There Will Be No Post-Presidential Peace For Donald Trump |
There Will Be No Post-Presidential Peace For Donald Trump
The president and his allies will face impeachments, lawsuits, and maybe even The Hague.
Donald Trump spent the first year of his second term trying to signal his strength, his impunity, and his permanence in American public life. When House Republicans gathered at the Kennedy Center in early January for a policy summit, he struck a much more vulnerable tone. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told the assembled lawmakers. “I’ll get impeached.”
The event appropriately symbolized Trump’s first year as president. It was held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a once-respected cultural institution that Trump took over and, using his handpicked board of directors, illegally renamed after himself. The wave of boycotts that followed led Trump to then announce, in February, that the center would be closed for at least two years, ostensibly for repairs and perhaps for eventual demolition.
The shuttering of the Kennedy Center may be the least of Trump’s second-term sins. In the first year since returning to power, Trump and his subordinates have pushed the country toward fascism and oligarchy. He has turned Washington into an orgy of corruption and self-dealing beyond even the most cynical observer’s imagination. He has transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol into a lawless paramilitary force that has besieged American cities and killed at least five U.S. citizens and 22 foreign nationals. He has abused Americans and their immigrant neighbors alike simply because he can.
A rundown of the Trump administration’s scandals and crimes resembles, with shocking likeness, the grave, sweeping charges laid out in the Declaration of Independence against the last American king. “He has excited domestic insurrections against us,” the Founding Fathers wrote about George III in 1776. Is there any better way of describing Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021? He supported a violent mob aiming to overthrow the government; he maintains a similar disrespect for the institutions of American democracy to this day. In early February, he threatened to “nationalize” American elections in a lawless and perhaps impossible bid to keep Democrats from retaking Congress.
The similarities do not end there. The declaration describes the king “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world” and “imposing taxes on us without our consent.” Sound familiar? Since last spring, Trump has used a Cold War–era sanctions law to unilaterally impose trillions of dollars in tariffs upon American customers and businesses. The law makes no mention of tariffs, and in February the Supreme Court accordingly struck them down.
Foremost among the Founders’ fears of threats to liberty was the potential misuse of the military. Trump, to borrow their phrasing, “has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.” In a show of propagandistic force, he has stationed thousands of National Guard troops from around the country within the District of Columbia despite the opposition of local government. The president frequently threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces into Democratic-led states and cities.
Trump, like his royal predecessor, “has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.” Trump’s immigration raids against Democratic-led cities and states—Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—appear to be at least partially punitive for their not voting for him in the presidential elections. On multiple occasions, out of apparent spite, Trump has also frozen congressionally appropriated programs and blocked infrastructure funding to blue states. He apparently intends to treat half of the country not as fellow citizens, but as conquered subjects.
“In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury,” Thomas Jefferson wrote after laying out the charges against George III. “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
There is a moral and democratic obligation to hold Trump administration officials accountable for their transgressions. The road map for what this accountability could look like is also growing clearer by the day. When Democrats return to power, they will have to think beyond presidents and prosecutions, especially since the Supreme Court has thrown up largely insurmountable barriers to criminal proceedings against the sitting administration.
Instead, a broader, all-of-society effort will be necessary to tear the roots of Trumpism out of the nation’s political system—an effort that uses every tool possible to achieve a measure of justice. This will involve not only impeachment, but also civil lawsuits, professional sanctions, restrictive acts of Congress, and the enforcement of international law against Trump administration officials by long-standing American allies. Trump’s attacks on the republic are relentless, and the republic must be just as relentless in holding him and his allies responsible.
Holding Trump and his allies to account will be harder this time than it was six years ago. After the 2020 election, the courts were the primary vehicle for accountability. Trump faced criminal prosecutions on three fronts over the next four years. First came the charges from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which alleged various financial offenses related to the Trump Organization. Then came indictments from special counsel Jack Smith for Trump’s continued possession of a trove of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.
But the most serious cases involved his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election results. In Georgia, state prosecutors charged Trump and 18 other defendants with a range of crimes for their campaign to subvert Georgia’s election results by creating slates of fake presidential electors and illegally accessing state voting systems. Trump himself pressured Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” more than 11,700 votes and give him the lead over Joe Biden. Federal prosecutors, again led by Smith, also brought charges in the District of Columbia for trying to obstruct the certification of the election results on January 6.
This time around, the legal landscape is much less favorable. During Trump’s first term, Justice Department guidelines forbade prosecutions of sitting presidents, delaying any potential proceedings until after his term ended. This time, prosecutors will also have to contend with Trump v. United States. The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on “presidential immunity” in 2024 fundamentally changed the executive branch and how it operates within the American constitutional order.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion laid out the scope of presidential immunity as follows: A president has “absolute immunity” from prosecution for any acts that fall within his core constitutional powers. On everything else, he receives “presumptive immunity” for any of his “official acts.” Only if something is an unofficial act does immunity not apply.
This formula is found nowhere in the Constitution, which explicitly grants a limited form of immunity to lawmakers while speaking on the floor and while traveling to or from Congress. Nor is presidential immunity rooted in the history and tradition of American constitutional thought, as is judicial immunity for judges. The court’s conservative justices essentially made it up because Trump asked them to do so.
In the ruling, Roberts argued that immunity was necessary to ensure that the executive branch could properly function. “A president inclined to take one course of action based on the public interest may instead opt for another, apprehensive that criminal penalties may befall him upon his departure from office,” Roberts wrote for the court. “And if a former president’s official acts are routinely subjected to scrutiny in criminal prosecutions, the independence of the Executive Branch may be significantly undermined.”
To the court’s liberals, however, the dangers were obvious. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that it would now be impossible to prosecute a former president for assassinating his political rivals or taking bribes in exchange for a pardon. “Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” she wrote. “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
In response to the liberal justices’ concerns,........