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Making America Accountable Again

Corporate leaders say they should be shielded from congressional inquiries because they had no alternative but to collaborate with the Trump administration. History says otherwise.

Congressional Democrats pondering how to hold Trump collaborators should consult the work of Hannah Arendt, author of “Personal Responsibility Under a Dictatorship.”

On October 5, Politico writers Jasper Goodman and Kahterine Hapgood reported on a growing battle among Democratic Party leaders over how deeply to investigate businesses that directly abetted a fascist regime, which is also the single most corrupt presidency in the history of the United States. Progressives like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), who are respectively poised to lead the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees, are eager to target the executives at major tech companies and cryptocurrency exchanges for their financial and in-kind contributions to Trump. But moderates feel that pointing too many fingers would be unfair.

“A lot of the companies did things because Trump had a gun on their head,” Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) told Politico. “We’re going to have to be a little bit wise about when companies simply did something they had to do to survive this unprecedented level of corruption, compared to companies that actually got on board and profited more by being a partner in his corruption.”

Dave Vorland of the Big Tech front group Chamber of Progress makes a similar case. In Silicon Valley’s generous funding of Trump’s second inauguration and his new White House ballroom project, Vorland writes that “what looks like ‘bending the knee’ may be better understood as risk management.… the company leaders were forced to make that choice by Trump.”

Both Foster and Vorland appear to be arguing that it’s unfair to judge corporate leaders by their actions. Foster claims that at least some “corporations, law firms, and universities that took steps to stay in Trump’s good graces” simply had no choice. It was a matter of survival. Similarly, Vorland appears to treat “risk management” not so much as a business strategy but as an all-purpose moral justification: If it maximizes shareholder value, it must be beyond judgment.

Whatever investigations congressional Democrats undertake in the next two years will be the nation’s first steps toward metabolizing this utterly dark chapter in our history. In other words, congressional oversight of private-sector collaboration with Trump will be a prequel to the truth commissions and criminal prosecutions that we desperately need.

Yet Foster and Vorland want to preemptively write certain actors out of the story of the Trump years, even before Democrats in Congress start wielding gavels. That would necessarily narrow the kinds of story America can tell itself about what the Trump years were to a narrative of coerced collaboration. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò writes, when a nation chooses to forget certain facts about a shameful chapter in its history, that keeps certain claims about the nation’s character open to future demagogues. The politics of memory are difficult, but they represent nonnegotiable terrain for any honest reckoning with the age of Trump.

Surely though, Foster, Vorland and others would respond, business and civic leaders who paid off or assisted the Trump regime aren’t as bad as Stephen Miller or Pete Hegseth. That’s absolutely correct. But to end the conversation there forecloses other questions about the inner workings of Trump collaboration Americans urgently need to ask ourselves. When an evil regime rises and flips public morality on its head, are you still responsible for your actions? Should one be judged for doing the wrong thing when, for a brief period, the gatekeepers of social power and prestige seemed to require it?

The philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt spent much of her later life thinking about such questions—and about what distinguishes the participants and resisters of fascist and totalitarian regimes from each other. She was particularly interested in the role of individual choice and culpability.

In 1962, The New Yorker sent Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi and key organizer of the Final Solution. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, her highly controversial book about the trial, Arendt argued that Eichmann was neither a fascist ideologue nor a hate-driven monster. Rather, he was a dull bureaucrat—a company man who committed........

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