WHO SHOULD HOLD TRUMP ACCOUNTABLE FOR JAN. 6?
The headline you never thought you’d read said it all: “Jimmy Carter: I fear for our democracy.”
The 97-year-old former president has set the gold standard for post-presidencies, creating a pro-democracy foundation and traveling to dozens of countries over the years to monitor elections and try to ensure that they were free and fair — like America’s — and “unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power.”
Yet there he was in a New York Times op-ed, lamenting the state of his own country’s democracy, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection incited by one of his successors, a wannabe strongman who wouldn’t accept defeat.
Carter didn’t name Donald Trump, though it seems high time that he and the three other former presidents drop their tradition-bound silence about Trump’s conduct and take a united, bipartisan stand explicitly denouncing Trump for the threat he poses to American democracy.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, likewise, did not name Trump on Wednesday in a televised speech when he laid out the work of Justice Department over the last year in arresting and criminally charging 725 insurrectionists, tacitly responding to complaints that the department is focused too much on prosecuting the small-fry rioters rather than targeting the big-fish coup plotters, including the insurrectionist in chief.
Garland plainly was referencing Trump and his circle when he said that the cases to date are providing “the evidentiary foundation” for prosecutions of higher-ups. He committed to “holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.”
Trump must be held accountable, politically and legally. But it’s not for Garland to name the former president until he has an actual, winnable legal case against him. Americans like their gratification served up instantly but justice, and the rule of law, doesn’t work that way.
Nor should Joe Biden, as president of the United States, have to take the lead in holding Trump politically accountable. In normal times, that work would be bipartisan in Congress. Yet after a year in which nearly all Republicans have refused to join Democrats in either impeaching or investigating the former president, Biden stepped up on Thursday with a forcefully delivered speech in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall marking the anniversary of the insurrection Trump incited.
The president also didn’t name Trump, but instead referred to him 16 times as the “former president,” including in a way sure to get under Trump’s skin: “He’s not just a former president. He’s a defeated former president.”
Biden also justifiably mocked Trump and his enablers for rejecting the 2020 presidential election result yet accepting Republican victories in votes for governors, U.S. senators and especially House members “on the same ballot, the same day, cast by the same voters.”
This speech was unprecedented — never has an American president had to indict his predecessor for refusing to accept the will of the people.
Biden, like most of us, never expected that Trump’s lies would become truth for the overwhelming share of Republicans and metastasize into justifications for state and local partisans to pass laws and make appointments that could subvert future elections.
Unless Trump is held accountable, he and his followers will have license to continue their anti-democratic offensive.
Voters also have a responsibility: Research the candidates on your ballots, whether they’re running for county clerk or Congress. Determine whether they’ve ever denied or questioned Trump’s defeat. If they have, vote against them.
Vote like our democracy depends on it. Because it does.