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Democrats Should Launch a “Nuremberg Caucus” to Investigate the Crimes of the Trump Regime

Administration officials and their collaborators must know that if they break the law they will be punished. There must not be impunity for those attacking our democracy.

A demonstrator carries sign in support of the victims of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and against Donald Trump’s refusal to release what are known as the Epstein files in New York’s Times Square.

Cory Doctorow understands the value of a good label. A writer and longtime critic of corporate consolidation, particularly in the tech industry, Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the process by which corporations degrade their online platforms to maximize short-term profits. It captured the shared experience of our worsening digital lives so well that the American Dialect Society named “enshittification” the 2023 word of the year.

Recently, after posing the question “What would a real political response to fascism look like?,” Doctorow articulated another idea that I think similarly captures our zeitgeist. In a blog post, Doctorow proposed that congressional Democrats launch a “Nuremberg Caucus,” an effort to determine what accountability for the grotesqueries of Trump’s regime should look like. People need to be held responsible for the corruption, concentration camps, and executions of US civilians by federal goon squads.

In Doctorow’s conception, the core of this project would be a public-facing platform where Democrats could assemble evidence of the administration’s crimes and promise trials for the perpetrators. In his words, “Each fresh outrage, each statement, each video-clip—whether of Trump officials or of his shock-troops—could be neatly slotted in, given an exhibit number, and annotated with the criminal and civil violations captured in the evidence. The caucus could publish dates these trials will be held on—following from Jan 20, 2029—and even which courtrooms each official, high and low, will be tried in.”

An initiative like this is necessary on its merits. Healthy democracies do not respond to attempts to impose authoritarian rule by allowing their perpetrators to remain in positions of power. Just this month, South Korea sentenced its former right-wing president, Yoon Suk-yeol, to life imprisonment for his 2024 attempt to impose martial law. And South Korea isn’t alone—both Peru and Brazil recently condemned their former presidents to long prison sentences for their coup attempts. There’s a strong case to be made that our country’s current dystopia is a result of the Democrats’ failure to put this principle into practice after Trump’s first term. Former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to file timely charges against Trump for seeking to overturn the 2020 election cannot be repeated.

As Doctorow put it when I called him up to discuss this idea, “We’re talking about people who violated their oath of office. They are categorically unfit to be in public service, and they need to be kept away from the levers of power.” The process of organizing a Nuremberg Caucus would force Democrats to commit to holding these bad actors accountable for their crimes.

A Nuremberg Caucus could also be a political boon........

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