Democrats Need a Post-Trump Plan. Here’s One That Works.
The only appropriate answer is the zealous pursuit of justice at every level of this criminal enterprise of an administration. The next Democratic administration should extend the Garland approach to January 6—a focus on the criminal foot soldiers of the Trump regime—to a host of other areas, most notably immigration enforcement, foreign policy, and corruption. But it shouldn’t stop there, as the response to January 6 did. It must go further.
Justice not only for the ICE and CBP thugs who murdered Americans in the streets, but also for the senior advisors and cabinet secretaries who sent those thugs on their campaigns of stochastic terrorism. Justice for the goons who will, it seems increasingly likely, seek to rig our upcoming elections, and the higher-level apparatchiks devising those antidemocratic schemes. Justice not just for the officials who executed double-tap strikes against civilians and bombed elementary schools and committed other startlingly barbaric war crimes, but more importantly, for the leaders who criminally launched such brazenly illegal military actions and wars. And, of course, justice for everyone inside and outside of this administration engaging in the most incomprehensibly flagrant looting of America’s public resources in our history.
Admittedly, all of this is a tall order. Pursuing accountability with such breadth and depth would require a serious commitment of resources, attention, and political capital. But it’s a necessary, not an optional, step towards rebuilding our democracy, which—even in this ideal future in which Democrats have overcome Trump’s efforts to dismantle free elections to win back temporary control of the government—will be overwhelmingly fragile for a long time to come. As the Allies understood when devising their denazification programs for Germany after World War II, America simply cannot afford to allow the bandits, propagandists, and sadists who’ve been running this administration to simply slide back into positions of power and privilege from which to plot their next fascist takeover. If Garland’s ignominious tenure as attorney general achieved nothing else of value, let it at least have taught us this lesson.