There is a large, difficult question about how the next Democratic administration should think about accountability for the endless executive branch abuses and rampant illegality that have permeated the Trump administration. The forms of abuse and illegality have been so broad-based that it is hard to know where to start or how to proceed. There is also a large and difficult question about how the next Democratic administration will use all of the many tools of the weaponizing unitary executive that it will inherit from Trump against its Trumpian enemies, and what new tools it might wield.
And then there is the fact that what looks like accountability in one bubble looks like weaponization in another.
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There is a growing element in the Democratic Party that wants to go much harder next time. Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, for example, said in February that Democrats once in power would punish the companies and institutions that have collaborated with Trump. “If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules…they’ve got another thing coming,” she said. “This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget. It’s not going to end well for them.” She added: “Democrats have had a belly full, and we’re not going to play by the old set of rules… but we’re not going to be suckers.” Rice and those who share her view surely would apply this logic to “collaborators” inside the administration. […]
I understand but do not share Rice’s view. I believe accountability for Trump 2.0 should focus first and primarily on transparency, i.e., figuring out what happened, not just in Trump’s abuses of government, but also in his and his family’s extraordinarily corrupt financial aggrandizement—and yes, that includes finding out who enabled, and benefited from, all of these things, and how.
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Despite the obvious hypocrisy in the Republican remarks, many on the Trump side really believe that the Democrats are just as bad, if not much worse, because they sought to decapitate Trump in his first term and to keep him off the ballot or weaken him considerably through lawfare in 2024.
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I don’t have prescriptions. There were very good reasons for the long-standing norm of not prosecuting high-level political rivals or using overt legal tools to damage and try to block a presidential candidate in an election year. Democrats broke that norm, which they believed was justified by Trump’s horrific actions. And they further believed that the norm brought its own costs in allowing a law-indifferent and abusive president to not be held to account. The Trump side saw this all as norm-busting and in bad faith.
Trump won the election and could have stopped the cycle. But that was contrary to his vengeful nature and, in any event, would have been seen by his side as unilateral disarmament. And so he engaged in astonishingly harsh and broad retaliation for what the Biden administration did, in order to deter rivals on many dimensions. The Democrats are now contemplating whether and how to respond when they gain power. The incentive for brutal retaliation will be overwhelming, especially since it will be argued, just as Vance argued, that the other side has already done it, will do it again if possible, and thus must be maximally deterred.
And so on.
It’s a bleak future.