Interestingly, the tweet omits a key phrase from her quote: she said
We hold our leaders accountable when warranted. That’s a phrase that hides a myriad of failures to hold anyone to account, from LBJ on Vietnam to Reagan on Iran-Contra to Dubya on Iraq—you name it, and we can name more. Sovereign is she who decides the state of exception to accountability.Psaki’s thesis here is that the indictment is good because it shows that our institutions are strong and will stand up to someone doing (in her baffling phrase) a “stress test” of democracy. This is plainly absurd. The events in question took place seven years ago when Trump was not president. He has faced almost no sanction for what he did as president and he got off scott-free for what he did in his attempt to subvert the presidential election.
By any standard, if accountability means consequences for actions, Trump has faced no accountability at all. Going after Trump on the Stormy Daniels issue is an admission of institutional failure or inability (which amount to the same thing), not of strength.
Paul Musgrave
In the days following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, I was talking about it with a friend who was stunned by these events and thought that Trump will surely be held accountable this time around. I held the opposite view, namely that Trump will mostly get away with this latest afront on American institutions, as he had countless times before – more than two years later, I haven’t been proven wrong yet.
You may argue that this indictment is significant, that others may soon follow, that Trump will be so distracted by the ongoing legal proceedings that he will have little time to dedicate to the primaries and his Presidential campaign. But he could also cast the trial as unjust political persecution by a Democratic district attorney (a task made easier by the pervasiveness of elections in the American justice system), and drag out proceedings until next year’s election, a tactic he employed many times before. Apparently, a conviction in this Stormy Daniels case wouldn’t prevent Trump from running for office or assuming the Presidency – and if he wins a second term, he will stop at nothing to obstruct investigations and intimidate prosecutors and witnesses. Underestimating Trump is what propelled him into the Presidency in the first place…
It came as no surprise – to me at least – that many Republicans rallied behind Trump, again, to denounce the judicial process, including his top competitor in the primaries, Ron DeSantis. I guess the calculus among senior Republicans is that, should Trump win re-election, he would be preoccupied with these lawsuits, leaving them more-or-less free reign to govern. And I suspect that DeSantis is angling for the VP ticket, which would get him into the White House, theoretically with a much better chance of becoming the Republican candidate after Trump’s term.
What’s more striking about this whole situation is that it’s the first time a (former) American president is indicted. For all their grandstanding as the world’s greatest democracy, Americans are remarkably reluctant to hold their leaders accountable – as opposed to multiple other states with weaker institutions or democratic traditions. There were plenty of cases where more accountability would have been justified: Nixon was pardoned over Watergate, and a recent story detailed how a Republican official essentially conspired with Iran to sabotage Carter’s re-election to Ronald Reagan’s advantage. Despite their proffered democratic ideals, Americans hold an unhealthy admiration for fame and status, almost as if they are secretly longing for an unassailable Monarch figure to rule them.
One final thought on this: days before the indictment, AI-generated images of a Trump arrest started circulating online and… nobody took the bait! This set off multiple speculations as to why; I have two possible explanations to offer: either people are so fed up with Trump and they assume he’s constantly lying (the optimistic scenario where his support wanes ahead of the elections), or they have become so cynical about the US justice system that they didn’t believe Trump would ever be held accountable (the pessimistic scenario where US citizens are disenchanted with their institutions and political parties and would likely lead to another win by Trump or a similar candidate promising a radical overhaul of the system).
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