Rules Are Made To Be Broken
Accountability, what is it good for? Ideally, stopping all of...this.
America is either a nation of laws, or a nation of none. Has it ever really been? At a certain point it’s not worth thinking too hard about because, at the very least, it’s known that the wealthier you are, the less applicable any law is to you. Better money buys better lawyers, more powerful friends, and, most importantly, the power to escape any form of accountability. This has enabled the vicious cycle in which we all currently live, where people like Donald Trump or Elon Musk are constantly labeled as liars, crooks, and charlatans but are never actually dealt with as such. Trump was convicted of however many counts of fraud last year, held liable for sexual abuse and defamation in civil court, and has stiffed countless contractors over the course of his career. Only a few examples among dozens of others. He’s been the president twice.
Let’s get local for a second. In 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had bribery and abuse of power charges brought against him by members of his own staff! 16 articles of impeachment were brought forth in the Texas legislature, and he was acquitted on all of them. In March of 2024, he had securities fraud charges dropped after he agreed to do 100 hours of community service. There’s a twisted comedic irony in a settlement like that being brought to a public servant. Paxton was reelected in 2022 despite all of this being public knowledge.
These are just two general examples of the bigger picture. Democrats are no stranger to this type of corruption either, but it’s even worse that they are the ones who ultimately never bring these people to justice. And this is where the repercussive effects of this vicious cycle get ugly. Ordinary people see corruption, criminality, and deceit rewarded with the highest positions of power on the planet. Why, then, should they have any reason to believe that the democratic institutions held in such high regard by Democrats are functioning even remotely as intended?
The disillusionment of America’s political system is not a secret. Apathy towards American democracy and politicians led 90 million eligible voters to just not even bother with this past election. Even thinking about politics is an immediately negative experience for people.
This past week, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa held a town hall for a room full of boisterous constituents. Almost entirely white retirees living in and around rural Iowa, the people attending the town hall were angry. Among all their grievances, the one that stood out the most was in regard to Trump’s defiance of the SCOTUS ruling that required him to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador back to the United States. As Sen. Grassley fumbled over his words to provide anything resembling an adequate defense, one attendee shouted something to the effect of, “Why should I have to pay a $1,200 court fine but Trump doesn’t have to?”
Often times corruption is dealt in the shadows. It hides behind the scenes, in secret, so as not to expose itself and run the risk of getting caught. Obviously the primary issue here is the administration’s extradition of legal US residents to a foreign prison camp without any due process, but the details of that are not as digestible to a median electorate. The defiance of the SCOTUS ruling, though, is an easy, cut-and-dry matter that has rural Iowans, a three-time Trump state, up in arms.
Over the last several decades, corruption has become increasingly unashamed. Using Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon as a basic modern starting point, the public can only take so many unabashed examples of zero accountability before the apathy sets in. Ken Klippenstein wrote a great article here on Substack about how nihilism is apparently a new target for the Trump administration. The Justice Department sees a string of assaults on public officials and Tesla dealerships, as well as the killing of the United Healthcare CEO, as a connected set of attacks stemming from a growing nihilistic sentiment among the public.
When you see the arbiters of global calamity and suffering continue to get away with it, with systems in place that are supposed to protect you simultaneously failing over and over, nihilism starts making a lot of sense. No one faced any sort of retribution for the lies and crimes of the War on Terror or the 2008 financial crisis. Trump and every Republican that defended January 6th and refused to certify the election saw zero repercussions. The Biden administration, openly defiant of international law, will never see any punishment for their perpetration of Israeli war crimes. This is all just within the last 25 years.
The laundry list for future Democratic administrations is impossibly long, and there are numerous to-dos that should be prioritized. One of those things is restoring justice to a country that has lost all sense of it. This doesn’t mean continuing to dish out slaps on the wrist. Merrick Garland and the Biden DOJ have done irreparable damage in their pussyfooting and meandering in holding Trump accountable for his election crimes and incitement of an insurrection. In their failure, all they did was legitimize the assertion from his base that he did nothing wrong. Counterintuitive in the most harmful way.
Obama bailed out the banks after the fallout of 2008 and refused to hold the Bush administration accountable for the War on Terror; may he run the risk of appearing too partisan. Enough is enough. All this has gotten us is a current administration that is kidnapping and detaining legal US residents for using their voice. They are rounding up legal US residents and shipping them away to prison camps. Killing them with kindness has done nothing but kill the civil liberties of the American people. It’s time to start locking these people up.
Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Tom Homan, ICE agents—I mean, the list goes on and on. Start making an example of people instead of trying to set an example that nobody follows. Americans, and really the rest of the world, are facing both the direct and indirect consequences of a centuries-long inability to do what’s right. It’s always been said that power corrupts people, and even the most noble of individuals are subject to the inevitable subversion that comes with wielding great power. It’d just be nice if we could have somebody do some tyranny against the bad guys for once.