What Accountability Looks Like

It’s arrived for Donald Trump, and it isn’t going away.

Dave Sanders/New York Times

There’s a photo of Trump exiting the trial last week, waving off the press and with his chin sunken into his chest and his eyes closed, where he looks hunched over and positively frail. When I first saw it, I found myself astonished at the weakness it conveyed, as if in one snapped split-second, the veil was lifted, and the man who has held America in his iron fist for almost a decade of threats and looming autocracy and actual violence was revealed to just be a shell of a weak old man.

There’s a lot of folks on social media (real or bots) who are spending a lot of time these days posting things like “he’ll never be held accountable” and “we all know nothing will ever happen to him.” I’ve spent a lot of time in response on my daily YouTube broadcast ResistanceLive talking about how commentary like that is straight-no-chaser voter suppression, because it engenders despair, cynicism, and distrust of democratic systems and the rule of law.

But there’s more to it than that. Because if you’re paying attention, you might have noticed that accountability for Donald Trump has actually arrived.

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Consider for a moment what has already happened in this year alone. First, Trump was found liable in the second trial on defamation of E. Jean Carroll in January, to the tune of $83 million. Next, Trump and his cadre of criminal family and friends, along with their company, were found liable to the State of New York for civil fraud for almost half a billion dollars in February.

Now, here we sit, entering week three of Trump’s first felony criminal trial that began in April, and he goes to court every day with no one but his lawyers. Not a single family member has shown up to support him, not even his sycophant sons. 

And while he rails daily outside the courtroom about how he believes he’s the victim– not American democracy, not those who lost their lives on January 6th and in its aftermath, not those families he separated at the border and not the pregnant folks who are bleeding out in bathrooms and waiting room floors because of the three ideologues he put on the Supreme Court– he can’t even stay awake in the courtroom to make a halfway decent impression in front of the jury that will decide his fate.

Fascists, it turns out, sometimes fall with a whimper rather than a bang.

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There is a looming awareness bleeding even into the GOP now that Trump is done. Unable to function, complete a full sentence, or even draw crowds of more than a few hundred to his ever-less-frequent rallies, his loudest moments resemble the crazy racist grandpa screaming from the porch about the teenagers on his lawn. Nikki Haley has still gotten 30% of the vote in recent Republican primaries even though she dropped out the day after Super Tuesday in March.

There’s a lot to be said about what made Trump so terrifying— about his narcissism, his willingness to incite violence, the mass death from his sheer neglect during the pandemic that followed his never-ending need for praise from governors who just wanted PPE and ventilators, and the mob-cult that still follows in his wake. There’s a lot to be said about the folks who are smarter than him who are willing to stand in front of the Supreme Court and say that, for criminal liability at least, he should walk away scot-free because he once ascended to the highest office in the land.

But for now, if you’re looking closely, you’ll realize that we’re in the end game. Not a moment too soon, and with no complacency or quarter, because we have to absolutely wipe the floor with Trump and his enablers and his entire party in November.

But make no mistake about it, he is a withering, frail figure now, and the consequence of his crimes will doggedly chase him for the rest of his natural days.

So what is accountability? It’s an undignified end to an abuser, where he is finally realized to be as small and as powerless and as all alone as he has secretly known himself to be his whole life.

It’s here.