go hungry so they could keep tax breaks for billionaires instead of helping Americans keep their health insurance. “The Democrats in this body condemn our R colleagues for their heartless, cowardly refusal to help their own constituents. We will continue fighting for healthcare access, but not by starving our fellow citizens.” (Picture Mitch McConnell standing at a press conference, looking wounded and saddened at discovering Democrats ‘playing politics, AGAIN!’) Would Democrats have looked strong instead of weak? Yes. And they did the same old shit, instead. Feckless fools.
Or, alternatively, Democrats could have let Team Cave vote as they did, on their own, waited until Johnson swore Grijalva into office, and then announced that they'd hoodwinked the Republicans: gotten services back for Americans while leaving the GOP trapped into voting for healthcare anyway, out loud, but just a little later. And oh, by the way, here's the vote to release the Epstein files while we're at it.
But sadly they followed neither your idea nor that one. Knife/gun fight
This entire essay, exceptional. this is the(ir) motivating factor:
"We know from the experience of 2020 that Trump and the people around him would sooner end the United States than accept consequences. They can not be allowed to catch the country sleeping again."
I think the person who wins the 2028 Democratic primary will be the one who puts forth a plan to bring us this kind of accountability.
Rehiring people who were fired from the Justice department, firing anyone who took a loyalty oath to trump, doing everything possible to remove Emil Bove from the bench, prosecuting anyone who doesn't have presidential immunity, working with blue states to prosecute people for State crimes so they can't be pardoned by a future president, investigating the crypto scam, turning the Qatar jet into a coral reef, etc.
These things may not matter to the general election electorate; they will be swayed by whatever narrative is prominent at the time. But these are an important filter mechanism for our nominee. Democratic primary voters want to see some folks get locked up.
I hope you are right about what it will take to win the primary. You know, that the consultants will be yelling at them about affordability and how voters hate partisanship. Smh!
"The oath of office is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. What greater abdication of that duty could there be than turning a blind eye after watching the U.S. democracy narrowly dodge a fatal blow?"
Well, if you really want to know, the greater abdication of duty was fomenting January 6th.
Josh Marshall's idea of forming a "DOJ In Exile" that (very) publicly keeps a list of potentially illegal acts that will be investigated when Democrats return to the White House is akin to this Off Message post. And I, for one, think it's a great idea. Marshall's written that he's not the person to make this happen, for a variety of very fair reasons, but the idea's valuable in the same vein as Beutler's post.
The evil wizard Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series was so feared that he was often referred to as “he who must not be named”. Can someone please explain to me why the Trump v United States (TVUS) SCOTUS decision has become the “case that must not be discussed?” I see article after article referring to Trump’s corruption and lawlessness with no mention whatsoever that SCOTUS granted presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts as president.
When the TVUS decision came down on July 1, 2024 I thought it was a huge political gift to Democrats. Biden said it was a terrible decision and that he wouldn’t break the law. Then nothing. The press covered it for a few days, then nothing. Harris said “I know your type” referring to Trump, then nothing. For a while there was a slogan floating around positioning the choice for president as “the prosecutor versus the perpetrator” but there never seemed to be any connection made to the TVUS decision and the dangers it created. The risk that we elect a lawless presidential candidate to the newly established lawless presidency was never made an animating theme of the election. This choice may have cost Harris the election.
The GOP made the Roe v Wade decision an animating and winning linchpin of their movement for decades. Why can’t the Dems do the same with Trump v United States. Trump’s lawlessness has been accelerated and amplified by the decision. A focus on TVUS offers a way to flip the “soft on crime” narrative back onto Republicans. A focus on TVUS is a good way to set up discussion of SCOTUS reform. The No Kings rallies show that it is a decision that animates the base. Can anyone help me understand why the decision has been swept under the rug?
I have very little faith that enough elected dems will be willing to do the loud, hard work of holding people in and out of this administration accountable, it just doesn’t seem to be in their nature.
I guess it’s possible that a dem somehow wins the presidency and unilaterally directs inquiries into all of the wrongdoing but to the detriment of a majority of the population and the country, the desire to ‘move forward’ is strong among elected dems.
I also have very little faith that repubs won’t bend the knee again and fully coalesce around trump/MAGA in the next month or two as that is their nature.
I really hope I’m wrong.
The earliest the Dems could retake the executive branch would be in 2028, by which point everyone capable of prosecuting Trump will have been purged and all that's left will be loyalist stooges. it will take decades to rebuild anything approaching a functional DOJ.
Yet the point of the article holds.
There will need to be accountability, and we should start thinking about how to prosecute that with the legal system in shambles.
After Trump left office the first time a lot of Americans just wanted to settle back into the comfortable rhythm of normality. Biden obliged them. It was believed we’d faced the danger and licked it. And now we’re facing a menace many times worse than Trump I. I read this post and the thought crosses my mind that we’re now faced with a choice between autocracy or civil war. Until a large and loud majority of Americans finally see and feel where this is headed, until the pendulum so obviously swings away from Trump II, we’re in a mortal limbo. Accountability will only come when the number of people who wish for it is vast enough to overcome this terrible inertia.
The way to not be caught sleeping is to be wide awake now. Which means that current office holders should go about the business of defending the country as best they can from inside the system. But there also needs to be some cohesive group that is outside the system (what’s the model for this? Hm, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 comes to mind) that is making the plan and gaming out the strategy. This would, of course, be separate from whatever other group was setting the legislative/ideological future agenda. The group I’m talking about is one that would be focused on sketching out a vision not only for what retribution looks like but also, how meting out real consequences to our current bad actors eventually serves the purpose of repairing the republic and making it stronger in the places we have found it to be weak. But, again, this is not the job of those currently holding office. They have other holes they have to plug in the dam.
We've seen what MAGA is willing to do to stay in power and we have seen what little the Dems. are willing to do to stop them.
It's not encouraging.
Had Hillary won in 2016 we would have bypassed the authoritarian threats we now see and be in a far better place because she would have swung the majority on the Supreme Court. The Voting Rights Act would be preserved and political contributions might be limited, among other freedom-preserving differences that would exist.
Democrats need to find some candidate that even the Republicans can tolerate. This is how it is usually done in countries that democratize after periods of dictatorship - the new government must assure previous rulers that their freedoms, families and wealth will not be harmed. Only then they can be persuaded to let go of power. Even Merrick Garland, soft as he is, was a obstacle to this process. America don't have the luxury to repeat this mistake.
"It’s three years until the election, but two years from now, if not sooner, a much larger and wealthier entourage of criminals will devote their efforts to election theft on the theory that:
if they lose the election, they’ll face legal risk;"
Arguably, Elon Musk already signaled this was a factor in 2024 - may have just been rhetoric, but he did say in Oct 2024 that he was all in on Trump because he thought he'd be in prison under a Harris administration.
The crimes, violations of norms and blatant, knowing hypocrisy of Trump, nearly all Republican Senators and Representatives and the GOP "elite" are so disgusting to me that I cannot focus too much on them for fear of blowing a brain gasket. This isn't the idyllic "America" of my youth. Of course, I was white, raised in the Midwest and "privileged" (yeah, I hate that word, too, even though I know it to be true [because I'm not a supporter of "I'm a victim"]), but I guess I believe people when they said, "character matters."