Of Course Trump Will Face No Consequences
Liberal commentators are already setting us up to expect nothing.
With a Trump defeat looking more and more likely in the November general election, calls for consequences for the president’s actions while in office are increasing in volume—and so too are attempts to quell any hopes for future accountability.
Welcome to The Flashpoint.
Liberal commentators are already throwing cold water on the idea that Trump should face any consequences for his crimes.
The Washington Post on Sunday featured an essay from Harvard professor Jill Lepore in which the historian argued that holding the president accountable stemmed from a ugly sense of vengeance rather than actual desires that Trump face repercussions for his behavior in the White House.
Suggesting that Trump be held accountable, wrote Lepore, means “the appetite for vengeance is a symptom of the same poison” as the cruelty of the administration. That’s right—calls for truth and reconciliation commissions, not even prosecutions, is the same as separating families and dropping bombs on villages from Afghanistan to Somalia.
The essay was celebrated by The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who tweeted that “Lepore argues quite eloquently that [holding Trump accountable] would be a bad idea.”
This is, of course, nothing new. As I wrote at Insider on Thursday, the signaling from liberal pundits and politicians in the wake of the president’s Covid diagnosis shows the impulse will be to rehabilitate Trump once he’s out of office, not hold him responsible for his actions:
Any sense of accountability or accurate remembering is detrimental to internal US mythology that holds the office of the presidency and lawmaking in general up as the pinnacle of public service. Accurate historical memory is incompatible with the American system — and we got a preview during the president's stay at Walter Reed of just how Trump's record will likely be sanitized.
Bush revisionism
If one wants an even more direct comparison of how this image rehabilitation manifests itself, look no further than the revisionism of the history of George W. Bush. Though Bush left office in disgrace, broadly reviled by the left and liberals, today he’s celebrated as a decent, kindly old man that Democrats just had civil policy disagreements with.
See the piece I wrote for The New Republic last month:
The impulse to rehabilitate former ideological enemies like Bush is nothing particularly new for Democrats. The party has been angling for two decades to claim the anti-terror tough-guy identity from the GOP ever since the 9/11 attacks and the Bush doctrine’s subsequent aggressive reaction was used to kick electoral sand in Democrats’ faces by repeatedly using national security as a campaign issue.
There’s no reason to expect they’ll do anything different with Trump.
The consequences of no consequences
A lack of accountability and repercussions for the crimes of former leaders can have disastrous ripple effects.
In the case of Bush, we saw what liberal rehabilitation and no consequences did both to the former president and those who aided and abetted his worse crimes with the Brett Kavanaugh nomination.
I reported on this consequence at the time for The Intercept:
Both Kavanaugh’s time with the Bush administration and his involvement with the administration’s controversial policies have been a constant undercurrent to the Senate hearings on his nomination, but he largely escaped serious scrutiny on that record — even though Kavanaugh continued to advocate for the worst of the security state from the bench. Senate Democrats expressed their skepticism over Kavanaugh’s dissembling about the policies; Kavanaugh told members of the Judiciary Committee in September that he was “not read into that program, not involved in crafting that program nor crafting the legal justifications for that program.” In a written response to a question posed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein on his involvement in the program, Kavanaugh dispensed with the vague answers and made his position clear. “I became aware of the program and the memos when they were publicly disclosed in news reports in 2004,” wrote Kavanaugh.
Bush would take advantage of the opportunity provided by his political whitewashing by pressuring wavering senators—specifically Maine Senator Susan Collins—to vote in favor of Kavanaugh, who was confirmed in a narrow party line vote even after allegations of sexual assault and remaining questions about his involvement in the administration’s most egregious human rights violations.
Heading for disappointment
What I find most interesting this time around, however, is that while Trump triggers the same rage and hate among liberals that Bush did in the 2000s, there’s not a similarly hopeful and beloved president coming in Biden to defuse the anger.
While President Barack Obama was able to use some of his political capital before inauguration day to quash any chance of Bush facing accountability—”We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards”—it’s an open question whether Biden can do the same after the last four years.
On the other hand, some liberals have convinced themselves that the culmination of the last four years of Cold War-inspired paranoid conspiracy theories about Russia—helped along by cynical news pundits like MSNBC’s entire stable of primetime talent—is that Trump is going to run to Moscow to avoid being thrown in prison.
No matter what happens, that fantasy is just not coming true.
What’s becoming clear now is that the door is already shut on even the pretense of consequence.