There Will Be No Post-presidential Peace For Donald Trump

Donald Trump spent the first year of his second term trying to signal his strength, his impunity, and his permanence in American public life. When House Republicans gathered at the Kennedy Center in early January for a policy summit, he struck a much more vulnerable tone. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told the assembled lawmakers. “I’ll get impeached.”

The event appropriately symbolized Trump’s first year as president. It was held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a once-respected cultural institution that Trump took over and, using his handpicked board of directors, illegally renamed after himself. The wave of boycotts that followed led Trump to then announce, in February, that the center would be closed for at least two years, ostensibly for repairs and perhaps for eventual demolition.

The shuttering of the Kennedy Center may be the least of Trump’s second-term sins. In the first year since returning to power, Trump and his subordinates have pushed the country toward fascism and oligarchy. He has turned Washington into an orgy of corruption and self-dealing beyond even the most cynical observer’s imagination. He has transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol into a lawless paramilitary force that has besieged American cities and killed at least five U.S. citizens and 22 foreign nationals. He has abused Americans and their immigrant neighbors alike simply because he can.

A rundown of the Trump administration’s scandals and crimes resembles, with shocking likeness, the grave, sweeping charges laid out in the Declaration of Independence against the last American king. “He has excited domestic insurrections against us,” the Founding Fathers wrote about George III in 1776. Is there any better way of describing Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021? He supported a violent mob aiming to overthrow the government; he maintains a similar disrespect for the institutions of American democracy to this day. In early February, he threatened to “nationalize” American elections in a lawless and perhaps impossible bid to keep Democrats from retaking Congress.

A rundown of the Trump administration’s scandals and crimes resembles, with shocking likeness, the grave, sweeping charges laid out in the Declaration of Independence against the last American king.

The similarities do not end there. The declaration describes the king “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world” and “imposing taxes on us without our consent.” Sound familiar? Since last spring, Trump has used a Cold War–era sanctions law to unilaterally impose trillions of dollars in tariffs upon American customers and businesses. The law makes no mention of tariffs, and in February the Supreme Court accordingly struck them down.

Foremost among the Founders’ fears of threats to liberty was the potential misuse of the military. Trump, to borrow their phrasing, “has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.” In a show of propagandistic force, he has stationed thousands of National Guard troops from around the country within the District of Columbia despite the opposition of local government. The president frequently threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces into Democratic-led states and cities.

Trump, like his royal predecessor, “has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.” Trump’s immigration raids against Democratic-led cities and states—Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—appear to be at least partially punitive for their not voting for him in the presidential elections. On multiple occasions, out of apparent spite, Trump has also frozen congressionally appropriated programs and blocked infrastructure funding to blue states. He apparently intends to treat half of the country not as fellow citizens, but as conquered subjects.

“In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury,” Thomas Jefferson wrote after laying out the charges against George III. “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

There is a moral and democratic obligation to hold Trump administration officials accountable for their transgressions. The road map for what this accountability could look like is also growing clearer by the day. When Democrats return to power, they will have to think beyond presidents and prosecutions, especially since the Supreme Court has thrown up largely insurmountable barriers to criminal proceedings against the sitting administration.

Instead, a broader, all-of-society effort will be necessary to tear the roots of Trumpism out of the nation’s political system—an effort that uses every tool possible to achieve a measure of justice. This will involve not only impeachment, but also civil lawsuits, professional sanctions, restrictive acts of Congress, and the enforcement of international law against Trump administration officials by long-standing American allies. Trump’s attacks on the republic are relentless, and the republic must be just as relentless in holding him and his allies responsible.

Holding Trump and his allies to account will be harder this time than it was six years ago. After the 2020 election, the courts were the primary vehicle for accountability. Trump faced criminal prosecutions on three fronts over the next four years. First came the charges from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which alleged various financial offenses related to the Trump Organization. Then came indictments from special counsel Jack Smith for Trump’s continued possession of a trove of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.

But the most serious cases involved his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election results. In Georgia, state prosecutors charged Trump and 18 other defendants with a range of crimes for their campaign to subvert Georgia’s election results by creating slates of fake presidential electors and illegally accessing state voting systems. Trump himself pressured Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” more than 11,700 votes and give him the lead over Joe Biden. Federal prosecutors, again led by Smith, also brought charges in the District of Columbia for trying to obstruct the certification of the election results on January 6.

This time around, the legal landscape is much less favorable. During Trump’s first term, Justice Department guidelines forbade prosecutions of sitting presidents, delaying any potential proceedings until after his term ended. This time, prosecutors will also have to contend with Trump v. United States. The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on “presidential immunity” in 2024 fundamentally changed the executive branch and how it operates within the American constitutional order.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion laid out the scope of presidential immunity as follows: A president has “absolute immunity” from prosecution for any acts that fall within his core constitutional powers. On everything else, he receives “presumptive immunity” for any of his “official acts.” Only if something is an unofficial act does immunity not apply.

This formula is found nowhere in the Constitution, which explicitly grants a limited form of immunity to lawmakers while speaking on the floor and while traveling to or from Congress. Nor is presidential immunity rooted in the history and tradition of American constitutional thought, as is judicial immunity for judges. The court’s conservative justices essentially made it up because Trump asked them to do so.

In the ruling, Roberts argued that immunity was necessary to ensure that the executive branch could properly function. “A president inclined to take one course of action based on the public interest may instead opt for another, apprehensive that criminal penalties may befall him upon his departure from office,” Roberts wrote for the court. “And if a former president’s official acts are routinely subjected to scrutiny in criminal prosecutions, the independence of the Executive Branch may be significantly undermined.”

To the court’s liberals, however, the dangers were obvious. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that it would now be impossible to prosecute a former president for assassinating his political rivals or taking bribes in exchange for a pardon. “Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” she wrote. “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

In response to the liberal justices’ concerns, Roberts complained that his colleagues were “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the president ‘feels empowered to violate federal criminal law,’” quoting from Sotomayor’s dissent. Rarely has a Supreme Court justice been proved so wrong so quickly. By declaring that Trump was immune from criminal prosecution so long as he could link what he did to an official act, the court itself effectively told him that he was unbound by federal criminal law.

Trump has responded accordingly, wielding his official powers in ways that would likely bring criminal charges in any other context. There appear to be two hubs through which wealthy donors and foreign governments can now exchange cash for favors. One is MAGA Inc., Trump’s preferred super PAC. Donors have been rewarded with intimate access to the president and, in some instances, delays of unfavorable regulations or enforcement actions.

In one particularly glaring example, Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who faced 18 months in prison and a $4.4 million restitution for various tax-related crimes, received a full pardon three weeks after his mother, a major GOP donor, accepted an invitation to a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. Since pardons are a core presidential power, bribery charges are out of the question.

The other nexus for potential corruption is World Liberty Financial, the vaguely named cryptocurrency company launched by the Trump family and its associates. Its signature “coins,” $TRUMP and $MELANIA, have lost more than 85 percent of their value since they were launched. But other crypto ventures have proved more lucrative, thanks to well-placed investors.

In one particularly alarming case, Trump may have allowed the sale of highly sensitive AI chips to Abu Dhabi in exchange for a member of the emirate’s royal family taking a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, according to a bombshell February report by The Wall Street Journal. Previous administrations had resisted approval of the sale because of fears that the chips could end up in Beijing’s hands, but the Trump administration dropped its opposition after the cryptocurrency transaction took place.

The Abu Dhabi deal appears to violate the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president and other officials from receiving payments from foreign governments. The clause’s existence has done little to deter Trump’s foreign dealmaking. In May 2025, the president even accepted a “gift” of a $400 million Boeing 747 from the government of Qatar, a small peninsula nation on the Persian Gulf. Attorney General Pam Bondi, herself a former Qatari lobbyist, said that she saw no constitutional problems with the deal.

In an ideal world, Trump would be held criminally liable for these acts after he leaves office. The sad reality, however, is that, unless the Supreme Court’s composition radically changes before the end of the decade, it is unlikely that state or federal prosecutors will be able to bring criminal charges against Trump or his top associates for anything connected to his “official acts.” Next time, accountability will have to take a different form.

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who currently serves as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, described Trump v. United States to me as “an outrageous decision” that was “completely deracinated from the text of the Constitution, the structure of the Constitution, and the history of the Constitution.” The Roberts court, he added, “has essentially invented a special immunity to take care of one very special guy. That sleight of hand does not affect our ability to impeach a president, or to try, convict, remove, and disqualify a president. That power remains.”

With criminal prosecutions either impossible or more unfeasible, thanks to the Supreme Court, Congress’s power to impeach federal officials becomes the most potent check on executive branch abuses. The Constitution allows the House and the Senate to remove sitting officials from office and permanently disqualify them from holding any public office again in the future. It is a weighty and rarely used power. The second Trump administration has made it more necessary than ever.

Democrats already launched two impeachments against Trump: first for trying to coerce Ukraine by withholding congressionally appropriated military aid until it falsely accused Joe Biden of corruption ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and then for inciting an insurrection in the winter of 2020 to try to stop the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.

If Trump is impeached a third time, it will fall to Raskin to build a case to persuade the rest of the House, the Senate, and the American people that it is worth pursuing. “We should never be afraid of impeachment,” he told me. “Impeachment should not be any kind of taboo, but we should not engage in any magical thinking about impeachment, either. It is not a panacea for everything that ails us after so many years of authoritarian assault on democratic institutions.”

Recent history supports that view. The aftermath of Trump’s first impeachment was subsumed by the Covid-19 pandemic one month later. While a majority of senators voted against Trump after the second impeachment trial—a historic rebuke compared to past efforts—the Senate still failed to reach a two-thirds majority to convict and disqualify him. The senators’ failures allowed him to regain power in the 2024 presidential election.

Those shortfalls left some critics wondering whether impeachment is a productive tool for a future Democratic Congress to wield against Trump. Raskin raised two points in response. First, he argued, a Democratic-led House would naturally have to balance the value of impeachment proceedings over other parts of the legislative agenda. Every Congress has a two-year shelf life and thus limited time in which it can act.

“How do you integrate impeachment with other goals, like our determination to get health care for all Americans, or our determination to make housing affordable or bring down the deficit?” he asked, rhetorically. “Our constitutional role compels us to think of all these things together, and we have to be thinking about rendering the most good for the most number of people under a theory of democratic utilitarianism.”

At the same time, Raskin suggested that lawmakers may not have a choice but to impeach Trump. “We also have to consider that the rule of law and constitutional integrity are themselves essential to the long-term flourishing of American democracy,” he observed. To those who doubted the value of Trump’s second impeachment, Raskin said it should be weighed in tandem with the January 6 Select Committee, which extensively investigated that fateful day and its causes.

“Republicans are engaged in some extreme historical revisionism right now about what had happened, but the truth is that they have not laid a glove on a single factual finding in the report of the January 6 Committee,” he noted. Alongside the second impeachment trial, he argued, lawmakers had “created an historical record that present day and future authoritarians will not be able to erase” and “struck a major blow against Orwellian historical revisionism and fascist politics.”

Impeachment may also look considerably different under the next Congress. While the impeachment power is usually discussed in the context of presidents, it can be wielded by Congress against any federal official in the executive branch or the judiciary. Democrats have expressed a greater willingness to open inquiries into members of Trump’s Cabinet and other high-ranking administration officials.

Ideally, a president would dismiss a Cabinet official or force their resignation before Congress had to get involved. But Trump’s approach has pushed Raskin and his colleagues to rethink that dynamic. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s articles of impeachment, for example, which were put forward in mid-January, drew 187 co-sponsors—an unusually strong level of disapproval in an age where lawmakers often submit articles of impeachment that are more symbolic than substantive in nature.

“In the case of Noem,” Raskin told me, “it is certainly a constitutional crime to unleash government violence and state terror against the American population.” He argued that, by leading the winter campaign against Minnesota, she had “gone out on a limb to destroy our social contracts.” Raskin also noted that House Republicans had sought to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Noem’s Biden-era predecessor, for alleged border security failures and thereby created an opening for Democrats.

Trump’s rogues gallery of a Cabinet gives House Democrats plenty to work with. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has drawn renewed scrutiny for his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficker who died in federal custody in 2019. Lower-level officials like Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol official who led the Trump campaigns against Los Angeles and Minneapolis, and “border czar” Tom Homan, who allegedly took a $50,000 bribe in a Cava bag from an undercover FBI agent in 2024, are potential targets as well. If criminal charges aren’t feasible against these Trump associates, thanks to the Supreme Court and Trump’s potential pardons, then impeachment offers the best hope for a formal public rebuke of their alleged misconduct.

Much of the post-2020 campaign for accountability centered on Trump and those in his immediate circle. Some top Democrats have argued for a much broader effort next time. “Part of the reason why we are where we are is because there was not enough accountability downstream from Trump,” Marc Elias, a top Democratic lawyer who has played a central role in election-related litigation throughout the Trump era, told me.

Some lower-level Trump allies did face legal consequences for their actions: Multiple co-conspirators in the Georgia election fraud scheme pleaded guilty or took plea deals before that case fell apart, while top figures like Rudy Giuliani were bankrupted by defamation lawsuits brought by two Fulton County election workers whom he had smeared. Next time, however, a much more intensive effort will be required to prevent Trumpism from making a resurgence in the future.

One of the first questions the next Democratic president will face is the fate of ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies. Public opinion swung heavily against federal immigration agents for their lawlessness and their undemocratic tactics in Minnesota over the winter, including the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens. A growing number of Americans now favor abolishing the agency.

Elias argued that Congress should allow civil lawsuits against federal law enforcement officials when they violate a person’s civil rights. Vice President JD Vance received widespread criticism after a federal immigration agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good in January. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” Vance told reporters. “He was doing his job.”

State and local officials can face civil rights lawsuits under Section 1983, a Reconstruction-era statute, though the Supreme Court has blunted its impact with the doctrine of qualified immunity. No such statute exists for federal agents. “I mean, there’s no reason why federal officials should be able to act with impunity and be unable to be held civilly accountable,” Elias argued.

Another option that Elias cited would be disbarment for attorneys. Some of Trump’s personal attorneys did face career-ending consequences for their role in the 2020 plot to overturn the election. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s most visible legal adviser at the time, lost the ability to practice law in New York, where he was once a top federal prosecutor. Lin Wood, another legal ally, retired from the practice of law in 2023 to avoid similar sanctions from the Georgia bar. The California bar also moved in 2024 to disbar John Eastman, who told Mike Pence that he could unilaterally reject electoral votes and hand the presidency back to Trump.

“Fundamentally, Donald Trump doesn’t believe in anything other than election denialism,” Elias said. “The only through line of his entire administration—from Bobby Kennedy [Jr.], who is nominally pro-choice or was, to people in the Treasury Department who don’t believe in tariffs, the only thing that all those people appointed to the Cabinet, all the federal nominees to the judiciary—the only line they had to toe and continue to toe is election denialism.”

Lies beget more lies. In Trump’s first year back in office, Justice Department lawyers have been repeatedly chastised by federal judges for presenting false or misleading information to the courts. Elias argued that state bar associations should take more forceful steps to hold them accountable for their alleged misconduct.

“Pam Bondi is a member of the bar,” he told me. “The bar shouldn’t be off the hook for doing what they need to do to protect democracy. And if they’re not willing to do that, then I don’t know why we let bars have exclusive licensing over lawyers. You know, at some fundamental level, if the legal profession is not willing to police itself for people who are attacking democracy, then, frankly, just take away the monopoly that lawyers have on practicing law.”

Justice Department lawyers have left the government at an unprecedented rate over the past year, with some stepping down amid public concerns that they were being asked to violate their ethical and legal responsibilities. Those who remained have faced crushing workloads, leading at least one to ask a federal judge to throw her in jail for contempt so she could “have a full 24 hours of sleep.”

Elias had little sympathy for that lawyer. “There is no one who’s working in these U.S. attorney’s offices at this point who is doing anything other than the bidding of Pam Bondi and Donald Trump,” he said, adding he was tired of the “poor, beleaguered line prosecutor” narrative. “No one is putting a gun to these people’s heads to earn a living by throwing children in prison,” he added.

For the nonlawyers working in the Trump administration’s deportation machinery, Congress could impose sweeping consequences. The administration has refused to cooperate with state and local officials who investigate ICE and Customs and Border Protection crimes, most notably by declining to publicly identify the killers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The now-ubiquitous use of masks makes it hard to tell who should be accountable. (News outlets, after conducting their own investigations, eventually named the two Minneapolis residents’ killers.)

Meanwhile, reports of abuses continue to grow. ICE has built a vast network of detention camps where squalid, unsafe conditions are meant to coerce detained immigrants into voluntarily leaving the country. NBC News reported in February that, in at least one instance at a Texas camp, children were served food containing worms, and their families were brought to a room with a Thanksgiving feast before being told it was for the staff, not for them.

If individual perpetrators can’t be identified or held accountable, more systemic solutions may be required. Lawmakers in a few Democratic-led states have introduced bills that would ban their police departments from hiring former ICE employees in most circumstances. Congress could impose a similar measure nationwide by cutting off federal funds from any law enforcement agency that hires anyone who worked as an ICE or CBP agent after a certain date. Since this would not be a criminal punishment, Trump cannot simply pardon it away.

In addition, lawmakers could exclude the perpetrators of these abuses from access to federal entitlement programs in the future, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. While extreme in theory, such an approach has some precedent. Congress enacted a ban on Social Security payments in 2014 for “individuals who participated in Nazi persecution” before and after World War II. That law’s drafters gave it a simple, straightforward name: the No Social Security for Nazis Act. Those who help federal prosecutors identify and bring charges against the worst abusers could apply to have this ban lifted.

If American institutions fail to hold the Trump administration accountable, other countries might be able to fill the gap. Trump’s disastrous campaign to alienate long-standing American allies in Europe and North America with threats and tariffs has opened the door to options that once would have been unthinkable. Because of alleged international law violations, the former president and his subordinates could also face heightened difficulties—and potential criminal charges—if they travel overseas in the future.

The president does not personally hold international law in high esteem. In a New York Times interview in January, one reporter asked Trump if he was bound by any limits on his foreign policy and war-making powers. “Yeah, there is one thing,” the president replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” When asked about international law—the body of norms and practices that the United States helped shape after the twentieth century’s destructive world wars—Trump acknowledged that the United States was technically tethered by it but indicated that it wasn’t a factor in his thinking.

“I don’t need international law,” Trump claimed. “I’m not looking to hurt people.” But international law could greatly complicate Trump’s post-presidential life, as well as the lives of many of his subordinates. His administration’s unlawful military strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have opened the door to criminal charges overseas. The wars against Iran and Venezuela could bring more such charges. Further illegal military actions—say, an invasion of Greenland or Canada—could only deepen his potential peril.

“I don’t need international law,” Trump claimed. “I’m not looking to hurt people.” But international law could greatly complicate Trump’s post-presidential life, as well as the lives of many of his subordinates.

One vector is the International Criminal Court. The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the court in 2002, and the Bush and Obama administrations kept it at arm’s length to avoid scrutiny of their military campaigns against foreign terrorist organizations. Nevertheless, U.S. officials could still be prosecuted by the court if they violate the laws of nations against a ICC member state, explained Charlie Trumbull, a professor of international law at the University of South Carolina.

“Under the [Rome Statute], there’d have to be an arrest warrant, and then the states that are party to the ICC would have an obligation to cooperate with the ICC,” Trumbull explained. Indicting a foreign head of state is not merely hypothetical. Two of them currently have ICC warrants out for their arrest: Russian President Vladimir Putin for his role in the war in Ukraine, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the country’s military campaign in Gaza since 2023.

Neither man has been hauled before The Hague, of course, but the warrants have had a tangible impact on their lives. “You can see that they don’t travel very often outside of their countries, and when they do travel, it’s mostly to countries that are not party to the ICC,” Trumbull said, adding that ICC member countries might also refuse or discourage a visit from Trump to avoid legal obligations. “This is because a lot of states are not going to want to ... invite someone who has an arrest warrant to come to their country.”

The likeliest basis for charges would be Trump’s campaign against alleged drug boats in South and Central America. At his behest, U.S. military forces sank at least 30 boats by January and by February killed at least 150 people. In at least one instance, The Washington Post reported, the commander overseeing an attack on a boat ordered a second strike to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s instructions, killing survivors who had been seen clinging to wreckage. These targeted killings of civilians may amount to crimes against humanity under international law.

The Trump administration has defended the military strikes by arguing that the targets were “narco-terrorists” and that they posed an imminent danger to American lives. The latter claim is obviously false, as U.S. warships could have easily intercepted the boats instead of destroying them. Nor does the anti-drug rationale allow for extrajudicial killings under international law, as shown by other recent prosecutions.

There is an ideal recent precedent for such a case: Last year, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by the Philippine government and transferred to The Hague. Duterte had publicly bragged about personally killing drug-trafficking suspects as mayor of Davao City and overseeing other extrajudicial killings during his term as president in the 2010s. His trial is expected to begin later this year.

Unsurprisingly, given the Trump administration’s apparent opposition to the concept of international law itself, it has been extraordinarily hostile toward the ICC, even by American standards. Trump imposed a wide range of financial sanctions for the first time against the court, its judges, and its prosecutors last February. The sanctions, which are typically reserved for rogue nations and terrorist groups, effectively severed the ICC employees from much of the world financial system and many digital goods and services. Targeted judges cannot even have Gmail accounts or conduct basic financial transactions with major banks.

The purported reasons for the sanctions were the court’s past inquiries into U.S. military actions in Afghanistan—the brief probe ended in 2021—as well as the ICC’s investigations of Netanyahu’s government, which is closely allied with the Trump administration. But the Trump administration wants to dispense with multinational tribunals for a deeper reason: They offend its vision of power that operates by brute force alone.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisers, proclaimed in a January interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, “but we live in a world—in the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

That reasoning applies to countries that may want to uphold international law as well. Even if Trump administration officials avoid the ICC’s scrutiny, they may be liable for prosecution by foreign governments anyway. In most countries, courts and prosecutors are bound by their jurisdiction: They can only charge and try defendants for offenses that occurred within their territory. In international law, however, some offenses are considered so grave that they can be prosecuted by any country.

This concept, known as “universal jurisdiction,” could make post-presidential life difficult for Trump and his associates if other countries are willing to use it. German prosecutors, for example, have successfully pursued charges against participants in Syria’s destructive decade-long civil war. In 2022, after hearing testimony from dozens of survivors, a German court convicted two former Syrian intelligence officers of crimes against humanity for their roles in overseeing the Bashar Al Assad regime’s torture camps. One defendant received a life sentence, and the other was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.

Even the threat of foreign prosecution could have a chilling effect on Trump administration officials. A post-presidency Trump may be more reluctant to visit his golf course in Scotland or his resort in Ireland if he fears that the British or Irish governments might arrest him and transfer him to The Hague. (A 2002 law prohibits the federal government itself from extraditing Americans to ICC custody.)

Trumbull cautioned that international law prosecutions can often face a significant time lag. “A lot of times, accountability for international crimes takes a long time to materialize,” he pointed out. “We’ll see prosecutions for crimes that were committed 10, 20 years ago. So the fact that there might not be accountability in the next few years does not mean that accountability might not happen at a later time.” In short, what Trump administration officials do over the next three years could haunt them for the rest of their lives.

For Trump and his associates, there will be no lighthearted vacations to Europe, for fear of trial beyond the Supreme Court’s reach. There will be no adjunct job at some university or quiet retirement to some farm or ranch.

Accountability for politicians can be a mercurial concept. Impeachment is the proper tool for it. When the Framers drafted the Constitution, they deliberated over how to properly structure it in a truly republican society. They knew that impeachments in Britain were often long, complicated affairs—colonial official Warren Hastings’s impeachment, trial, and eventual acquittal for alleged abuses in India lasted from 1788 to 1795—and had much higher stakes. Had Hastings been found guilty, the House of Lords could have ordered him to be imprisoned.

American impeachments are less punitive and more direct. Any federal official can be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” That last phrase is as broad as Congress wants it to be. “They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, “as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” Or, as Gerald Ford once phrased it in more modern language, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

While the mechanisms of accountability are important, the spirit that drives them is just as vital. A jail cell may not await Trump. But after another four years of defiling the republic, there will be no post-presidential peace for him or his top associates. There will be no lighthearted vacations to Europe, for fear of trial beyond the Supreme Court’s reach. There will be no adjunct job at some university or quiet retirement to some farm or ranch. There will be investigations. There will be depositions. There will be hearings. There will be whatever other measure of lawful justice can be provided. The fears that Trump voiced at the Kennedy Center in January were well-founded. Dictatorships are always more fragile than they try to seem. If anything, the president has deeply underestimated his legal and political peril.