Dahlia Lithwick: The Price of No Consequences for Trump

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/no-consequences-for-trump-garland-biden.html

The Price of No Consequences for Trump
Joe Biden and Merrick Garland are acting like Donald Trump was a crazy dream. But the threat to American democracy will only get worse the longer we ignore it.
By Dahlia Lithwick
June 14, 20215:40 AM


Things are supposed to feel better now—better than they felt during the Trump administration, at least. The Biden administration and the Justice Department appear hellbent on restoring the (appearance of) normalcy, boring us to death, and getting past the days of a citizenry held captive to madcap tweets. That’s why the administration is focusing on infrastructure, COVID relief, economic recovery, and the workaday acts of governance.

Except that alongside these acts of sleepy normalcy we see constant reminders of where we have been and where we are still heading. In the past few days we have learned—among other object horrors—that Donald Trump’s Justice Department seized metadata records for members of the House Intelligence Committee and their families, whom it suspected of leaking. We learned that Trump supporters have been leveling crippling death threats against state election workers. We learned that White House counsel Don McGahn had been instructed to fire Robert Mueller. We learned that in 2019, Rudy Giuliani, acting in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer, pressed Ukraine to announce baseless investigations about alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. And yet as Richard Painter and Claire O. Finkelstein showed last week, the Justice Department has worked to stymie investigations and litigation that would unearth at least some of these truths, in a quest to protect institutional prerogatives and values.

Perhaps this would all be understandable if we had actually turned a page. But this great unearthing taking place in the press right now has also revealed that Donald Trump and some of his (never disbarred) lawyers are presently insisting that he will be “reinstated” as president in August, that several Republican senators who lost in November will be swept back into office with him, that Trump is insisting that “audits” in Arizona and other states are going to trigger a nonexistent mechanism for his return to office. Oh and that huge numbers of Republicans believe him.

In other words, nothing that is meant to be over is actually over. Because nothing was ever really litigated in the first instance. Despite the best efforts of Robert Mueller, two impeachment trials, myriad court cases, House oversight, and a decisive election, we can all see that the worst excesses of the Trump years were pleaded, argued, sometimes proved, and then dismissed. The difference between papering over and closing a case could not be more apparent than it is now. There has been no real reckoning with the broken laws and shattered norms of the Trump presidency, nor with the ostensibly conclusive results of the 2020 election, and certainly not with the violent insurrection of Jan. 6. As Will Saletan observed last week, none of these theoretically discrete phenomena are dead or buried; they are instead not merely informing many people’s present but also rapidly distorting the future:

snip//

I don’t have any prescription for how to reason with a radicalized GOP, a post-truth electorate, or a conspiracy-addled former president, nor do I harbor any illusions that tackling the problems of minority rule, racial violence, and weaponized law enforcement head on will allay the problems of creeping illiberalism. But gritting your way through it by pretending it’s not happened or happening will continue to open a bigger and bigger chasm between what we know to be true and what we want to believe. With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, and being told to get over it is just as jarring when it comes from inside the guardrails of democracy as it was when it came from the smirking authoritarians that has replaced. That’s why it doesn’t feel any better. If anything, gaslighting about ongoing threats to democracy might be even scarier when it comes from the very people who were supposed to protect us.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. TFG needs to be prosecuted and held responsible for his crimes

[BSdetect]

2. trump must be dealt with and all his enablers too

[albacore]

3. At the very least.... the Insurrection needs to be dealt with. nt

[kentuck]

4. I agree with the author...

..the longer there are no consequences, the worse it will get.

[Solly Mack]

5. I still see the plastic ice bag covered body of Manadel al-Jamadi in nightmares.

I still wake up now and feel a momentary churn in my stomach, wondering what harm Trump has caused while I was sleeping. Even now, with so many people who bow down before their Dear Leader. Did one of his followers go on a rampage? What have the Trump states done to erode democracy while I was sleeping?

Except my nightmare happened in real life and my brief disorientation upon awakening was (and is) a real concern.

Nothing was done to abate my nightmares. No justice. No accountability. The only type of reassurance that matters. Saying torture is wrong and criminal isn't the same as proving torture is wrong and criminal (through arrests and prosecutions).

Saying Trump is a danger to democracy because of his actions isn't the same as holding him accountable for being a danger because of his actions.

Same with the rest of his followers.

To say there is no way forward for actual accountability just goes to show how bad it really is in America. To say there is no need for accountability is a denial of the below fact.

For Trump and his followers, to include members of Congress, at both the federal and state levels, the uprising continues.

They are still at war with America. They are still fighting to overturn our democracy.

[msfiddlestix]

6. Incredibly and Precisely Spot On The Mark.

This piece nails it like none other I have read thus far, not that I managed to read every brilliant piece on the subject.

As of the past few weeks, I have unsubscribed and uninstalled Sling from my Roku tv and other devices. I do not watch or listen to clips of my favorite MSNBC afternoon and evening hosts, because I cannot bare to listen to repeated reports of the most insane, outrageous on goings of the dismantling of the foundations of our democracy, column by column, brick by brick.

All done in plain sight and reported on daily, and no apparent opposition by any of our institutions. Probably because they really don't exist in the way we had always believed. Or perhaps I should say, we had always expected them to exist, despite the frequent failures over the decades.

In any event, this article article articulates precisely the crux of the situation we are struggling to understand and "deal with" intellectually and emotionally. That is to say, most of us are experiencing.

Some here are in denial, working hard to give cover, and/or attempting to paint a picture of normalcy and accomplishment as evidence all is just dandy. They do so in very condescending and patronizing terms and in tone.

This summary is excerpted for emphasis:

But gritting your way through it by pretending it’s not happened or happening will continue to open a bigger and bigger chasm between what we know to be true and what we want to believe. With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, and being told to get over it is just as jarring when it comes from inside the guardrails of democracy as it was when it came from the smirking authoritarians that has replaced. That’s why it doesn’t feel any better. If anything, gaslighting about ongoing threats to democracy might be even scarier when it comes from the very people who were supposed to protect us.

[msfiddlestix]

7. One additional point which bears repeating:

excerpted:

With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, and being told to get over it is just as jarring when it comes from inside the guardrails of democracy as it was when it came from the smirking authoritarians that has replaced.

again to emphasize this quote:

With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along

[msfiddlestix]

8. Thank you for posting this brilliant piece babylonsister!