Thanks to the Jan. 6 committee, Donald Trump is right: I’m saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again
The Jan. 6 committee’s report and criminal referral this week heightened the sense that Donald Trump’s most monumental fabrications are at long last crashing down around him. But the incongruous yuletide timing of the development lends some resonance to one of his countless littler lies: the one about people “saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”
That’s not to suggest that it’s any gift to have elected a president who ransacked our system with all the abandon of a toddler tearing into his presents on Christmas morning. But for those still sharing my sentimental attachment to the rule of law, finally holding Trump accountable provides hope of, to paraphrase another Trumpism, taking our country back.
For all his appeals to the hegemony of the holiday, Trump gave us some very unmerry Christmastime moments. It was just days before Christmas in 2020 when he issued his infamous “will be wild” invitation to Washington on Jan. 6, placing a lump of coup in our collective stocking. The following Christmas, a number of the halfwits who heeded his call were given judicial dispensation to head home for the holidays, one of several troubling signs of national unseriousness about the dire events of just a year earlier.
The Jan. 6 committee remedied that, for which we can thank an odd couple of Californians: outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who formed the panel; and her would-be successor Kevin McCarthy, who helped necessitate it by rejecting a bipartisan commission on the attacks. McCarthy also made the grave error of excommunicating fellow Rep. Liz Cheney from the Republican leadership, setting in motion her service as one of the committee’s most effective members.
Despite past loose talk within the panel to the effect that it might not issue a criminal referral against Trump — the Beltway equivalent of letting the rioters spend Christmas with their families — the committee ultimately made the right decision.
Its referral formally recommends that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against the former president as well as, on some counts, alleged co-conspirators such as California lawyer and “coup memo” author John Eastman. The suggested counts include obstruction of an official proceeding, namely Congress’ certification of the election of Joe Biden; and inciting an insurrection by falsely denying Trump’s loss and encouraging the deadly storming of the Capitol.
The committee’s bipartisan and thoroughly supported referral instantly disproved every suggestion that such a move wouldn’t make any difference. Yes, as a matter of law, criminal charges are at the discretion of the Justice Department, which is free to ignore referrals and often does. But the unprecedented congressional recommendation of criminal charges against a former president, especially following such a meticulous and compelling presentation of the case against him, makes a failure to hold Trump accountable for his attack on the country that much more unthinkable.
The prospect of criminal prosecution for the attempted coup is the most important but far from the only form of accountability finally facing the former president. He appears to have been caught committing another federal crime by stealing classified government documents and storing them at his gaudy Florida compound. The Jan. 6 committee’s report may bolster the case for state charges that he attempted to bully Georgia’s top election official into reversing Biden’s victory there. And earlier this month in New York, his dodgy family business was found guilty of tax fraud.
Not coincidentally, Trump’s candidates and party fell well short of expectations in last month’s midterm election, extending a run of losses that seems to have weakened his GOP support in ways that his lawlessness, sadly, did not.
Trump’s losership could be more effective in keeping him out of power than any number of charges or convictions. That doesn’t diminish the importance of holding him accountable for crimes he committed. We can’t succeed as a nation of laws if we don’t bother enforcing the most ruinous and infamous violations of them.
Trump’s “Merry Christmas” nonsense, sometimes couched as a defense of the “Christian values” that are nowhere evident in his behavior, was really one more way of promoting the idea that this country should continue to privilege certain creeds, classes and colors above others — not least by failing to require everyone to follow the same rules. Our willingness to prosecute even a president who breaks our laws is a powerful and necessary means of refuting that poisonous notion.