President Obama was, so far, the best President of my lifetime, but he was far from perfect. Chief among his failures was the failure to bring to account those who were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Nobody ever went to jail for that nearly catastrophic event, which brought the U.S. to the brink of another Great Depression and was the product of depraved, heedless greed and malfeasance.
Many argued that the malefactors were simply too obscure, and their crimes too hard to understand--it took a movie, "The Big Short" to explain it and that movie had to include scenes in bubble baths to illustrate what had happened when financial bubbles burst--and it would be hard to define who actually did illegal things, beyond the ordinary self serving Wall Street types, but driving around Iceland, you can see prisons where the white collar criminals who damaged Iceland are housed. They served their time. Americans were not nearly as scrupulous in seeking justice as the Icelanders.
Obama said, "It's done and past now. Let's move on." But isn't all crime in the past? We try people and bring them to account for what they did in the past.
Hermann Goering, at his Nuremberg trial huffed and dismissed the proceedings as "victor's justice," as if bombing civilian populations in London, the Netherlands, France and Poland was not a crime, nor even immoral, not to mention what was uncovered in the concentration camps across the Third Reich.
The U.S. Supreme Court, a packed Court of Trump's creation with the connivance of Mitch McConnell and his willing accomplices in the Republican party (like Susan Collins) says that whatever Mr. Trump does in office, he is protected against judgment--he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. In fact, Mr. Trump can fire away on 5th Avenue, and then pardon himself.
But the Court can be unpacked if there is enough outrage and enough Democrats in Congress.
Hitler was reportedly profoundly shaken when he saw the photographs of Mussolini and his mistress hanging in a square in Milan, and he wanted to be sure his body was burned to ashes so nobody could do that to him and Eva Braun. He saw vengeance coming.
That kind of retribution is rare, however--The Romanov czarist family was shot, but the emperors of Germany, Austria/Hungary and the Ottoman empire simply retired.
Trump, will, of course, issue blanket pardons for everyone in his circle, but one thing we have learned from Trump is the law doesn't matter. All that matters is the judge.
The New York Times ran a front page article on the death threats to Congressmen and Congresswomen, and even the gun toting Marjorie Taylor Greene complained about that.
In his Sunday Boston Globe piece, Stephen Kinzer, a professor at Brown, reminds us there are plenty of guilty folks in both Democratic and Republican parties and if the Democrats go after Republicans, they'd better clean their own house first, and in this he echoes Secretary of Commerce Scott Bessent who has sounded that refrain, as only he can in his creepy way. "Get your own house in order," Bessent smugly tells his Democratic interlocuter, Senator Elizabeth Warren, after she asks the SEC to investigate Donald Trump's stock trades as he manipulated the market with his off again/on again forays into war in the Middle East and opening and closing the Strait of Hormuz.
There are surprisingly few treatments of what comes next. Not just immediately after the election but after, after.
"Embracing Escape," by John Dower tells the story of what happened in Japan after the surrender. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, the Japanese emperor was allowed to live, as the Americans saw it would be far easier to manage the Japanese with the emperor alive.
There were war crime trials in Japan but they were limited and got far less attention than Nuremberg.
"The Defeated," a TV series set in immediate post war Berlin portrays the dissolution of society in the days before the Marshall plan for restitution of Germany came into effect.
Oddly, "Gone with the Wind," Margaret Mitchell's pot boiler, addresses the after, after at length. Mitchell believed the Ku Klux Klan was a noble and necessary organization to keep the freed slaves from raping white women and she believes the slaves were better off in slavery and she says large numbers starved after emancipation, as they were pathetically sitting on road sides unable to feed themselves--much like the urban homeless of today. For Mitchell, the after, after was a disgraceful abrogation of white supremacy in managing the post war realities.
The fact is, the rich, like Jared Kushner do not believe they have done anything wrong--that he embarked on trips to rich Arab countries as an official American government envoy, while making deals to enrich himself by billions as a condition for American government support--but none of this strikes him as anything to apologize about. He's entitled to do a little business the way the Saudi ruling family is accustomed to doing business: the government is the family and the family is the government. That's just the way the world works for Jared.
As Kinzer notes, "Failing to hold high officials accountable for their actions increases the likelihood that their errors--or crimes--will be repeated. It also fuels public outrage that destabilizes our political system. Washington forgives and forgets too easily."
And that has been Trump's great insight: Americans are profoundly cynical--they think America is, in reality, much more like "The Godfather" than it is like "Erin Brockovich."
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