White collar defense, which often involves helping the rich and powerful escape accountability, is also the best way to describe Garland’s tenure as attorney general, at least where it matters. While Garland’s DOJ immediately began to prosecute the lowest-level participants in Trump’s crimes against democracy—the foot soldiers of Jan. 6—Garland steadfastly refused to take on the architect of that insurrection, waiting almost three years to bring federal charges against Trump himself. Indeed, Garland only took action after Congress’s Jan. 6 committee essentially forced him to launch the prosecutorial effort he’d spent years resisting. By that time, it was—in the most predictable way imaginable—already too late. Trump was running for reelection, meaning he could cast his prosecution as political persecution. He would be reelected before the cases against him had any chance to be concluded. Where accountability mattered, Garland failed spectacularly.
The Brazilian comparison is particularly instructive, because of the beat-for-beat similarities between Bolsonaro and Trump. Both are right-wing populists who falsely insisted they had won an election they had lost. Both used tactics of denial and conspiracy to inspire violent attacks against their respective capitols with the goal of blocking a democratic transition of power. But the paths of these authoritarian despots diverged sharply following their attempted coups. One is currently in prison. The other is back in control of the most powerful nation on Earth, waging an all-out assault on our Constitution that frankly makes the crimes of his first term look like child’s play.
The only appropriate answer is the zealous pursuit of justice at every level of this criminal enterprise of an administration. The next Democratic administration should extend the Garland approach to January 6—a focus on the criminal foot soldiers of the Trump regime—to a host of other areas, most notably immigration enforcement, foreign policy, and corruption. But it shouldn’t stop there, as the response to January 6 did. It must go further.
Admittedly, all of this is a tall order. Pursuing accountability with such breadth and depth would require a serious commitment of resources, attention, and political capital. But it’s a necessary, not an optional, step towards rebuilding our democracy, which—even in this ideal future in which Democrats have overcome Trump’s efforts to dismantle free elections to win back temporary control of the government—will be overwhelmingly fragile for a long time to come. As the Allies understood when devising their denazification programs for Germany after World War II, America simply cannot afford to allow the bandits, propagandists, and sadists who’ve been running this administration to simply slide back into positions of power and privilege from which to plot their next fascist takeover. If Garland’s ignominious tenure as attorney general achieved nothing else of value, let it at least have taught us this lesson.
This will make many Democratic leaders squeamish. The party’s centrist establishment hates to take strong stances on just about anything. And there may be opposition from some on the left, as well. After all, doesn’t this “prosecute Trump” fixation risk dragging us back to a pre-2020 resistance liberalism that deprioritized material conditions and obscured the structural problems of oligarchy, of which Trump is really just a symptom?
The word “populism” is thrown around a lot to describe very different political tendencies, in large part because populist anger can be channeled in polar opposite directions, towards fascism on the one hand or social democracy on the other. But at its core, populism is what you get when a critical mass of a society stops seeing the previous systems of political authority as legitimate. And there is nothing—literally nothing—that creates that perception of illegitimacy more than repeated demonstrations of elite impunity.
Obviously, that was never the reality of Trumpism, and today Trump’s administration stands as the ultimate monument to elite impunity. There are countless examples of how his regime has become a platonic ideal of the corrupt swamp, from the pardon-for-cash operation it has been running for wealthy criminals of all stripes, to the DOJ’s announcement that it simply won’t be prosecuting corporate crimes anymore. But the clearest narrative connecting Trump and elite impunity—indeed, the most intuitively understandable indictment of how our institutions have failed to hold elites accountable for their depravity—is the one that’s for months been flowing out of the millions of documents that make up the Epstein files.
Thanks to horrifying references like these, the Trump administration has become deeply entangled and, in the eyes of many voters, incriminated in the Epstein saga. And that means Democrats have an opportunity to develop a broader message of opposition to elite impunity—one that rightfully combines pledges to hold both Epstein’s associates and the Trump administration accountable for their wanton criminality. Because the truth is, these two groups are one and the same. As Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff aptly put it, “We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It’s the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class. They are the elites they pretend to hate.”
Of course, it would be madness at this point to trust the Democratic establishment—so long led by the likes of Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers, each of whom spent years consorting with Epstein—to embrace this message. Thankfully, 2028 offers Democrats an opportunity to wipe the slate clean of their decrepitly complicit establishment.
This January, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva held a rally in front of a massive banner reading “Defense of Democracy.” He was there to veto legislation that Brazil’s opposition-controlled Congress had passed to lower Bolsonaro’s sentence from 27 to two years. After describing Bolsonaro’s attempted coup as a reminder that “democracy is not an unshakeable achievement,” Lula proclaimed, “In the name of the future, we do not have the right to forget the past.” Unlike Lula, America’s last Democratic administration failed to appreciate this essential truth. It is quite possible that this failure will prove lethal to our democracy. But if it’s not—if we are so fortunate as to have an opportunity to drive MAGA from power in 2026 and 2028—Democrats cannot be allowed to repeat their past mistakes. We must bring the architects of our current nightmare to justice—not in the name of the past, but in the name of the future.
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