Holding Trump Accountable Is Not Optional for Democrats

Authoritarian Watch

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November 13, 2026

Yes, the party must focus on the economy. But that is inextricably linked to a focus on corruption.

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office on November 5, 2026.

(Mandel Ngan / Getty Images)

Heading to the airport Tuesday morning, I lucked out on my Lyft driver. He was a middle-aged African American man, listening to the news coverage of the impeachment proceedings against Pete Hegseth. He was horrified that a man like Hegseth—someone willing to embrace clearly illegal orders to, for example, turn the military against civilians, and eager to deny people promotion based on the color of their skin and/or gender—had so much power; and he was salivating at the prospect of the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” whom he denounced in fiery language as a dyed-in-the-wool racist, finally being held to account. To restore America’s global reputation, he insisted, there had to be accountability. And that accountability should begin, but not end, with Hegseth’s impeachment.

I asked if he thought that the incoming Democratic majority should focus on investigations and impeachments, or on legislation intended to provide an economic boost to struggling Americans? “Do both!” my driver exclaimed. “You can chew gum and walk down the staircase at the same time.”

Amen to that.

Polls showed that two issues were dominating voters’ minds in the midterm elections. The first, more “normal” concern, was bread-and-butter economics: inflation, high interest rates, job insecurity, the destabilizing impact of AI, the difficulty in finding affordable housing, the increasing cost of healthcare. But the second was different: corruption and its degrading effect on our democracy, as well as the damage done to government institutions by the incompetent and cruel leadership of men such as Hegseth.

After 10 years of the Trump cult, America’s voters, in overwhelming numbers, finally saw through the con. They intuited, at long last, that their government was being shamelessly tapped for private profit, and that a man elected as the ultimate outsider was, in fact, consolidating a new elite strata, in large part propped up by unqualified hires such as Hegseth, infinitely more venal and brutal than the “establishment” they had replaced.

These two issues, of course, are intertwined. In the sort of sultanistic kleptocracy that Trump is running—backed up by mediocre loyal foot soldiers, such as Hegseth, who owe their status solely to their undying fealty to Trump and Trumpism—the suffering of ordinary Americans as a result of, say, high tariff-induced and war-induced inflation, represents a glittering set of opportunities for grifters to move in and capitalize on the crisis, for influence-peddlers to sell their wares, for backroom deals that exempt companies from tariffs in exchange for lining the pockets of Trump and his princelings. Addressing one without the other will never lead to the sort of cleansing moment that America so desperately needs—and is demanding—in order to truly enter the post-Trump era.

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Come January, of course, Democrats should focus on rolling out a new social compact. They need to offer voters an expanded social safety net—a new Fair Deal—paid for by appropriately taxing America’s emergent oligarchy and its ill-gotten gains. Make Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, and the other tech-lords pay their fair share, and suddenly—precisely because wealth is so grotesquely concentrated—you have a whole lot more money to stabilize Social Security, move toward healthcare access for all, build more public housing, expand nutritional programs, and much else besides.

But simultaneously, Democrats must also be relentless in hammering home to Americans that, while they are fighting the good fight, Trump and his shrunken claque of GOP congressional enablers, with the ludicrous Jim Jordan at the helm, are still mired in extremism—stonewalling, grifting, or simply prattling on about vanity projects such as the (now-not-so) Triumphal Arch. That means holding public hearings on all the corruption and criminality, all of the unconstitutional, violent actions, and all of the self-dealing of this gang of crooks.

There is debate over exactly which members of the administration can be impeached, but at least some legal analysts think that in addition to elected officials and cabinet members, high-ranking, non-Senate-appointed officials can be subject to this sanction too. On that assumption, Democrats should start by aggressively investigating new White House chief of staff Stephen Miller’s white nationalist ties; his orders for ICE to meet arrest quotas, which have resulted in an epic level of violence against noncriminal immigrants; his decision to send shock- troops into cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Charlotte, Portland and Los Angeles; his vastly cruel project of ramping up deportations—more than 25,000 to date—to third countries with atrocious human rights records; and, court orders notwithstanding, the shipping of people, via third countries that are a party to the scheme, back to homelands where they could well be tortured or killed.

With the exception of Trump, there is no man more dangerous to the ongoing viability of the multiethnic, diverse, American democratic experiment than Miller—no man more willing to push the country toward civil conflict to pursue his fanatical political ends. Democrats should lay this all out for the American people to see—that Miller isn’t just a shmuck but that he is a shmuck on a Constitution-wrecking mission—and then impeach him. Dare the GOP survivors in the Senate to not convict this odious man and drive him from office; and, if they take up that dare, make them wear their spineless decision as a scarlet letter heading into the 2028 and 2030 election cycles.

Similarly, since the GOP-led Congress failed to impeach Hegseth this week, impeach him in January. Add to the list RFK Jr, Todd Blanche, and Kash Patel, all of whom have flagrantly abused their offices—whether through promoting quack medical cures at the urgings of financial donors or siccing the vast investigative and legal powers of the DoJ and FBI on Trump’s “enemies”—and then force the Republicans in the Senate to choose sides. These men are all low-hanging fruit, as strong candidates for impeachment as any public officials in US history. If the Republicans remaining in the Senate come 2027 can’t muster the strength to pick off these cabinet members, the public will, I suspect, be entirely unforgiving over the coming years’ election cycles.

And, above all, Democrats need to investigate Trump and his family’s endless self-dealing. Lay out in easy-to-understand detail how the con works: how the billions of dollars flow in via crypto scams; corrupt real estate deals; illegal “gifts”; strong-arm, mafiosi-like tactics deployed against corporations and overseas governments; the endless demanding of tribute; the pay-to-play understandings with companies looking to secure government contracts.

Document all of this and convict the Trumps beyond any reasonable doubt in the court of public opinion. But don’t immediately trigger an impeachment vote; don’t give the GOP an excuse to say this is all Trump Derangement Syndrome. Instead, let the Trump clan twist on the end of the investigative rope for a while as the full scope of their criminal actions is laid bare for the world to see. And then force the Republicans themselves to take the initiative, as—when push came to shove—GOP senators in 1974 did in pushing Nixon to resign: force them to either make their peace, even after the midterms drubbing, with who and what Trump and his self-dealing family is, with all the electoral fallout this will likely lead to for the GOP in 2028 and 2030, or to finally and definitively cut ties with Trump’s mobster government and agree to vote to convict him. Make those Republicans with capacious ambitions for high office—the Josh Hawleys and Ted Cruzes, for example—beg to be allowed to turn a corner on the Trump era that the party’s cravenness and opportunism have inflicted on the world.

In short, make the GOP cry uncle. Make the party that brought us Trump be the one that has to deliver the coup de grâce to the man and his kleptocracy.