There is a parable Jesus told of a manager who was about to get fired from his oversight of a wealthy estate. He spent his “lame duck” period cooking the accounts, lowering the debts of folks who owed money to his about-to-be-former boss. We generally see this as his attempt to ease his post-employment life, “so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes,” he said, wanting to ensure he had something — someone — to fall back on.
“What shall I do?” he had asked himself, when getting fired became apparent; “I am too old to dig and too proud to beg.”
The lesson the gospel writer appends to the story is that you should “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.”
This is an incredibly unsatisfying parable, all the more unsatisfying because we’re seeing its frightening reciprocity playing out before our eyes.
Donald Trump, soon-to-be-former President Trump, is trying to figure out what his life will be like after the presidency. “Elder Statesman" is definitely out. Speculation is that all of his refusal to concede and his 40 or so lawsuits challenging the election outcome are just ways of buying time, keeping his supporters on his side. The GOP leadership is playing his game because they are determined that his supporters continue to be on their side too. They are bound, much as the boss was bound in the parable, by public opinion as they perceive it.
This would be all well and good if it were only a neat sermon illustration. But it is far more than that, and far more vile.
Trump has lost interest in governing, say news reports, and we know he wasn’t all that interested to begin with. His entire fixation now is on stoking the fires of his ego once he leaves office. That is bad for us, very bad. We ponder and celebrate the end of Trump, but clear-headed observers recognize that “trumpism” is here to stay — unless we take strong measures.
We don’t have a strong history of strong measures. In fact, we do the opposite. Ford pardoned Nixon; Agnew pleaded no contest to something less than corruption, and only paid a fine. George Bush I pardoned Reagan's minions, including his Secretary of State, for illegal sales of arms in the Iran-Contra scandal; Bush II commuted the sentence his own VP’s convicted chief of staff (and Trump later pardoned him); Obama refused to consider war crimes charges against Bush II and Cheney. Because we need to move forward. And don’t tell me none of that led to the state of the Republic now, the disregard for law that has been standard procedure in the Trump White House.
But our queasiness with holding folks accountable goes back way further than the 1970s. At least by a century.
When the Civil War ended in 1865, the question loomed: what to do about the states that had seceded? What to do with the political and military leaders who had led such treason against the Union? The short answer became “meh, nothing, really.”
While there was a brief period of expectation that Confederate States would ratify the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, ending slavery, expanding the vote and forever changing the way they did business, that quickly fell away, in part by the complicity of the Supreme Court and the Southern, slave-owning President Johnson. There was a brief period of Reconstruction when Federal troops occupied former Confederate states and insisted on good behavior, but the Compromise of 1877 ended that occupation and gave us 100 years of Jim Crow, with a deal that decided the presidency for Rutherford Hayes in exchange for Southern racism. Which, of course, required Northern racism as well. Black Americans got thrown under the bus yet again, and a century later, white Southerners got a Robert E Lee holiday, as a counterbalance to the federal Martin Luther King Jr Day. Because we can’t tell the difference between the righteous and the hideous.
Post-war, with 750,000 dead soldiers and a country in tatters, hardly any returning Confederates were made to swear a loyalty oath to the Union, and the top Confederate leaders, Gen. Robert E Lee and Pres. Jefferson Davis, were pardoned. No one was tried for treason, no one executed or imprisoned as a traitor.
And look where it got us. More than 150 years later, we are still nursing those old grievances, still surrounded by monuments to the “glorious lost cause,” still divided by old loyalties, still haunted by that Confederate flag, which shows up mostly as an anti-Black threat and in places remarkably far from the South.
And now Trump.
Pundits believe the danger will be done and the threat will be over when he leaves office, by hook or by crook. I find that optimism to be naive and unwarranted.
I believe we are staring down the barrel of a new “lost cause,” the Trump presidency that was cut short in an insult to 70 million voters. I don’t know how many of those folks will ultimately maintain their sworn fealty to him; maybe only 30 or 40 million, maybe only 10 or 20 million. But how many does it take to keep the storms stirred, to keep racial reconciliation at bay, to keep the GOP in obeisance? and how many does it take for the Democratic Party to continue believing they can simply try harder, play nicer and win favor with these white racist opportunists?
Trump isn’t going away. His niece, Mary Trump, has commented that “irrelevance is a fate worse than death for him.” His lawsuits, his mulling a 2024 run, his desire to own a news channel, his command over a large swath of the electorate, his rearranging leaders in the Pentagon, all point to his “whatever it takes” campaign to remain in the public eye. He will no doubt continue to hold rallies, incite violence, poison democracy, and crown the next generation of leaders of a fascist agenda, and we all will be the poorer for it. Our mental and civic health will suffer.
Plus, as others have made the point, he has a whole lot of debt and a head potentially full of state secrets. Why wouldn’t he try to exercise the Art of the Deal one more time?
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Germany made sure after Hitler that he was never venerated in public and made it a crime to display swastikas. Mussolini was likewise dispatched.
Trump should be, could be contained. While he may well orchestrate his own pardon for any and all federal offenses prior to leaving office, state laws can still do what the Senate would not — convict and remove him from public life. If he doesn’t somehow finagle such a pardon, the federal government ought to do what it would not for Bush or Cheney or Nixon or Reagan — try, convict and sentence him to punishment that fits the crimes. Minimally he should be removed from the public eye, stripped of the privileges accorded former presidents, and disqualified for anything in the next decade that smacks of hero-worship or conciliation. No statues, no holidays, no postage stamps, no streets named after him, no FCC broadcast license, no book deals to profit from his crimes, no federal contracts, leases or appointments, no more briefings, no ceremonial anything, banned forever from candidacy for public office. (His children should also be purged from public life.) Assets frozen or forfeited, lifetime imprisonment away from the public eye, (Alcatraz is available, but we’d have to discontinue the tours), as our way of fulfilling the requirement of lifetime guards.
Or … well, consider the Rosenbergs. (And have you ever noticed that we execute the left, but forgive the right?)
The Mueller Report is a handy first draft of the case for such a thing.
Of course, I don’t expect us to do any of this (and it is a sad state of things that I have to stipulate that I’m only talking about official processes, not rogue actors). He could be contained, but we will let it go, because that is what we do. Even if New York — the city or the state — manages to try him for financial or sex crimes of which there are apparently plenty, officials will face tremendous pressure to settle with a manageable fine (perhaps in installments) or some other non-incarceration resolution. He has suggested he might leave the country, but exile isn’t what it used to be, with social media bridging the oceans. He could wreak havoc from a world away, just for the hell of it. And he would. His passport should be revoked along with his phone.
We are “destitute of political memory,” wrote Frederick Douglass, in 1870. “We get the government we deserve” wrote Joseph de Maistre, the 18th century philosopher, (though I heard it first from Don Henley in the 1980s). Biden has been elected, a neoliberal to lead a party that has never had the stomach for confronting the right, though it doesn’t mind demonizing the left; and Congress will likely remain split — or barely in Democratic hands but with one or two right-of-center folks who keep pining about working “across the aisle” or “letting bygones be bygones” — while Trump, perhaps too old to dig but not at all proud, has already begun his begging.
So, keep pining, and watch us get what we deserve — a Trump who looms large, who exercises outsized power in electoral politics, who with his god-awful progeny will continue to poison the country for decades.
In the parable, the manager was commended by his boss as shrewd. Watch and see what shrewd really looks like and the damage it can do. Just watch. A hundred years from now, Trump flags will wave, civil strife will go on, and we’ll say we have no idea how that happened.