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Trump Must Be Held Accountable

"The Two-Pronged Test That Could Put Trump in Prison
Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony Changed Our Minds About Indicting Donald Trump"

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
January 8, 2021

IMAGE
Impunity has defined Trump’s Presidency. If he remains unpunished, his antidemocratic movement
will persist in mainstream American culture. Photograph by Andrew Harnik / AP / Shutterstock

The first important news item concerning the Save America March in Washington, D.C., on January 6th—the one that broadened into an insurrectionary riot—came from the local police blotter. On December 30th, a Superior Court judge in the District of Columbia issued a warrant for the arrest of a thirty-six-year-old Florida man whose name was rendered in legal documents as Henry Tarrio but who goes by Enrique, and who was wanted on a charge of destruction of property. Earlier that month, during another election protest, Tarrio had torn down and burned a Black Lives Matter banner from a historically Black church not far from the White House. On Monday, when Tarrio arrived in Washington to attend the rally, D.C. police officers pulled over the silver Honda in which he was travelling once it entered the District’s borders.“A traffic stop was conducted,” the officers Michael Reese and Lashay Makal wrote. “Officers were able to confirm the individual seated in the rear passenger seat to be Defendant Tarrio. Defendant Tarrio was placed under arrest for the above listed warrant and was transported to the 1st District Main Station for processing.”

Tarrio is the chairman of the Proud Boys, a pro-Trump paramilitary group. In recent years, he has worked in a gray area between criminal activity and formal electoral politics; Tarrio is also the chief of staff for a campaign group called Latinos for Trump. Tarrio worked for small businesses during his twenties and thirties (installing security equipment, managing a poultry farm), but he was also a criminal: convicted of theft, in 2004; sentenced to more than two years in federal prison, in 2013, for rebranding and reselling stolen medical devices. When the arresting officers searched his bag, they found two high-capacity ammunition magazines (neither was loaded), each stamped with a Proud Boys logo in gold. The arrest was a passionless execution of a legal warrant, but it was also an act of social prudence. A known criminal with a recent history of insurrectionary acts was arriving in D.C. for a rally that always held the possibility of violence. If your interest was social order, you’d want him detained. When the President’s supporters rioted, many Proud Boys among them, Tarrio was in custody.

A striking feature of the insurrection at the Capitol was how little effort the rioters made to conceal their identities,...

[...]

On Monday afternoon, I called David Blight, the acclaimed historian of the American Civil War and its aftermath. He was worrying about Trump’s impunity from a different point of view. The insurrection at the Capitol was still two days away, but news of the President’s Saturday call to Brad Raffensperger had recently surfaced; in it, Trump urged the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes,” in order to help overturn the results of the Presidential election. This reminded Blight of the decision that officials in Washington had faced, in 1865 and 1866, about how to handle the criminality of Confederate leaders. Blight’s view was that the officials had let the ex-Confederates off much too lightly, and that as a result a sense of impunity came to characterize the South throughout Reconstruction and eventually in the segregation era.

Blight said, “There was a moment there in 1865 when lots of ex-Confederates expected to be truly punished”—in prison, or hanged. Henry Wirz, the commander of the infamous Andersonville prison camp, where thousands of captured Union soldiers died from neglect and starvation, was convicted of war crimes and executed. Otherwise, Blight said, “Jefferson Davis was the only person arrested. And he was released after two years, because he was never fully indicted. He was released in an act of reconciliation, and his bail was paid by rich Northerners, including Cornelius Vanderbilt.” Blight noted that the Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, was held in a prison in Charlestown, Boston, through the summer of 1865, but afterward “he was just released and sent home, back to Georgia, and then immediately elected to Congress.” In 1866, Stephens gave formal testimony to a government commission in which he reaffirmed his belief in the right to secede.

Because the violence and horror of the Confederacy went unpunished, Blight said, it could be euphemized until, in the minds of many who fought for it—and many, too, who didn’t—the defense of the slaveholding South became a heroic endeavor. Blight’s prize-winning history “Race and Reunion .. https://www.amazon.com/Race-Reunion-Civil-American-Memory/dp/0674008197?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50 ,” from 2001, is an examination of the way that the Civil War has been remembered, especially in the half century after Appomattox. Veterans from both sides were brought together for reunions, from which Black veterans were excluded, to celebrate their shared valor. The rehabilitation of the South was in part a political act, by Southerners who used violence and voter suppression to defeat Reconstruction. But it was also, Blight said, “a long-term cultural phenomenon of spirit and sentiment that includes everything from popular literature to blue-grey reunions, until this culture of reconciliation sets in.”

A similarly nostalgic culture will follow Trump after he leaves office. The MAGA movement shares with the Lost Cause a rejection of historical fact, a consuming cult of personality, and a valorization of violence. “Look, there has to be some accountability,” Blight said. People loved to quote from the final passage of Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address, with its call to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” But Blight said that was a selective reading. In the same speech, Lincoln said, of the war, “If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Healing was a secondary consideration. Blight said, “Most of that speech is about retribution.”

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