After Trump, America Will Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission
It needs to be done so that future generations can learn about this horror and ensure that it can never happen again.
by Julie Roginsky
When this is all over — and it will be over someday — the United States will need a truth and reconciliation commission to hold accountable everyone who will clamor to say that they were not really part of the MAGA movement that did its best to destroy American democracy at home and its role as the indispensable nation abroad.
Two tweets from Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina perfectly illustrate the point. On Sunday night, shortly after CBS aired its most recent episode of 60 Minutes, Graham tweeted this:
CBS’ crime? It aired an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Zelensky said this:
"I believe, sadly, (that) Russian narratives are prevailing in the U.S. How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war? This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia's information policy on America, on U.S. politics and U.S. politicians."
Also on Sunday, Russia launched an unprovoked ballistic missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, killing at least 34 people. Trump’s response was to absolve Russia of the Sumy massacre by saying, “I think it was terrible. And I was told they made a mistake. But I think it’s a horrible thing.”
It was not a mistake, much like Russia’s missile attack earlier this month near a playground in Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, which murdered 19 civilians, nine of them children, was not a mistake. It was deliberate and it was a middle finger not just to Ukraine but to Trump, who has repeatedly said that he expects Russia and Ukraine to end the war.
Yesterday, Trump went even further, once again gaslighting his supporters into believing that Ukraine — not Russia — started the war. Zelensky, he claimed, is “always looking to purchase missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know that you can win the war. You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
After the attack on Sumy, Graham tweeted this:
There is a lot to unpack here but let’s start with this: if Graham is interested in punishing those who prop up Putin, he should look in the mirror and then take a ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to have a chat with his friend, the president of the United States. No one has done more to prop up Putin than Trump since the moment he set foot back in the Oval Office. And no one has done more to prop up Trump than Graham.
In February, the United States shamefully voted with North Korea, Iran and other Russian-aligned countries against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s war and supporting Ukrainian territorial integrity. It also drafted a resolution in the Security Council that called for an end to the war but said nary a word about Russia’s role in it. This was all done on Trump’s orders. Graham did not take to Twitter or the senate floor to denounce this.
The larger issue, of course, is that Graham is only one high-profile example of the craven politicians, corporate leaders and even judges who talk tough but kowtow to Trump for self-preservation. If you want to understand Graham’s willful disconnect, you only need to see what he has pinned to his Twitter page.
Actually, Graham was not there at the beginning. At the beginning, he warned Republican voters that Trump was “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.” He also added of Trump: “any time you ignore what could become an evil force, you wind up regretting it.”
What happened to that Lindsey Graham? He saw his numbers precipitously decline among Republican voters in South Carolina. The only way he could survive politically was to embrace Trump and his “evil force.”
If Graham is still in public life when Trumpism is finally eradicated — and it will be — you can count on him to distance himself from the years of sycophancy encapsulated in his pinned tweet. Don’t let him.
Don’t let any of them. On Monday, Trump was overheard telling El Salvador President Nayib Bukele that he intends to send American citizens to the maximum security hellhole that is currently housing over 200 men whom Trump shipped to El Salvador without an ounce of due process. “Home-growns are next,” Trump told Bukele, referring to American citizens. “The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough.”
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Where is the outrage emanating from any of these pocket constitution-waving Trumpers? You know, the ones who will start screeching about law and order just as soon as a Democrat is back in office.
Earlier this week, the Financial Times ran a chilling story that shows exactly how far down the rabbit hole we are. The lede outlines the problem perfectly:
“In mid-February, some of Wall Street’s most powerful investors and business titans — controlling hundreds of billions in personal wealth and trillions in assets — lined up like teenagers before a rock concert.
“The headliner was Donald Trump. In a cramped Miami Beach auditorium, plutocrats and CEOs waited up to three hours for the president’s first in-person address to the business world at a Saudi-backed conference. The crowd, which included Vista Equity’s Robert Smith, Bridgewater CEO Nir Bar Dea and Apollo co-founder Josh Harris, roared when the US president finally strode onstage, an hour late.”
Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, these masters of the universe are now shocked – shocked – to find that Trump is dismantling the global economic order that has made them all fabulously rich. “We didn’t believe him. We assumed that someone in the administration that had an economic background would tell him that global tariffs were a bad idea,” a Wall Street executive told the FT. “We are in for a roller-coaster ride.”
These Wall Street titans lined up for Trump like teenage girls at a Bieber concert just two short months ago. Never mind that many of them had slammed Trump for subverting the rule of law after January 6th and accused him of spurring an insurrection just four years ago. Let them eventually explain publicly why they put profit over patriotism.
Joe Biden did a terrible thing when he became president. He believed that ignoring Trump would make Trumpism irrelevant. He referred to him as “The former guy.” He wanted to just move on.
But the nation cannot move on from Trumpism without first having a reckoning about how we got here, who enabled it and who must be held accountable. There is nothing that Trump’s current enablers would want more than to move on from the lies they peddled on his behalf and the constitution they abjured at his behest. But if they are allowed simply to move on, there will be another Trump, and another one, until there is nothing left of the constitutional republic that existed for nearly 250 years until Trump took the oath of office again this January.
This country has a bad habit of refusing to reckon with its history, as though admitting that we err is somehow a blow against American exceptionalism. That is why we have never really come to terms with the effects of slavery on modern day society and why we do not teach about Franklin D. Roosevelt turning back the Saint Louis or incarcerating Japanese-American in internment camps.
We just… move on.
Well, we cannot move on from Trump, even when he eventually shuffles off this mortal coil. We cannot move on from the titans of Wall Street refusing to invoke the word “tariff” when discussing the reasons for the current economic crisis, for fear of angering the president. We cannot move on from Jeff Bezos paying Melania Trump $40 million for the rights to her “life story.”
All of these people need to testify publicly about how and why they cowered before a tyrant. It needs to be done for accountability. It needs to be done for transparency. Most of all, it needs to be done so that future generations can learn about this horror and ensure that it can never happen again.
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You and Ben have been good about connecting the dots -- so let's connect some more. Zoom way out on all the "shock and awe" cited below and the Billionaire class envisions American masses (all races) as an enslaved worker bee class, doing menial factory and physical labor jobs, barely getting by, being uneducated to know any better, and religiously towing the line with blind faith. That's the plan. And here's how they did it: Trump's economic policies that have eroded middle class retirement savings, raised prices and the cost of living, made housing unaffordable, decimating the social safety net (Medicare and Social Security), and eliminated high paying jobs. Add to all that, DOGE accessing all of our personal information (which will destroy financial security, allowing the government to financially kill off any enemies or undesired demographics). Musk going on endlessly about the need for more babies, while the GOP takes away women's rights to bodily autonomy, the right to vote, and soon, the right to have credit without a man's permission. Next, there's Vance leading the war on education, wanting to sell off college campuses to private development, dismantling higher learning, closing the Dept. of Education and rewriting of history for K-12 students. Next, you add the erosion of child labor laws, and soon that K-12 will be a K-6 pipeline into factory work. And Trump's base will ensure this will all happen, thinking they will be excluded. It will be too late when they are enslaved too and their votes no longer matter.
Setting aside America's reckoning with its past history, how do you suggest or think America must reckon right now this very moment in time with the actual reality of what is happening?
What is in your mind the pivotal hinge that will allow America to close the door on Trump's fascist take-over of the White House? Which brings me to a pivotal and very important question: Why do you or anyone else think that the 2024 election results for the Presidency was accurate, legitimate, and untainted by hacking? Interference? Manipulation? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And I must ask , once again, why does anyone actually think that Trump won the 2024 elections in a fair and honest way?
The answer to this question is the key to saving the constitutional makeup of our treasured democracy.
“Democracy does not die when you ask questions about election integrity, it dies when you stop asking questions.” —Dean Obeidallah