. @ddayen's piece looking ahead to the potentially disastrous lame duck months has me thinking about if and how our political system can grapple with the flatly criminal legacy of the Trump years. https://prospect.org/politics/winter-of-our-discontent-trump-2020-election/

Since Watergate, the tradition in American politics has been for the following administration to forgive or forget the crimes of its priors. And I mean crimes, not merely misdeeds -- like the case of torturers who literally tortured a man to death.

That is not a good precedent for accountability, but it is easy to see why even politically opposed administrations take this course. Since the criminals in question are political partisans, the pursuit of justice and accountability can be framed as a partisan political vendetta.

So much of what the Trump administration has done has not only been illegal, it has obviously been illegal, and it has been conducted in broad daylight with everyone watching. They shot off fireworks when they threw the RNC at the White House. Everybody knows what happened.

Functionally, if Trump and his administration are not prosecuted for this stuff, we will be living in a world where it is literally true that "if the president does it, it's not illegal." In a sense, his presidency demonstrates that we have been living in that world.

But actually bringing the cases against him will be hell. Everybody who is willing to think already knows the deal with Trump. He still has a bunch of supporters. They're not going to see the facts in a case come March 2021 and say, "Ah! I get it now, nevermind."

And the country will still be deep in a public health / economic crisis. Climate change will demand swift and serious action. The bureaucracy will need to be rebuilt. There will be plenty of reasons for a Biden administration to choose to shrug off Trump & focus on other issues.

Either Biden chooses to "look forward, not back" as Obama did -- in which case William Barr, Stephen Miller et al will have successfully established the presidency as an authoritarian office -- or we have years of deep social conflict to come.

We have a very long and difficult road ahead. Voting Trump out in November is necessary for the preservation of American democracy, but his removal will by no means guarantee its survival.