Most Americans like to believe that this is a nation of laws, where justice is blind to power and status. But that is a bit of self-flattery. The truth is that as a country we have often found one reason or another to let the powerful escape the consequences of their actions.
Consider Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, commander in chief of a rebellion that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Davis spent two years in federal custody after the end of the war. The indictment against him was dismissed following his release, and he spent the rest of his life a free man. He died gently after a brief coma, 24 years after Appomattox, on Dec. 6, 1889. The Southern press, the historian Donald E. Collins notes in “The Death and Resurrection of Jefferson Davis” was “universal in its praise for the ex-Confederate leader.”
“The funeral should be a demonstration of respect and love that would be the grandest and most impressive that had ever been witnessed in this city,” The New Orleans Daily Picayune editorialized, “and should be conducted on such a scale as to show the world that the South, in the face of sectional abuse and criticisms, does not hesitate to honor in the profoundest manner the memory of the greatest of her sons.” Davis was given the honor of a funeral procession through the streets of that city, where he had made frequent visits, and was laid in state in City Hall. Lawmakers from across the South, including members of Congress, would give eulogies in his honor. In 1931, the state of Mississippi contributed a statue of Davis to the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. It’s still there.
A little more than a century after Davis’s death, a former American president, Richard Nixon, would die peacefully in bed. In life, he had disgraced his oath to the Constitution of the United States, grievously abusing his power in what was, until quite recently, the most notorious presidential scandal in American history. Despite his guilt, Nixon left the White House with his freedom intact. The next month, he would have a full and unconditional pardon, courtesy of Gerald Ford, his successor.
For the next two decades, Nixon would live as one of the wise old men of American politics and foreign affairs, still admired in the halls of power as an important voice of counsel. Four living ex-presidents attended his funeral. Bill Clinton, the sitting president, gave a eulogy. And while Nixon did not want an official state funeral, he was honored as a beloved elder statesman, complete with a daylong period of national mourning.
Between Davis and Nixon are any number of more minor figures whose crimes against the body politic were wiped away if they were ever acknowledged in the first place. So it goes, in the 21st century, with President Trump. Five years ago, as the outgoing president, he inspired an attack on the United States Capitol in a last-ditch effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
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“We fight like hell,” Trump said to an angry crowd of supporters hours before they marched to the Capitol. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Before this, Trump had pressured Republicans in states such as Georgia and Michigan to fabricate votes and invalidate results. He pushed his allies, as he put it, to “stop the steal,” and he summoned the mob that would attack Congress and try to stop certification of the Electoral College (“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump famously tweeted on Dec. 19, 2020. “Be there, will be wild!”). As Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed under President Joe Biden to investigate the case against Trump said in a recent deposition before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, “The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him.”
Trump tried as much as he could to overthrow the Constitution. That his was an almost farcical and shambolic attempt at an autogolpe does not change the gravity of what happened. And yet, Trump isn’t just a free man — he is, once again, the president of the United States.
The myth of America says that this can’t happen. But as we see, our history tells us a different story. Our history says that we struggle to hold the powerful accountable. Our history says that we would often rather look the other way than contend with what it means for presidents and other high officials to break their oaths and turn their power against the republic. Our history says that with enough power, and if you’re the right kind of American, you can escape consequences altogether and die a citizen in good standing.
Jan. 6 was shocking. That Trump left the scene of the crime to return to power is a little less so. And while my points of reference in this column are from the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, you need look only at the last 25 years of American political life to see that this country is unwilling, and thus unable, to hold its political elites responsible for anything, from illegal wars to fraud and other forms of venal wrongdoing.
There are many ways to diagnose the state of the nation, but if there is a sickness eating away at American democracy, it is our culture of elite impunity. Trump is at once a symptom of this disease and its apotheosis, a living representation of all the ways the United States has encouraged, tolerated and rewarded the most selfish and antisocial behaviors imaginable, at least among a certain class of person. And with the full might of the federal government in his hands, Trump hopes to institutionalize impunity — to make it the only rule, both here and abroad.
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