The failure of the right, left, Congress and justice system to hold Donald Trump accountable is creating mass psychosis in the United States. No, Trump is not the only bad actor, and from a systems perspective, maybe he’s not even as “bad” as his financiers. And as many have said, he is indeed as much a symptom of a broken system as the primary cause of its failures.
However, what he does is own are the outcomes of his actions that we fail to hold him accountable for. These include the: coarsening of public discourse; loss of American prestige and soft power; enmity between Americans as citizens, co-workers, family, and friends; increased suicide rate; increased drug use; reduced life expectancy; unnecessary death and illness (Covid-19); individual and sociological depression; and loss of productivity and national wealth stemming from the other items noted.
At a minimum, there are more than one million fewer people in the U.S due directly to Trump’s dereliction of duty as President alone – and the number is likely three times that from indirect effects. Estimates are the Covid-19 itself cost the world more than $8 trillion and, while Trump isn’t responsible for all of that, prompt and minimal response on his part to the challenge would have cut those losses by at least 50%. We don’t get those people and that money back – both losses are tragedies for their families and communities, they permanently dampen growth – and they impacted the neediest the worst.
Trump has not been held to account for raping and abusing dozens of women, he’s cheated tens of thousands of customers, vendors, and clients, he trampled over the Constitution’s Emoluments clause, he enriched himself through corrupt means while President, he very likely committed multiple acts of treason with Putin and the Saudi government.
Trump has always and is currently exploiting his own supporters ($40M and counting in 2023 alone) to pay his legal bills. Most of these donors are low-income people whose contributions come at the expense of family and community health and wealth building. While not technically illegal under current law, this tactic is an abomination, a perversion, and fundamentally corrupt. That we on the left permit this situation to persist means that we bear a great deal of responsibility for this multi-faceted impoverishment of American society.
He's been charged with 31 violations of the Espionage Act and he’s not in pre-trial confinement -- and he’s directly threatening the prosecutors! Anyone else would be in jail pending trial, and there would have been a gag order imposed. And this almost didn’t get prosecuted -- and indeed wouldn’t have if Trump hadn’t obstructed the investigation.
Then there’s Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government, in which he failed to honor his oath of office and broke multiple laws. He was just today charged with four counts in what people are describing as the worst attack on American Democracy since the Civil War, if not in the entire history of the nation. At least eight people were killed and over 130 wounded at his instigation. And Garland was even going to give him a pass for this but for the House investigation!
Jack Smith got done in 8 months what Garland didn’t even start for 23 – which means we could have been at this same point two years ago, which would have significantly changed the political landscape in favor of Democrats and progressives and given us two additional years to reverse the harms the right-wing ecosystem wrought on us. Whatever might be said about Garland’s reasons, the only one our analyses indicate holds water is that Garland and the justice system intended to let January 6 slide. And the only reason for doing so is the mass psychosis that could make someone justify this to themselves, and for others to accept that outcome.
Maybe espionage, insurrection and obstruction seem abstract. So, let’s make this very real. What Trump is doing is killing people and dooming our children to stunted lives of ever-increasing distress, fear, and threat. He’s killing the dream of America – that part of it which was real, inclusive, and expansive. He’s reducing the salaries and wealth for 90% of us to make the other 10% richer. He’s preventing the entire world from addressing climate change robustly – dooming hundreds of millions to misery when it could all be mitigated by his simply doing the right thing.
From the psychosis viewpoint – Trump is enabling his followers to abandon reason, civility, and discourse – necessary hallmarks of a functioning democracy. Most of them are never coming back to reality. He is causing the left to lose hope because he never comes to justice, generating anger, resentment, fear, and loss of faith in government and us. He exploits, denies, and bullies because that is who he is. But more importantly, it is because we permit him be that way.
Just today I read three national press articles that said that Trump will likely be convicted but avoid jail, and five that said he’ll be pardoned even if convicted. The authors wrote these things with calm acceptance, demonstrated no outrage, and offered no recourse. This general deference to hierarchy I have long noticed in the U.S., but the prostration in front of Trump by liberals is galling. I spent nine years in the Army and saw great respect for good leaders, but I never observed the absolute boot licking that the press and most citizens are engaged in regarding Trump.
Don’t tell me that “we’re working on it,” that the recent charges signal that democracy still stands proudly, that we’re making significant progress on gun control, police reform, gerrymandering, voter protections, equal justice, financial equality, upward mobility – or anything else that mattes to the majority. As Steely Dan said, “Only a fool would say that.” Biden and Garland were going to let it all slide until Congress forced their hands. It’s too little, too late. Justice delayed is justice denied, and the fact that he’s not behind bars like all others charged with similar crimes – and that there’s no national uprising demanding his immediate incarceration, is the biggest indicator that he’s given us all Stockholm Syndrome.
The fact that he’s an ex-President is irrelevant to the decision on whether he should be remanded – yet that is the argument everyone is making and almost all are accepting for his preferential treatment. The fact that we accept an outdated Department of Justice memorandum stating that a sitting President cannot be prosecuted while in office is even more absurd than the DOJ having created it in the first place. A DOJ memo is not the Constitution, it is not even legal precedent, yet we all defer to it as if it were one of the Ten Commandments! For Christ’s sake, Garland could order up a new memo reversing the old one tomorrow – and you must then wonder why he doesn’t, and why none of his predecessors did either! And you really must wonder why we have allowed a government memorandum – memorandum simply meaning a record of something – in this case an opinion – to have the force of law. We accept and reify this error because we are not even aware that it can be challenged.
The problem we face now with Trump specifically is time – he may run out the clock once again. And if he succeeds, the Republic won’t fold because of what he then does – it will have collapsed because we failed to muster sufficient response to prevent him from acting.
Let’s start to reset the terms of discussion around Trump, justice, power and what we want and deserve as a people. For starters, we are not limited solely to legal recourse, and we must be prepared to pull every lever to prevent him from winning the next Presidential election. This is going to require left, right, Congress, and the justice system to each exert the influence they can to prevent that outcome, to reverse it if necessary, to make his exercise of power impossible if we get to that point.
But waiting is for chumps. Here’s what we can do now, listed from most immediate and easiest to most challenging:
· Inform our Congressional Representatives to:
o pass a law providing a sitting President only the rights and protections every common citizen has;
o have the DOJ rescind the DOJ memorandum “A Sitting President's Amenability to Indictment and Criminal Prosecution,” pending the result of that legislation.
· Join your state’s “Disqualification for Office Under the 14th Amendment” effort.
· Join the progressive social action organization that most aligns with your values, objectives, and expertise. Here’s a list for you.
· Create a Participative Democracy effort in your area focused on Equal Justice.
· Be prepared to join protests, economic boycotts, and general strikes.
Why have we included the last item on this list? Perhaps it seems a bit of an overreaction?
Folks, there is a perilously high probability – we estimate it at 46-48%, that a Republican becomes President in 2025, and that the House and Senate have Republican majorities. Biden could easily die or become incapacitated prior to the election, which is one easy-to-contemplate route to this outcome. Another is the Supreme Court allowing multiple challenges to slate of electors, states’ refusing to comply with court orders to re-district, etc.
The laws and policies this “triumvirate from hell” would emplace, backed up by the Supreme Court, would ensure that they maintained power in perpetuity. They would eliminate Social Security and Medicare. They would politicize the Federal Government and withdraw from NATO. Not to mention dooming the planet by making climate change worse. They would purposely create an American dystopia because they are so hateful, fearful, ignorant, soulless, miserable, shortsighted, and nihilistic. This is not hyperbole – this is the most probabilistic outcome of our models in the event of a Republican sweep in 2024.
Jack Smith has done all he can do. Our institutions will not hold faced with the level of politicization we would expect from a Republican Administration. The military is crumbling from within due to its need to recruit white Christian nationalists just to make recruitment quotas, and the Officer Corps is riddled with Evangelicalism.
It will be up to us. And when push comes to shove, the only thing the right-wing ecosystem cares about is money. That’s why the last bullet. Those actions hit it in the wallet, demonstrate that we mean business, and fully commit the left to overthrowing neoliberalism. Without this last step our descendants will end up perpetually fighting the same battles in a political Groundhog Day.
Democracy must win every battle – authoritarianism must only win once. This is an asymmetric fight that favors the right, and we must fundamentally change the nature of the fight by making it about system change – not preservation of a sub-optimal and crumbling system that never really worked fairly for very many. Only an explicitly existential battle whose outcomes could generate meaningful change will animate the majority sufficiently to overcome mass psychosis.
Ideally the system change effort will benefit from strong leadership from existing liberal and progressive organizations – but such cannot be counted on. They may fail to combine effectively, and they be suppressed by government and law enforcement before they can make a difference. We must be prepared to win with a leaderless network of fearless, dedicated Resistance fighters, and we must be prepared to fight back against occupying forces in the event the Republicans win the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2024. Combat power must be built now, it will be too late to wait for the election results.