We Need a Nuremberg Caucus

It's time for Democrats to show that criminals in the Trump regime will be punished.

Cory Doctorow understands the value of a good label. A writer and longtime critic of corporate consolidation, particularly in the tech industry, Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the process by which corporations degrade their online platforms to maximize short-term profits. The American Dialect Society named “enshittification” the 2023 word of the year, because of how well it captured the shared experience of our worsening digital lives in an age of Big Tech oligarchy.

Recently, after posing the question “What would a real political response to fascism look like?,” Doctorow articulated another idea that I think similarly captures our zeitgeist. In a post on his blog, Doctorow proposed that congressional Democrats launch a “Nuremberg Caucus,” an effort to explicitly define what accountability for the grotesqueries of Trump’s regime—the corruption, the child concentration camps, the execution of US civilians by federal goon squads—should mean.

In Doctorow’s conception, the core of this project would be the creation of a public-facing platform where Democrats could assemble evidence of the administration’s crimes and promise trials for the perpetrators. In his words, “Each fresh outrage, each statement, each video-clip—whether of Trump officials or of his shock-troops—could be neatly slotted in, given an exhibit number, and annotated with the criminal and civil violations captured in the evidence. The caucus could publish dates these trials will be held on—following from Jan 20, 2029—and even which courtrooms each official, high and low, will be tried in.”

An initiative like this is necessary on its merits. Healthy democracies do not respond to attempts to impose authoritarian rule by allowing their perpetrators to remain in positions of power, plotting their next assault on democracy. Just this month South Korea sentenced its former rightwing president, Yoon Suk-yeol, to life imprisonment for his 2024 attempt to impose martial law. And South Korea isn’t alone—both Peru and Brazil recently condemned their former presidents to long prison sentences for their coup attempts. There’s a strong case to be made that our country’s current dystopia is a result of Democrats’ failure to put this principle into practice following Trump’s first term. Former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to file timely charges against Trump for seeking to overturn the 2020 election cannot be repeated.

As Doctorow put it when I called him up to discuss this idea, “We’re talking about people who violated their oath of office. They are categorically unfit to be in public service, and they need to be kept away from the levers of power.” The process of organizing a Nuremberg Caucus would force Democrats to commit to holding these bad actors accountable for their crimes.

A Nuremberg Caucus could also be a major political boon for Democrats, offering them an effective tool for directing public attention toward the criminality of Trump’s regime. It’s one thing to say, “We need accountability.” It’s more compelling to say, “This specific official committed this specific crime—and here’s the evidence, here’s the witness list, expect a prosecution in early 2029.”

Moreover, this structure would provide Democrats with a powerful narrative to project onto Republicans. As Doctorow explained in our conversation, “The minute you can get your adversary to say, ‘These are the ways we’re not Nazis,’ they are implying that there are a bunch of ways in which they are. It forces the adversary into your frame.” Certainly, debating whether or not Trump officials deserve Nuremberg-style trials seems like a favorable field on which to fight electoral battles.

In addition to these political benefits, a Nuremberg Caucus could also have deterrent effects. It’s an often-repeated talking point in liberal circles that Trump officials are not acting like people who think they will have to face free and fair elections again—that the blatant vulgarity with which they’ve been committing their crimes is proof that they know our democracy is already in the bag. These concerns are valid. Republicans are preparing to rig the midterms, and we urgently need to be doing everything we can to foil these plots. But there is an additional explanation for their brazenness that I think is just as likely: The GOP has concluded that even if the Democratic Party were to sweep back into power, its leaders are too feckless, cowardly, or incompetent to mete out consequences to Trump officials for their criminality.

To be fair, this is a perfectly rational analysis for Republicans to have adopted, based not only on Garland’s failure to prosecute any senior member of Trump’s first administration, but also on the Obama administration’s refusal to pursue accountability for Bush-era war crimes or Wall Street’s demolition of the world economy. But this reasonable assumption makes Trump’s regime far more dangerous than it otherwise would be.

Assumed impunity is what gives Trump’s Gestapo thugs the confidence to murder civilians on video in broad daylight. It’s what allows Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to order double-tap strikes against civilians, Attorney General Pam Bondi to violate legal orders to release the Epstein files, and Secretary Kristi Noem to oversee the construction of concentration camps. Officials who believed that Democrats were committed to holding them accountable would have some motivation to constrain the breadth and scope of such criminality—motivation that members of this administration obviously lack.

The same might be said of the bootlicking elites who have spent the last year competing to see who can display the most cowardice in the face of Trump’s authoritarian takeover. Why have so many of the wealthy and powerful embraced such a demeaning posture, despite being more insulated from fascist retaliation than the millions of regular people whose response to seeing Renee Good and Alex Pretti get gunned down has been to protest even harder?

Certainly some elites, particularly the full-on oligarchs, are earnestly sympathetic to Trump’s fascist goals. But for many—the Big Law firm heads, the elite university leaders, the corporate executives—the craven collaboration is pragmatic. Trump is a fact of life, there are benefits to participating in his fascist project, and—putting aside honor, dignity, and morality—there don’t appear to be serious consequences on the horizon for those who acquiesce to his corrupt demands.

If US elites care only about their own self-interest, as they have proven conclusively over the course of Trump’s second term, then the impetus is on Democrats to demonstrate that collaborating with fascist criminals will have ramifications once they retake Congress or the White House. Doctorow believes there are actions a Nuremberg Caucus could take to contribute to that calculation shift. For example, Democrats could announce their intent to undertake scrutiny of all mergers approved by the Trump administration, putting corporations on notice that “they should expect lengthy, probing inquiries into any mergers they undertake between now and the fall of Trumpism.” A Nuremberg Caucus could also publish plans to conduct systemic IRS audits of the ultra-wealthy to identify any suspicious wealth gains that might be the fruits of corrupt dealings with the administration.

A final attribute of this project—and perhaps the most fun one to think about—is its potential to sow discord within the ranks of Trump’s regime. Doctorow imagines the Nuremberg Caucus announcing a plan to furnish $1 million bounties to any ICE officer who provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. If ICE recruits are signing up based on the promise of $50,000 signing bonuses, what would they do for a million bucks? And how would it affect ICE’s operations if agents started worrying that the next time they chose to brutalize an immigrant or kidnap a child or attack a school with chemical weapons, the guy in the balaclava next to them might be taking notes? We can extend that principle up through the ranks of the administration, which we know is disproportionately full of nutjobs with paranoid delusions. A Nuremberg Caucus could do a lot to help feed that paranoia.

Of course, Doctorow’s proposal is just one of many possible answers to the question of how we rebuild our democracy. But it’s a compelling one—compelling enough that, if Democrats won’t take the suggestion, I hope some of the advocacy groups helping to lead the anti-Trump resistance give it real consideration. There are nongovernmental models for this kind of project—for example, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is an organization “dedicated to collecting evidence up to a criminal law standard for the express purpose of furthering criminal justice efforts to end impunity.” CIJA targets international human rights abuses, with recent efforts focused on war crimes in Syria and Myanmar. But a similar structure—a Nuremberg Project, let’s say, rather than a Nuremberg Caucus—could be organized by progressive nonprofits here in the United States.

Whatever form it takes, this work cannot be ignored. Impunity is a cancer in democracies. Impunity for economic elites helped create the loss of faith in our institutions that was so critical to Trump’s initial ascendance, and impunity for government officials who betrayed our Constitution is what facilitated Trump’s return to power. We cannot keep repeating this pattern. Over the last year, Republicans have turned our federal government into a vast mafia syndicate whose criminal enterprises—graft and corruption, violence and human rights abuses, coverups for the wealthy and well-connected, anti-democratic conspiracies—are being operated without any fear of consequences. That must change, and it’s time for Democrats, and perhaps our broader antifascist resistance movement, to show that we have a plan to bring the architects and executors of this regime’s crimes to justice.

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This piece appeared in The Nation. They’re great, check ‘em out!