Democrats Need a Post-Trump Plan. Here’s One That Works.

Holding the powerful accountable for their crimes is the only way out of this mess.

Given everything that has happened since Donald Trump returned to power last January, you could hardly be blamed if you were unaware that Merrick Garland—who Barack Obama unsuccessfully nominated to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and who served as Joe Biden’s attorney general—got a new job. It’s an old job, really: He returned to the corporate law firm Arnold & Porter, where he had previously been a partner, to work on focus areas including white collar defense.

White collar defense, which often involves helping the rich and powerful escape accountability, is also the best way to describe Garland’s tenure as attorney general, at least where it matters. While Garland’s DOJ immediately began to prosecute the lowest-level participants in Trump’s crimes against democracy—the foot soldiers of Jan. 6—Garland steadfastly refused to take on the architect of that insurrection, waiting almost three years to bring federal charges against Trump himself. Indeed, Garland only took action after Congress’s Jan. 6 committee essentially forced him to launch the prosecutorial effort he’d spent years resisting. By that time, it was—in the most predictable way imaginable—already too late. Trump was running for reelection, meaning he could cast his prosecution as political persecution. He would be reelected before the cases against him had any chance to be concluded. Where accountability mattered, Garland failed spectacularly.

This, and the resulting dystopian reality we are living through today, were not necessary or foregone conclusions. Another path was eminently possible, as a veritable pileup of international counterexamples demonstrates. Just this February, South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol was jailed for life for his imposition of martial law in December 2024. Last November, a Peruvian court handed down an 11-year sentence to former president Pedro Castillo for his attempt to dissolve Peru’s Congress in December 2022. And last September, Brazil’s highest court condemned former president Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison for his efforts to overturn that country’s 2022 election results.

The Brazilian comparison is particularly instructive, because of the beat-for-beat similarities between Bolsonaro and Trump. Both are right-wing populists who falsely insisted they had won an election they had lost. Both used tactics of denial and conspiracy to inspire violent attacks against their respective capitols with the goal of blocking a democratic transition of power. But the paths of these authoritarian despots diverged sharply following their attempted coups. One is currently in prison. The other is back in control of the most powerful nation on Earth, waging an all-out assault on our Constitution that frankly makes the crimes of his first term look like child’s play.

Given this tragic sequence of events, it is not, I think, too soon for those of us opposed to Trump’s corrupt and cruel reign of terror—and in particular for our ostensible opposition party, whose leaders failed so utterly in their previous attempt to bring Trump to justice—to begin thinking seriously about what accountability for the crimes of this regime will look like if (and needless to say, it is a big if) Democrats........

© New Republic