The most immediate challenge any new president faces is deciding what not to do. For Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the catastrophes of the past four days have not radically changed the way they should make those choices. One week ago, it was imperative that they mainly look forward, to the public-health, economic, and foreign-affairs emergencies that they are inheriting. That is still their duty and imperative now.
But for the rest of the government, and much of society, the barbaric and potentially catastrophic storming of the U.S. Capitol, and the culpability of public and private figures who egged the mob on, demand a response. The response of Congress should be to impeach; that of law enforcement should be to arrest and prosecute every participant who can be identified; and that of civil society should be to ensure that there are consequences for those who chose violence and fascism at a decisive moment in the country’s history. Usually “letting bygones be bygones” is wise advice for individuals and for societies. Not in this case.
For this new president and vice president, clearheadedness about this choice is more important, and more difficult, than it was for nearly any of their predecessors. It’s more important because they are moving into a house that’s on fire. They are taking responsibility for a range of emergencies not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt followed Herbert Hoover in 1933, and exceeded only by what Abraham Lincoln faced in 1861. Just a few items on a very long list are a surging pandemic, a damaged and unsustainably imbalanced economy, and a governing system whose basic principles are under direct attack and whose operational competence has been hollowed out.
And their decisions are harder than for most new administrations, because in addition to looking forward, to all the problems they are now supposed to solve, they must look backward, to reckoning with what Donald Trump and his enablers have done.
President-elect Joe Biden faces a decision rare in American history: what to do about the man who has just left office, whose personal corruption, disdain for the Constitution, and destructive mismanagement of the federal government are without precedent.”
To boil it down, I argued:
- On matters of corruption, they should leave the work to state-government authorities, in New York and elsewhere, who already have investigations under way. And for possible violations of federal law, from ignoring the Hatch Act to impeding the U.S. Postal Service, they should appoint an eminent, independent attorney general, and also inspectors general in the executive-level departments, and leave the rest to them.
· On corrosion of federal competence, from the State Department to the CDC, a new president can and must act directly and immediately. Of the 4,000 political-appointment positions in the executive branch, some 3,000 do not require Senate confirmation. The Biden team can and should get them in place, right away. And because the victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia have put the Democrats in control of the Senate, Biden can get the other 1,000 in position without undue delay.
· On the catastrophes of this era, from pandemic management to the rise of white-supremacist violence, I suggested longer-term responses a new administration could authorize and encourage. These would include the creation of top-level national commissions, on the model of the Kerner Commission on racial justice in the 1960s or the 9/11 Commission after the attacks of 2001, as the least polarizing, most promising ways to deal with white-hot public crises.
For Biden and Harris, the right path remains what it had been. Their main job is to cope with the emergencies at hand. Vaccines and resources to deal with the pandemic. Relief, renewal, and innovation to address the grossly uneven effects of economic collapse. Investments, vision, and coordination to make “Build back better” more than just a slogan. The nation’s recovery depends on their focus on such tasks—not to mention their political fortunes, and the Democratic Party’s.
The new president and vice president can’t afford to look back. The rest of us have to. The person with the most individual responsibility for this week’s carnage is, of course, Trump. He is stained, culpable, unfit, and forever disgraced. But that is who he has always been—as I argued in 152 “Time Capsule” installments during his 2016 rise, and as he prefigured in his appalling “American Carnage” inaugural address.
Trump could not have fulfilled his dark potential without a complaisant, also culpable supporting cast. That includes a political organization that converted itself from the “Grand Old Party” to a group of “Vichy Republicans,” who cowered rather than standing up to Trump. It includes a highly partisan press claque that magnified Trump’s lies (as Margaret Sullivan has again emphasized), and a self-consciously nonpartisan mainstream press that seemed terrified of using the word lie.
And it includes social-media companies, notably Facebook and Twitter, that have knowingly been crucial parts of the ecosystem of disinformation. Twitter provided Trump a megaphone for lies and incitement for nearly a decade, until its overdue but welcome decision to deny him an untrammeled platform. Facebook’s own employees have protested the role it played.
These groups acted as they did because they feared the consequences of doing otherwise. The GOP and Fox News info system feared the wrath of Trump and the passions of the base he kept ever more fervently riled up.
The mainstream media acted as they did largely because of a culture that feared criticism for “taking sides.” The social-media companies feared giving up the convenient pose that they were strictly “platforms,” as opposed to being “publishers,” and therefore could not be held responsible for what appeared on their sites.
Few consequences existed for going along—for standing with a president for whom many senators and representatives express their private contempt (always private), for describing as “controversial” or “without evidence” views that reporters knew to be flat-out lies, for letting social-media technology become the organizational backbone of disinformation and hate. These behaviors, which erode democratic governance in the long run, have carried too few consequences in the here and now.
Peggy Noonan, the onetime Ronald Reagan speechwriter, made an impassioned argument for, as she put it, lowering the boom on those directly and indirectly responsible for the desecration of the Capitol. “When something like this happens it tends to be repeated,” she wrote. “It is our job to make sure it is not. And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.”
Those instigators, she wrote, began with Trump but included the congressional Republicans who stood with him and against the peaceful transfer of power, notably Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. “They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed”—Hawley a product of Yale Law School, Cruz of Harvard Law. “Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.”
Actions should have consequences, and consequences will affect future actions. How could consequences be adjusted after this week? A non-exhaustive starter list:
Impeachment. Nearly two years ago, Yoni Appelbaum argued in an Atlantic cover story that Trump had already far passed the threshold that would justify impeachment. . . . Given the calendar, even a successful impeachment effort is not likely to remove Trump from office much faster than the constitutional deadline will. But it will force members of his party to go on the record for him or against him. It would signal to the world, and to our own country, an awareness that something terrible has happened, and cannot happen again. Societies that shrink from, fictionalize, or paper over the ugliest parts of their past invite even uglier episodes.
Reputation. This matters to people, in practical and emotional terms. Cabinet members and White House staffers are discovering that Trump has at last gone “too far,” and are trying to leap from his diminishing ice floe back onto firmer ground. Resigning “on principle” at this point is a cheap stunt and should be seen as such. It is worse than a stunt for Cabinet members, including Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos, in that it spares them the obligation of taking a side in a Twenty-Fifth Amendment vote to remove Trump from office. Having stayed with Trump, and having lied or dissembled on his behalf, should lastingly stain his associates’ reputations. . . . Senators Cruz and Hawley might prefer to be known for other things, but the dominant item on their résumé should always be their role in the disaster of January 6.
The press and social media. . . . The “established” press, and the new digital and social media, has not caught up with the realities of this era—and has to adapt much more quickly than it has so far.
The mechanics of democracy. The Vichy Republican efforts of the past year have been in direct service of Donald Trump. But their indirect targets have been the fundamentals of American democracy as a whole, of which the most important is a willingness by the losers to respect an election’s outcome.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s main contribution to the defense of democracy should be to faithfully execute the office they have democratically attained. The rest of us need to get to work on these other fronts.
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