On the Practical Case for a Book of Grudges

Late in September 2019, with the political winds swirling towards impeachment for embattled President Donald Trump, New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger gave a lecture at Brown University, which was adapted into an op-ed for the Times titled “The Growing Threat to Journalism Around the World.” Sulzberger delivered a bombshell accusation: that the State Department had been tacitly enabling the Egyptian government in harassing and attempting to arrest Times reporters Declan Walsh and David Kirkpatrick on various assignments there. Sulzberger quotes an unnamed official at the Cairo embassy, on the topic of one of these arrests: “What did you expect would happen to [Kirkpatrick]? His reporting made the government look bad.”

This was, while perhaps not a presidency-threatening scandal for most administrations, definitely a serious breach of established standards and further underlined the Trump administration’s growing hostility towards the press. It certainly would have merited more than a fleeting amount of scrutiny in another era, especially in the wake of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. 

Yet I forgot all about it, and so (I assume) have you. Mr. Sulzberger has softened his oppositional stance towards Trump and his political apparatus, and the reporters in question moved on with their careers. I have only come back to this story by deliberate chance: by digging through a chat log, starting on a random date, in order to find the first piece of forgotten Trump scandal I could. There are many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar crimes and offenses that have also fallen out of sight and out of mind.

Mr. Trump’s unique brand of political Teflon seems to be rooted in the unrelenting, myriad nature of his various scandals. It is impossible to focus too much on any relatively modest outrage, and increasingly, even the major ones slip by. Starting a pointless war with Iran has certainly served to distract us all from the Epstein files. And as the project of a future liberal government requires holding the assorted criminals of the Trump empire to account, as new offenses break like a wave into clickbait headlines and then are forgotten almost as quickly, I am left to ponder a disconcerting question: is anyone writing all of this down?

I don’t mean to suggest that there are crimes of the Trump presidencies that are lost to history; the headlines record an unending chronicle of misdeeds spanning this sordid decade. But if there is a comprehensive list that a public servant could take to a future attorney general and say, “Get to work!”, I am not aware of it. In the wake of this whirlwind of graft and plundering, anyone who wishes to set things right must have an organized ledger of all the things that have been made wrong.

In modern high fantasy media, the Dwarven race, adapted by J. R. R. Tolkien from Norse mythology, are often characterized as quarrelsome and vindictive, keeping meticulous archives of every insult and injury dealt to them. The Warhammer Fantasy setting brings this tendency to an evocative point: a great Book of Grudges, kept by the kings for posterity. This is a human tendency exaggerated to a fantastical level, of course, but as I read through The Reconstruction Papers in their tightly organized packet I can’t help but wish to hold such a cheat sheet for Trump’s offenses. 

The reasons for compiling such a document are twofold. First, we should ensure that all of the goons, gremlins, and associates of the two administrations can’t slink away into obscurity. Elon Musk deserves prosecution, but so do relative has-beens like Steve Bannon. Second, and in my estimation much more importantly, any serious agenda to fix everything that has been broken requires a comprehensive accounting of what those things are. Would a well-meaning but forward-looking Democratic administration fail to restore the Smithsonian board from its looming purge, for instance? Would they remember the Park Service, and funding for minority-serving colleges, and screwworm mitigation, and to fire any remaining State Department careerists who hung reporters out to dry in Egypt? There are many parts of our state apparatus that will have to be rebuilt from scratch. Anything we can salvage instead will have to be meticulously patched back together, a task that the Biden administration struggled greatly with. 

A future liberal administration will need to juggle a million priorities at once, rebuilding agencies and partnerships while undoing sabotage and neglect. They also must work to deter future misbehavior by bringing legal consequences upon those within the government who have engaged in naked corruption, and upon the outside firms and individuals who facilitated it. This is not a time for forgiveness, for looking solely towards the future. That path was tried before, by the Obama and Biden administrations, and following it has contributed to the present environment of lawless government and populist discontent. Feet must be held to the fire, and broken windows must be systematically fixed. I want our next administration to know from the beginning exactly which windows and exactly whose feet.

It is unhealthy to seethe Dwarvenly on a mountain of pent-up grievances, of course. The progression of right-wing media demonstrates this: the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity drove their audiences to madness, and now the new generation of commentators struggle to be mad enough to sate them. Of all the reasons I resent Donald Trump, perhaps the deepest and most personal is the degree to which he has made me a more somber, cynical, and hateful person, just from living in his country and looking upon his works. I am torn between my responsibility as a citizen to remember what must be made right, and my distaste as a human being for the litany of horrors I have had to witness because of him–and I haven’t even been a direct victim. 

In this much, the Dwarves have it right: grievances belong out of sight, but chronicled, meticulously indexed, and filed away close at hand. Perhaps in a large, imposing book. 

Featured Image is Justice for Jamal: The United States and Saudi Arabia One Year After the Khashoggi Murder, by April Brady/Project on Middle East Democracy