America Needs to Reckon With What Trump 2.0 Has Done. Planning Should Start Now.

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A reckoning is coming for the Trump administration. Rising numbers of Americans want accountability for all the crimes, corruption, and cruelties committed by the Trump administration since January 2025. One poll has suggested that a whopping 77 percent of Democrats believe criminal prosecution of administration officials is warranted for actions that range from their military strikes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement attacks on citizens. Democrats must be hearing these demands from voters regularly, as many—including centrists like Sen. Elissa Slotkin—are promising robust oversight if they take Congress in the November midterms. That’s good, and it makes accountability an issue for the upcoming midterms. But we also need a long-term vision of how accountability fits into American democracy, with an appeal to those across the political spectrum. The planning should start now.

It will be a long road ahead. For one thing, Americans are skeptical. A recent Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans lack trust that their leaders will ever be held accountable under U.S. law. After two failed impeachments of Donald Trump and the Supreme Court’s determination in Trump v. United States that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, that view is understandable. Even so, the public appetite for a government that can hold politicians accountable for illegal acts appears to be growing. A raft of new books on political and elite impunity—like End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran, and Profiles in Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg—are storming the bestseller list, signaling a simmering anger about the law’s inequities and the dangers to democracy. Meanwhile, some of Trump’s staunchest rank-and-file supporters are going quiet.

Americans are right to demand an end to impunity. We have never had an administration that has committed so many crimes and so much corruption at home and abroad. It has disobeyed court orders, shuttered federal agencies without any basis in law, repressed freedom of expression, pursued vindictive prosecutions against perceived political enemies, assaulted our cities and peaceful protesters, caused lasting damage to the global economy and global health, undermined international institutions, and failed to comply with a range of American laws touching on the environment, education, climate, and public health. Trump, his family, and his associates have engaged in self-dealing at a level never seen at this scale in American history. All the while, the administration has sought to crush the pillars of democratic civil society, such as independent journalism, colleges and universities, social sciences, and the legal profession.

Congressional oversight will have to be the first part of the accountability agenda, but its path will be bumpy and  less effective than promoters may hope. Needless to say, this ideally should start with Americans first electing a Congress next month that will pursue oversight. Yet even with a Congress doing its job, Trump and his satraps will still be in power, and are sure to stonewall committees, refuse subpoenas, and block inquiries while crying weaponization, witch hunt, and Trump derangement syndrome. Elon Musk, himself a likely target of congressional investigation, could juice an anti-accountability algorithm on his personal propaganda platform, X. Republicans will try to exploit Congress’ historically high disapproval ratings to undermine anything they do. With that kind of propaganda and noise, many Americans might perceive these attempts as just more chaos and instability rather than a Congress finally stepping into its assigned constitutional role of checking the executive. That, at least, would be the Trump White House’s spin.

All of this means that the real reckoning—accountability backed by the force of law—will have to begin in January 2029, if (or when, depending on your level of optimism) Trump is replaced by an administration committed to a democratic future. Without the hard edge and clarity of legal processes and consequences following this administration, America could enable antidemocratic forces to persist indefinitely. Impunity for Trump-era crimes and corruption will guarantee their return and fuel the existing cynicism throughout our society.

It may seem distant, but congressional leaders and experts across American society, drawn as much as possible from the left, center, and the remaining rule-of-law supporters on the right, should begin to develop a vision and plan for accountability now. For one thing, they must explain to voters the price Trump and his circle must pay for their brazenly unlawful conduct. They need to socialize a language of accountability that promotes rule of law, democracy, and due process while eschewing talk of retribution, retaliation, or political payback. They need to articulate how an accountability agenda will also support the pursuit of popular policies in the public interest, whether it’s affordability or long-term issues such as the concentration of oligarchic wealth, a sustainable climate, or healthcare. An effective approach to accountability that goes beyond prosecution may also require new laws and institutions—these should be hashed out and ready to be created when Trump leaves office.

So what does that actually look like? What should be the plan to build high-level accountability into an American government that has, it turns out, so long been without it?

At the very least, the accountability agenda will require an independent Department of Justice pursuing criminal investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the actions that most experts and officials view as manifestly unlawful. This includes leadership responsibility for the military’s murder of hundreds of people in the Caribbean and killings of civilians in Iran, and violations of fundamental rules in the law of armed conflict; the illegal deportation, inhumane treatment, and arbitrary detention of migrants, asylum-seekers, and even U.S. citizens, which together constitute crimes against humanity; and the killings of and threats against protesters by ICE and Border Patrol.

Other potential offenses will require investigation just to be discovered and determined to be subject to criminal or civil liability. Corruption by the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” as Sen. Jon Ossoff calls them, may involve federal crimes, such as insider trading, wire fraud, and securities violations. Though the Supreme Court has stripped anti-corruption law of much of its power, some, like Sen. Andy Kim, are thinking creatively about how to reinforce it. Civil liability and asset forfeiture will have to be on the table for those responsible.

Even with the most robust investigations, not all serious harms will be—or should be—subject to criminal law or civil liability. For instance, a democratic government committed to the rule of law will require de-Trumpification, the kind of lustration (the removal of members of the law-breaking regime from the bureaucracy) that other societies have undertaken to deal with authoritarian regime figures and staffers who have burrowed into the bureaucracy. All of the various loopholes in law that provide officials with vast discretion—and there are too many—must be closed through legislative initiatives, while the independence of agency inspectors general, for instance, must be better protected and empowered. Lawyers who carried out Trump administration policies, breaking professional obligations, should face disbarment proceedings. Elite institutions will need to adopt some gatekeeping, refusing to platform Trump officials who do not, for instance, acknowledge the reality of his 2020 election loss, in order to reinforce social opposition to authoritarianism—though this is something most have failed to do even after Trump’s insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.

Much of Trump’s assault on democratic institutions remains shrouded in secrecy. For instance, Americans have limited insight into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the extent of its employees’ and leadership’s criminal acts or other violations of law, or how Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, engaged in an unprecedented stripping of federal programs, grants, and authorities.

Trump’s second administration has constituted such a broad assault on American law and values that we will require something more than prosecutions: a society-wide initiative to deal with it. This should take the form of a congressionally authorized, department-by-department Truth Commission for America that investigates and establishes the details of administration malfeasance in every agency of the federal government, one that develops historical records detailing the destruction and crime and proposes possibilities for further criminal investigation, legislation, and constitutional revision.

Congress can begin identifying the elements of an accountability agenda, starting with the creation of an Accountability Task Force to study and plan for the post-Trump world. Some states, such as Illinois and Minnesota, have established commissions to begin the work of accountability already. We also can learn from democracies around the world that have themselves recognized the importance of accountability to democracy: high-level prosecutions from countries like Brazil, Argentina, and South Korea, corruption investigations and penalties from Hungary and France, lustration from Germany and post-Soviet Eastern Europe, judicial reform from Poland, and truth commissions from South Africa and Guatemala, among many others. Democracies do this as a matter of course, and we can, too, even if we modify these lessons, and learn from their shortcomings, for our own particular contexts.

Not all Americans—not even all Democrats—will be on board. Some establishment figures will reject an accountability agenda in service of the chimera of bipartisanship and problem-solving. Going after those responsible for wrongdoing, they will argue, will deepen divisions rather than deliver reconciliation, aligning them with a Supreme Court majority that worried about “a cycle of factional strife” more than administration criminal wrongdoing.

These are the same kinds of justifications used by President Gerald Ford when he pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes, by President George H.W. Bush when he pardoned perpetrators of the Iran-Contra scandal, and by President Barack Obama when he urged that we look forward instead of backward at the torture regime established by the George W.
Bush administration. Did any of those bring unity? Did any of those tamp down the tendency of the powerful to violate basic rules of democracy? Did they stop Trump’s Department of Justice from its vindictive prosecutions and attacks on civil society? Are we more united today because of their self-described magnanimity?

We are not. And needless to say, on his way out of office, President Trump will abuse the pardon power in a bid to immunize himself and his closest officials. Making matters worse, the Supreme Court gave him a Get Out of Jail Free card by immunizing presidents from criminal liability for “official acts” in Trump v. United States. Federal prosecutors, whether at the Justice Department or the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the military, will have to navigate efforts to avoid liability and challenge their scope and legitimacy. Some of the crimes may be amenable to state prosecutions, which the pardon power does not reach, and federal prosecutors should be open to helping those succeed. The most heinous of crimes—those constituting war crimes or crimes against humanity—may even be subject to criminal process by prosecutors outside the United States.

Accountability, to be clear, is not retribution. It is leveling the system so that we can genuinely say that no person is above the law. It is promising due process and even forbearance for those who participate in genuine acts of truth-telling. But it has to happen if we are to build a democratic society.