Four years is a long time. Eight years is even longer. As we sit on the edge of a Biden/Harris presidency we have to pay attention to the loud voices on the Left who want to turn their anger over the 2016 Election into something more tangible.
We need to believe these people when they talk about tribunals.
Sasha Abramsky over at The Nation has a piece that highlights the mindset. “Removing Trump Is Not Enough. He Must Be Prosecuted,” the headline screams.
Abramsky spends two-thirds of the piece accusing the president of being a racist (deporting illegals and the border wall), and of threatening ‘dutiful civil servants (in other words making it easier to fire #Resistance swamp people), and for spreading conspiracy theories about the election. Okay, the president is kinda hanging-on to a shrinking argument.
But she gets to the point in the last three graphs.
Given how the post-election period has developed, it’s not enough to remove this man from power. His authoritarian presence on the political stage, the cancer that he represents on the American body politic, must be obliterated, leaving absolutely no possibility of a second act. For he has in this past month declared total war on American democracy. And in this struggle, there can be no middle ground.
There is a lot of talk of “healing” and “moving on,” of ignoring Trump’s myriad crimes in order to somehow nurture the greater good. But healing involves, at the very least, acknowledgment of culpability on the part of the guilty—that was, after all, the foundational principle of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Trump is not only not admitting any culpability, but his rampage against the legal, political, and cultural pillars of American democracy is actually intensifying as his term in office draws to a close.
Without even a nod to truth, there certainly can be no reconciliation. Trump’s disgraceful, dangerous behavior, from his self-dealing while in government to his last-ditch efforts to subvert the popular will, is cratering trust in American democracy. For this, he must be made to face a legal reckoning.
A legal reckoning for what? Where is the crime? The President of the United States has the power to determine immigration policies, just as he has the power to manage one-third of the federal government. That is literally his job. As for sour grapes about a close election, if that is illegal then Hillary Clinton should be serving a life sentence.
Conrad Black has a piece over at The Hill that explains Abramsky’s thought-process.
This is the principal problem of all the Trump-haters: They are so possessed by their loathing that they lose all judgment and imagine that his many tawdry acts and utterances are crimes — because they want them to be crimes.
U.S. public life is afflicted, as many (myself included) predicted during the Watergate affair of 1972-1974, by the criminalization of policy differences. Now, the rabidly partisan national political media have embraced the criminalization of poor taste as well. The New York Times declared after Trump’s 2016 election that objectivity was no longer desirable; the national interest required Trump’s destruction by any means short of actual assassination (though that might not have left some of his enemies inconsolable).
Having a different political viewpoint is not a crime. At least not yet.
Abramsky talks about the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She wants President Trump, his administration, and presumably 70 million Americans to atone for the crime of voting wrong.
The Left has no problem with ‘re-education’ or ‘de-Trumpification.’ as if those things in Cambodia, or China, or Soviet Russia didn’t end with a bullet to the back of the head.
The hatred for Donald Trump has so consumed the Left for four years. It is threatening to consume them for the next four, or eight. But this time the victims will not be snowflakes who cannot deal with a Hillary loss. The victims will be you, and I, and everyone else the Left has determined is wrong. And the consequences could be real.
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