After Trump’s Victory, There Can Be No Unity Without A Reckoning

Back in July after the first Trump assassination attempt, I wrote that there can be no national unity, no burying the hatchet or cooling the rhetoric with people who have been encouraging political violence and pushing assassination prep for years. You can’t smack someone in the face with a hammer and then insist everyone calm down.

Trump’s election victory doesn’t change that. Those in the news media who spent years calling Trump a fascist and comparing him to Hitler, claiming he represents a threat to democracy and that he’ll use his presidential powers to go after his enemies, should not be forgiven. Their lies and nonstop propaganda should not be forgotten. No one should ever take them seriously again. When they try to engage the public square, they should either be ignored entirely or met with a wall of mockery and derision. They are enemies of the American people, whom they openly despise, and there can be no real unity with them no matter what they might say in the future.

Going forward, it should be a mark of shame to be associated with MSNBC, CBS News, and CNN. Same goes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Politico. All the “prestige” media outlets that perpetrated lies, distortions, and unhinged rhetoric about Trump should lose so much credibility that their reader and viewer bases collapse, advertisers abandon them, and they get broken up and sold off for parts. If Laurene Powell Jobs wants to run a vanity magazine for her own entertainment, fine. But let’s not pretend it’s a serious place where serious journalists work. We all know what it is now.

Legacy media outlets, the polling industry, the Democrat-funded nonprofits and the academics and activists who run them have all now been exposed as cogs in a giant propaganda machine. Kamala Harris was never ahead. She never had a chance of winning. There was no “joy.” She wasn’t “brat.” She didn’t even win the Democrat Party nomination, it was handed to her in a backroom deal. She isn’t relatable or cool, she’s the most cringey and fake person ever to run for president. Corporate media and the Democrats ran a massive psy-op on the American people to make them believe something that wasn’t true. And it failed. We should never forget that these people will say anything for the sake of power, so we should never trust them again.

For the government officials and institutions who tried to bankrupt and jail Trump, there should be more severe and formal consequences. On Wednesday it was reported that the Justice Department will be dismissing Special Counsel Jack Smith and dropping his cases against Trump before Trump takes office. That’s great, but Smith should not be allowed to simply walk away. He and everyone else at Biden’s DOJ who was involved in these lawfare cases against Trump needs to be investigated and held accountable for their actions.

And of course the problem goes far beyond Smith. What the Justice Department and the FBI did to Trump was one of the most egregious abuses of power in American history, and we shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders at it because Trump won. These agencies need to be dismantled entirely and re-built from scratch. The FBI in particular has shown itself to be an enemy of the American people and a danger to the republic. Its director, Christopher Wray, should not simply be allowed to resign. He should be removed and placed under criminal investigation. 

Same goes for New York Attorney General Leticia James, whose lawfare against Trump is an ongoing scandal, said on Wednesday that her office is preparing to “fight back” against the incoming Trump administration. She should be disbarred, at a minimum for trying to bankrupt Trump with a bogus fraud case in which there are no fraud victims. 

Then there’s Liz Cheney, who in her role as vice chair of the Jan. 6 Committee has been accused of inducing witness perjury, destroying documents, and suppressing exonerating evidence. Cheney posted what seemed like a message of conciliation on X Tuesday night, saying we must accept the results of the election. But she shouldn’t get off so easily either. Her role in the Jan. 6 Committee should be fully investigated and she should face criminal charges if warranted.

The truth is, if Trump hadn’t won he’d be going to prison. For supporting Trump, Elon Musk would have been targeted by the government, bankrupted, and subjected to years of lawfare. The people who howled loudest about Trump weaponizing the government against his political opponents have spent years doing just that to Trump.

The idea that we should just forget all that now for the sake of unity is deeply misguided and naïve. If those responsible aren’t held accountable, they will never stop trying to destroy their enemies by any means they can. Before we ever achieve anything like unity in America again, there must be a reckoning and there must be justice. Without those things, the divisions in our country won’t be able to heal. 

Even with a reckoning, unity will be difficult. We can’t just say “Oh well we’re all Americans in the end.” That won’t cut it. The stark reality is that there are a large number of our countrymen who are no longer Americans in any meaningful sense. As Doug Ellmers has written, they “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

After those who broke the law are held accountable, and those who lied are ostracized and ignored, we will still face the problem of disunity and division among our people. We will still be two nations occupying the same territory, with two irreconcilable visions of what the country should be. We can’t paper over those differences, and we shouldn’t.

To achieve real and lasting unity we’ll need a counter-revolution in America, a re-founding of the country. That in turn will require a conversion of the American people and a return to the ideals, principles, and way of life that made our republic possible in the first place.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.