Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has — wrongly and dangerously — granted President Donald Trump broad immunity for illegal acts he commits as president, it has not afforded the same luxury to the many minions who do his bidding.
Those in that pipeline, including White House staff, cabinet secretaries and individual federal employees (and nonemployees such as Elon Musk), should go back and read the history of what happened to those who blindly did the dirty work of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.
“I was following orders” was not a sufficient defense when they were put on trial. And it is not a sufficient defense today for those who are breaking federal laws in service of a lawless president.
Mark Wingfield
Chuck Colson, H.R. Haldeman, John Dean, John Ehrlichman and G. Gordon Liddy might also have some advice worth heeding. Although Watergate was a quaint Sunday school picnic compared to the misdeeds of the Trump administration, these men all paid the price for not standing up to a lawless president. They were convicted while their leader went free.
Truth will out, and justice will come.
The best way to stop Trump’s reign of terror is for his minions to become too afraid to keep doing his bidding. Trump is not physically deporting innocent people to El Salvador, but his minions are. Trump is not arresting them, terrorizing them, humiliating them, shackling them and shoving them on illegal flights, but his minions are.
Trump is not standing in federal courtrooms telling bald-faced lies, but his minions are. Trump is not personally ransacking federal databases — the man marvels that his son can turn on a computer — but his minions are.
It is time for Trump’s many victims to begin filing suit not just against the administration but against the very people who are breaking the law in his service. They have choices to make every day, and right now they are choosing to serve a dreadful master. (And yes, there is legal precedent for this.)
“It is time for Trump’s many victims to begin filing suit not just against the administration but against the very people who are breaking the law in his service.”
We need to name them and shame them and file suit against them. They need to be arrested and given the kind of fair trials their overlord does not want others to have.
The family of wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia ought to begin finding out the names of every person who was part of abducting their loved one, ignoring the warning signs that they had the wrong man, shipping him to El Salvador and then standing in courtrooms saying they are powerless even to know where he is. These criminals should be named, just as we eventually learned the names of those administering Germany’s death camps.
There will come a day — hopefully soon — when Donald Trump is off the scene, discredited, thrown aside, lost in shame. He will not have made America great, but he will have made us more cruel and more hated the world over.
Most of the people doing his dirty work will outlive him, and their shame will go on much longer.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality and Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.
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