Unity requires truth. Healing requires accountability

And it must start at the top. That is what is at stake in the second impeachment trial of President Trump.

In the aftermath of a terrible social injury, the question becomes: how do we heal? How do we move forward?

Societies from Germany to South Africa have had to wrestle with that painful question. In engaging that process, there are three core inquiries that must be addressed fully and honestly.

1) What happened?

2) Who was affected?

3) What must be done to repair the harm and ensure this never happens again?

Truth and accountability provide a foundation that a society can build on. They make sustainable healing — justice — possible. The persistence of lies and the failure to hold accountable those responsible for grievous harms, on the other hand, plunge a society into the abyss.

We now have the opportunity to demand the former. To learn from our history and provide the accountability that has eluded our country so long — and that which constitutional democracy now requires.

I. What happened?

The full accounting of the insurrection on January 6th will take years of investigation and review. But what we do know is that the picture gets darker and more disturbing with each passing day, as more information is revealed.

Even before the November election, President Trump said that if he lost the election it was because it was rigged. He said the same before 2016, before votes were even cast. This was never surprising given Trump’s psychological profile.

After the actual election he continued these claims, insisting it was stolen from him and the subject of massive fraud. These claims were made without evidence, which is why they were thrown out of court nearly sixty times. The Attorney General refuted them. Our election security czar, a lifelong Republican, deemed the election the “most secure in history.” Local election officials unanimously confirmed this conclusion, with every single state certifying their results.

But the “big lie” persisted. And it was legitimized by Republican officials. By Republican Attorneys General who filed an unprecedented lawsuit to throw out the electoral results of the swing states that tipped for President-Elect Biden by Supreme Court fiat. By Republican members of Congress, who gave oxygen and institutional credibility to these “stop the steal” conspiracies. Republican Senator Ben Sasse has stated that he did not speak with a single Republican senator who believed these lies. But they indulged them out of fear. Fear of a President insisting on them and a base who now believed them.

And President Trump did more than make allegations. He acted on them. He pressured local election officials, calling them directly and summoning them to the White House. He threatened the Georgia secretary of state with criminal consequences if he didn’t “find 11,780 votes.” He took every possible step to overturn the election.

To their credit, many of our institutions — the courts, local election officials, and others — held the line. They resisted this pressure and performed their duty. But the spread and persistence of the big lie, and its repetition by so many elected Republicans who knew better, had an impact. Nearly 70% of Republican voters came to believe it. Let that sink in: a supermajority of the voters of one party believe — falsely — that an election was stolen. As I’ve written elsewhere, this high number wasn’t entirely unpredictable; after all, the same percentage believed President Obama wasn’t born in the United States — Mr. Trump’s original lie that vaulted him to power. But that did not make the spread of the “big lie,” which touched on such a fundamental institution, any less disturbing.

The logical implication of this narrative of a “stolen election,” like many other lost causes in history, was always predictable. It would end in violence. And that is exactly what happened.

President Trump hyped his followers that the “stop the steal” rallies taking place on January 6th would be “wild!” He told a crowd coursing with feral anger that “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He told the crowd the election had been “stolen” from them and that it was time to “fight much harder” and “take back our country.” He said the crowd needed to “get rid of” Republican Congressmen who voted to finalize the democratic process. He told them that the party “fights like a boxer with his hands behind his back,” suggesting they needed to throw blows instead. He told them he would “never concede,” that his followers “needed to be strong,” before finally telling them “lets walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

They listened. Only an hour after Trump’s rally drew to a close, his followers acted on this message. They marched towards the Capitol, passing a noose on their way. And then they began to breach the seat of our government — an event that had not happened since 1814. Not in the Civil War. Not in World War II.

Images speak louder than words for what happened next.

The Capitol was stormed. The crowd chanted “stop the steal” and “hang Mike Pence.”

Capitol windows were smashed in, as insurrectionists climbed their way through. Our government had no way of knowing who was armed.

A law enforcement officer protecting the Capitol was murdered.

Insurrectionists came within seconds of breaching the Senate Chamber at a time when Senators were meant to be consummating the democratic process. They wore military style tactical gear, and flashed zip-ties to restrain politicians. Pipe bombs, molotov cocktails, and an assault rifle were found on Capitol grounds.

House members were forced to shelter in place with gas masks, while police — in their last line of defense — aimed their weapons through the shattered windows of the House chamber.

The insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol, and law enforcement barely held the line as they moved forward. One cop was physically crushed in a doorway as they tried to force their way open. Police had to fire on another as they sought to break into offices of Congressional leadership.

They made clear who they were hunting down. They looked for Vice-President Pence, for Speaker Pelosi’s office, and for Minority Leader Schumer (full disclosure, an office I used to work in). They yelled “Where’s Nancy?” and “tell Pelosi were coming for that bitch.” Eventually they broke into her office, all the while her staff hid in closets, under tables, in the dark.

They smashed in doors and took materials. Historical artifacts were destroyed. Feces were streaked across the walls.

We have no way of fully knowing how compromised the Capitol is now. Whether listening devices were placed or sensitive national security material stolen.

And amidst the chaos, the Confederate flag flew through the halls of Congress for the first time. Neo-Nazis were not far behind. 6MWE means six million wasn’t enough, referring to Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

These were the kinds of groups fueling a chaos of the most dangerous kind, which reached the very dome of the Capitol.

It is hard to overstate how close we came to full blown disaster. A coup. More and more reporting indicates that if security inside the Capitol had responded minutes or even seconds later, armed insurrectionists could have harmed and even killed elected legislators in the seat of the Article I branch of government. There remain open questions about the complete security failures that allowed for such a moment, including infiltration within our police, planning for the attack by members of Congress, and limitations placed on Capitol security by Trump’s appointees. But what is clear is that this was a modern day Reichstag fire, and one of the darkest moments in American history.

During the storming of the Capitol, however, President Trump was reportedly “borderline enthusiastic” if not “delighted” (as reported by a Republican Senator with a White House aide) because it meant the election certification was being derailed. He repeated on Twitter the process was fraudulent, and when pressured to make a statement to tell insurrectionists to leave he told his followers “we love you, you’re very special.” He reportedly delayed sending in the national guard as reinforcements until Vice-President Pence intervened. By then, the damage was largely done.

Armed insurrectionists had physically stormed the Capitol to stop the consummation of the Democratic process.

The Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85). Not since the Civil War have we seen actions, perpetrated by our own citizens, that more singularly reflect that definition.

President Trump said the next day his actions and statements to the group that stormed the Capitol within an hour later were “totally appropriate.” He failed to take any responsibility or express remorse for his role.

II. Who was affected?

Five people died, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Sicknick.

Multiple lawmakers have caught COVID-19, likely in part to the refusal of Republican members of Congress to wear masks when they were confined sheltering in place.

The United States can no longer say we had a peaceful transition of power, the hallmark of a democracy.

And as a result, the Capitol is now overflowing with members of the National Guard, who must protect our first branch of government from future threats — a visual reflection of the perilous state of our democracy. The FBI reports there are plans for armed “protests” in every single state on inauguration day.

Our country is left shaken, traumatized, and humiliated on the world’s stage.

III. What must be done to repair the harm, and ensure this never happens again?

The United States has had chances to deliver accountability before. After the Civil War, the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was charged with treason. But the trial was waved off when President Andrew Johnson pardoned Davis and everyone else who raised arms against our country on behalf of the Confederacy. Johnson was only able to do this because he was not convicted in the Senate by a single vote in our country’s first presidential impeachment. Accountability was never applied in the former and — therefore — it was never applied in the latter. Those who raised arms against our country, including the very President of the Confederacy, went legally unpunished.

Although President Ulysses S. Grant made a valiant effort to make good on the promise of the Reconstruction amendments ending slavery through Southern military occupation and his fight against the Ku Klux Klan, one could argue the damage had been done. No legal accountability had been applied for those who tried to destroy democracy. And after the corrupt bargain that elected President Rutherford B. Hayes and ended federal enforcement of the rights of newly freed Blacks, a century of racial terrorism ensued. The KKK regained its strength, and a racial apartheid system of Black Codes, Jim Crow, and segregation was put in place. Eventually, monuments to Confederate Generals were raised across the country, in a mythology of the lost cause. The Confederate battle flag of those who sought to destroy the Union was even featured in multiple state flags.

Systemic racism has always been this country’s oldest social wound, left gaping after the Civil War and Reconstruction. The country did noble work to bind and heal it during the Civil Rights Movement, under our country’s closest equivalent to a Moses figure in Martin Luther King Jr. Progress has ebbed and flowed since then. But for the last four years, we have had a President who tore the wound open, who poured salt in it, for political gain. He rode to power on the lie that the first Black President, Barack Obama, was not a U.S. citizen. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, “whereas his forebears carried Whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” The powers of whiteness, of structural racism, were never reflected more viscerally than in the split screen the country saw this past year in our criminal justice system: George Floyd being murdered like an animal and peaceful protestors being tear gassed in Lafayette Square on the one hand…and armed insurrectionists attacking the seat of government being treated like rowdy children on the other. And the danger these forces present is only growing, as the White Supremacists and right wing extremists Trump has emboldened become an increasing domestic terror threat.

Despite the dangerous trends Trump has harnessed and ways he has abused and tarnished his office, he has never truly been held accountable. He was never held accountable for abusing his powers to smear his opponent, Joe Biden, by coercing Ukraine. He has refused any attempt at congressional oversight. He has refused to tell the truth about his loss in the 2020 election, spreading lies and conspiracies that poison social trust. And he has refused to take responsibility for his role in inciting the insurrection on Capitol Hill that almost toppled American democracy. Alexander Hamilton wrote of the flexible “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for impeachment that it related to the “misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” One cannot imagine a greater violation of the public trust, of an injury to society, than playing a defining role in an insurrection against the government he is sworn to protect. If this is not impeachable, nothing is impeachable.

To heal, there must be truth and there must be accountability. And it must start at the top. That means the big lie of a stolen election must be repudiated by those who went along with it. And President Trump must be convicted by the Senate and permanently barred from federal office. That will require Republican Senators to place their duty to the county above their partisan loyalties, to avoid Hamilton’s fear that the “decision [to convict on impeachment charges] will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” We forget, but it was Republican Senators like Barry Goldwater who intervened with President Richard Nixon, and who convinced him to resign for the good of the country. Now, in a situation with drastically higher stakes, these Senators are called to intervene for the protection of constitutional democracy against exactly the kind of tyrant the framers worried would be our undoing and for whom they included an impeachment power. “Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men [… who] subvert the power of the people […] to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion” (George Washington’s Farewell Address). We cannot bend an inch to the assassin’s veto (Senators acquitting out of fears for their safety from Trump supporters), or be moved by the bad faith gaslighting and cries of “division” from those whose lies and enabling have brought us here — like an abusive spouse telling you that if you leave or call the cops that you’re the one tearing the family apart.

The only answer is accountability. Accountability has eluded this country for too long, and our failures to apply it in our past have contributed to the situation of our present. The first branch of government must stand up for itself by sending message and setting a precedent for what it will not tolerate, by consummating our first full impeachment of a President. Such a step is far from sufficient, as every aspect of the attack on the Capitol will need to be investigated top to bottom and everyone who contributed to this act of domestic terrorism will also need to be held responsible. But such a step is, nonetheless, necessary. Accountability at the top will provide the foundation constitutional democracy can sustainably build on.

We can then begin the hard and necessary work of finally binding our oldest social wound, the systemic racism that has nearly torn us apart. That will mean learning from the mistakes of the past so we can truly heal, take responsibility for “making good by doing good,” and move forward. It will also mean strengthening our civic capacities, so we can build our national resilience against disinformation and the appeal of demagogues. Only then can we move sustainably toward becoming a “more perfect union” and making “equal justice under law” a lived reality. Only then can we achieve our true national potential and become the democracy we aspire to.