To heal we must prosecute Trump and his enablers
Do we forgive without restitution, or do we rebuild with a Reconstruction mindset? To pardon Trump would be a crime against the Nation, our heritage, our dreams, our humanity. To let his enablers walk consequence free would be a crime against our very souls, friends and enemies. We are not living in the remade image of the Nixon years, though it surely looked that way at the beginning of Trump’s term. And, if that were the extent of Trump’s transgressions, a paranoid man’s desire to keep his friends close and his enemies closer, a man accustomed to mafia-style business dealings skating along the knife’s edge of legality, occasionally slipping ever so slightly to the other side, the rough, non-presidential demeanor of someone in the construction trade grating against our sensibilities of what an American President should be, that I could forgive. That I could understand.
But, that is not what the last four years have wrought. No, what we were given on that fateful night in 2016 was a criminal delivered on a gilded tray to the White House. A man who is not only accustomed to mafia-style (if not outright criminal in nature and act) business dealings, but a man who openly embraces the illegalities and stereotypes of his trade and birth place. A gaudy man who measures a person’s worth by their gender, their look, their skin color, their religion, and most damning and damaging of all, their unwavering fealty to him.
No, these last four years, which have been a decade every week, they have not been the second coming of Nixon. They have been worse. They have been both the wet fever dream of the Right Wing and the living nightmare of those who hold dear the best of America. Trump has both reshaped us and given us clarity to all the cracks and weaknesses of what we believed was so solid. But, the shape Trump has attempted, continues to attempt and will continue to attempt to twist us into is not one America should ever be. For we have been that shape and we have rejected its contours. We continue to reject the dark shadows the perversions of our past cast upon our hopeful souls.
To move forward we must not cast aside the past as though it were nothing but a dream. We must confront what we just endured. The evil, the warts, the scars left behind. We must face our attackers, our persecutors, and push back, tell them no more. We must hold our heads high and demand justice, demand retribution and recompense. We must march forward to rebuild, repair and build anew a Nation that will endure by its very nature. A Nation that holds true and dear that all People are not only created equal, but are equal in the eyes of the law and the eyes of all others. We must confront the monstrosity that has been the Trump Administration and declare that laws will only take us so far, guard rails protect us so much. We must do better as a society, our culture and cultural attitudes must change. Together, with laws that promote individual liberties as more important than corporate interests, with a foundation of education in the national interest, with science and medicine walking hand-in-hand with the arts, we can build a Nation and Society that we can be proud of, that the World can look upon and see a shining beacon upon that hill. A better way, a better life, one the rest of the World desires to be part of.
In order to achieve a better, brighter future for us all we must not let the criminal machinations of the last four years fade quietly into the fog of history. We must prosecute and hold accountable the leaders, enablers and co-conspirators. While unprecedented in American history, and a direction that should not be taken lightly, prosecuting Trump once out of office at the federal level is the first step toward healing the national divide (and if Nixon had been prosecuted, not pardoned, I don’t think we would have Trump today). So that we will not lose it we must show ourselves through extraordinary steps that we hold dear our Democracy. To heal we must cut out the cancer that has metastasized so readily, we must root out the disease that has infected our politics, culture and community. The medicine we must take to ensure a relapse does not occur is many layered, but must start with Congress enacting laws and regulations to repair the damage done and fix the many loopholes Trump and his enablers slipped through. We must shore up the weak places and rebuild stronger the failed spaces. We must declare, through law at the highest levels, that no President shall ever pervert and twist our Nation again.
