While Democrats flail about looking for a message, the answer is staring them in the face: promise to actually prosecute the criminals running the country.
That’s the argument from The New Republic’s Aaron Regunberg, who lays out a comprehensive case for making accountability the centerpiece of the party’s 2028 platform—and contrasts America’s failure to hold Trump accountable with how other democracies handled their own would-be authoritarians.
The scoreboard isn’t flattering. South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol got jailed for life this February for imposing martial law. Peru’s Pedro Castillo received 11 years for trying to dissolve Congress. Brazil sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years for attempting to overturn his country’s 2022 election.
And Trump? He’s back in the White House.
Regunberg places the blame squarely on Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, who waited nearly three years to bring federal charges against Trump for January 6—only acting after Congress’s investigation essentially forced his hand. By then it was too late. Trump successfully recast his prosecution as political persecution, won reelection, and the cases never concluded.
Where’s Garland now? Back at his old corporate law firm doing “white collar defense”—which Regunberg notes is also “the best way to describe Garland’s tenure as attorney general, at least where it matters.”
The prescription: Democrats need to commit now to prosecuting not just the foot soldiers of Trump’s regime but the architects. ICE and CBP officers who committed abuses, yes—but also the cabinet secretaries who directed them. Officials who rigged elections and the strategists who devised those schemes. Everyone involved in what Regunberg calls “the most incomprehensibly flagrant looting of America’s public resources in our history.”
This isn’t just about justice, the argument goes—it’s about politics. Elite impunity is what created Trump in the first place. His promise of “retribution” resonated precisely because regular people watched rich assholes face zero consequences for hollowing out their communities.
The Epstein files provide the perfect frame. Trump’s administration is deeply entangled in that saga, from Trump’s “pornographic birthday card” to Epstein referencing a “wonderful secret,” to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s documented visits to Epstein’s island.
As Senator Jon Ossoff put it: “This is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. This is the Epstein class. They are the elites they pretend to hate.”
Democrats can run on burning that system down. But it requires the party’s own complicit establishment—the Bill Clintons, Reid Hoffmans, and Larry Summerses who spent years consorting with Epstein—to get out of the way.
Brazil’s president Lula da Silva recently vetoed legislation to reduce Bolsonaro’s sentence, declaring at a rally: “In the name of the future, we do not have the right to forget the past.”
America’s last Democratic administration forgot that lesson. The next one can’t afford to.