It’s time the country got a dose of reality. As the Trump presidency staggers toward its conclusion, the White House is still engaging in a blitz campaign of malfeasance. The president is inventing wild and dangerous allegations about voter fraud.
Bill Barr is executing as many people as he can, proposing to carry out death sentences during a presidential transition for the first time since 1889. Mike Pompeo, meanwhile, is proposing to flood the Middle East with new weapons, fast-tracking $23 billion in advanced weapons to the United Arab Emirates, potentially transforming the balance of power of the region.
If anything, the month since the election has shown us that the Trump administration is taking their electoral defeat as a reason to ramp up their misconduct, rather than gracefully step aside.
But come January 20, Joe Biden will be in the Oval Office. The 46th president will have both the authority and the ethical mandate to pursue the truth around what we’ve all endured over these last four years. I don’t know if the divisions sundering America are healable, but only if he commits himself to a cold, hard dose of truth will he have a shot at stanching the bleeding. Otherwise, the nation will further bifurcate into camps that don’t just disagree on policy and the optimal role of government, but into ones that have entirely different understandings of reality. Too many folks have already gone far down that track, but we still have a chance to fight back.
Starting with arguably the most obvious instance of his grift, Donald Trump has already raised over $170 million based on his false allegations of voter fraud. Where is that money going? We’re only just now learning about the alleged misuse of inauguration funds from the first day of the Trump administration; there’s no reason to think these last days will feature more propriety. Audit every penny.
We also remain in the midst of the greatest public health crisis in at least a century. In the spring, the U.S. became the global epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, and although other regions now rival us as disaster cases, it’s not because we’re doing better. We owe it to the hundreds of thousands of dead to understand how it went so poorly, but also we all need to build systems in the future so that public health officials can resist miscreants concerned only about reelection. Who made the decisions to sideline the Centers for Disease Control, give crisis funding to Kushner- and Trump-led companies, issue a deluge of false information, politicize masks, keep PPE from Democratic-led states, bungle testing, and all the other choices that have led us to this moment. We should find out how many people got sick from holiday parties like those thrown by Mike Pompeo. When government actors made decisions that resulted in death and disabilities, even secondhand (a person catching Covid at a party, then getting a family member or some third person sick), we should know it. I’d love to see a spreadsheet linking Covid cases to each public official and their events. We might consider the 9/11 commission as a model, especially given that by inauguration we’ll likely be at a 9/11-worth of deaths every single day.
While presidents have traditionally been cautious about revealing the secrets of their predecessors, we’ve never had anyone quite like Trump.
The pandemic swept the impeachment hearings out of the news, but we can’t let the allegation that Donald Trump attempted to bribe a foreign country using defense dollars to smear his political rival from historical memory. If true, it’s one of the biggest betrayals in American history. There’s a lot of evidence supporting the allegation, of course, but there’s so much we don’t know. The White House, backed by right-wing courts, decided that congressional subpoenas were more or less optional, then the Republican Senate decided not to hear any more evidence before voting to acquit. But Biden will have access to buried and classified documents, and while presidents have traditionally been cautious about revealing the secrets of their predecessors, we’ve never had anyone quite like Trump. Biden should release everything possible.
We need similar oversight across the Trump national security decisions. In 2019, Trump revoked the Obama-era rule on reporting drone strikes. Most Americans still seem not to know that the drone war has escalated under Trump because, without the reporting, the quotidian killings don’t generate news. The Pompeo-UAE deal last month is the most recent in a long series of arms agreements with Middle Eastern powers made without due oversight. When the State Department inspector general objected in May, Trump fired him. Biden’s going to need to rehire and put those IG’s back to work. Again, where is the money going, and to whom? Given the revelations about the Trump organization’s extraction of fees from the Secret Service and room rentals at the Trump hotels, it seems likely that a deep well of graft lies beneath the few revelations thus far. Let’s follow the money and see where it goes.
While tracking financial improprieties, foreign policy decisions, and pandemic mismanagement seem to fall under the general rubric of independent investigatory commissions, we may need a truth commission — that is, a nonjudicial body (sometimes with the ability to refer cases to prosecutors) empowered not to punish crimes, but simply to unearth what actually happened — to probe the alleged human rights violations perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security. The track record of such commissions as vehicles for justice is mixed depending on what judicial authority their recommendations carry. They are, however, good for forming what political scientist Elin Skaar has called a “rudimentary sketching of a common narrative.” When it comes to the concentration camps at the border, the family separation policy, the machinations of the internal deportation force, or the use of DHS troops as anti-protest paramilitaries, the deportation of Covid-positive immigrant families, we’re on familiar ground for the ways such commissions can be useful for revealing the excesses of an authoritarian regime.
The question facing the incoming president isn’t whether to let things lie fallow or to dig up the truth; the Trump administration is openly trying to bury or even destroy the evidence. The White House has been flouting the Presidential Records Act, and is in fact currently facing a lawsuit intended to force compliance. The Department of Homeland Security has been trying to designate documents related to border enforcement for destruction rather than preservation. Both the National Archives and Library of Congress, two institutions that should be as dedicated to preserving knowledge as the CDC is to fighting disease, willingly doctored a photo of the Women’s March to remove anti-Trump slogans. Only a chance visit by a Washington Post reporter revealed the alteration; what else have we missed?
This isn’t about justice, although justice should be the aspirational goal. President Trump is going to exit the White House with an unprecedented flurry of preemptive pardons for everyone who might possibly implicate him in anything. President-elect Biden has indicated he’ll let the Justice Department decide who to prosecute, but I’m skeptical this will happen. Influential voices are lining up against prosecuting Trump. Biden is wary that prosecutions would be a distraction. And after all, Nixon was pardoned, Iran-Contra forgotten, and Obama famously chose to “look forward, not backwards,” when choosing not to investigate the Bush-era use of torture. Letting Republican administrations off the hook for malfeasance has been common, but not in the end restorative.
So in 2021, prosecutions or no, President Biden needs to commit to serving truth. I believe that the Trump administration has perpetrated both actual crimes and significant misdeeds (that may not be in fact criminal) in every aspect of their misrule. But I could be wrong. Let’s find out, let’s air out all the dirty laundry, and then proceed into the roaring ’20s on a firm and shared basis of knowing what the heck actually just happened to our country.