Impunity or Bust

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

What if Ilhan Omar did it?

 

It’s fine and fair to call the federal probe of the Democratic congresswoman’s immigration history “appalling,” as Barack Obama did recently. The Trump administration’s motives in the matter are malign, as usual. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that the president’s flunkies have bad intentions that Omar is innocent.

 

And it sure doesn’t follow that she should face no consequences if she isn’t.

 

What if the feds find evidence that she really did direct aides to falsify records related to her birthdate, to conceal that she was too old to receive “derivative” U.S. citizenship as a minor from her father?

 

That would raise sticky questions about the appropriate penalty. Should she be denaturalized and deported to Somalia, where she hasn’t lived since she was a child? Should she be allowed to remain in the U.S. but expelled from Congress? Should she be prosecuted and jailed for fraud?

 

If Trump’s investigators get the goods, Americans will have a robust debate about which punishment fits the crime in this strange situation. But there needs to be some punishment. The result of Ilhan Omar gaining citizenship fraudulently and then covering it up cannot be to shrug and say, “Sorry, she’s a member of the House. She’s above the law.”

 

In America, we don’t drop meritorious criminal cases just because the suspect managed to land him- or herself an important government job. Normally.

 

The Republican Party will come together behind that message if and when Omar’s wrongdoing is revealed, oblivious to its own preposterous hypocrisy. Yet when another Midwestern Democrat, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, made a variation of the same point a few days ago, right-wingers howled. The president, of all people, called her a “lowlife” for suggesting it. Why?

 

Lawfare?

 

Full context is essential.

 

Speaking at an event in Chicago, Slotkin considered how her party might get the most bang for its accountability buck when investigating the Trump administration if it regains control of Congress. First, she said, we should zero in on a few “signature cases” where the corruption has been especially egregious. Second, we should include lower-ranking staffers who facilitated that corruption as targets. In a world where the president enjoys broad personal immunity for his criminal activity thanks to the Supreme Court, deterring official misconduct necessarily requires making an example of his enablers too:

 

We do have to have accountability for the unbelievable corruption that we are living under right now. But you can’t just make that your whole personality, right? So you have to pick signature cases and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious. So everyone knows the East Wing of the White House, right? People feel that in a way that’s different from a nameless contract at the Pentagon, or whatever.

 

Pick those signature cases and go hard on accountability. Not just Trump, right? Because, of course, there will be moments of “Let’s go after Trump himself.” As someone who voted to impeach him twice, he’s still there, right?

 

But the people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity. They have no immunity the way the president does. And to me, he couldn’t do any of this stuff, without all of those people saluting and supporting it. So you go after the people who do his bidding.

 

A few minutes later she returned to the point, referring back to the “signature cases” of corruption she mentioned in the excerpt above:

 

I wanna look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president but on the people who enabled him. I want young people coming out of school to say, “Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.” I want them to be like, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want. And so let me avoid participating in that.” I want that deterrence message sent.

 

Would it surprise you to learn that that second excerpt, shorn of the context of the first, went viral within the same right-wing circles that were certain James Talarico recently spent a week in an insane asylum?

 

The viral clip, in isolation, made it seem like Slotkin was saying that Democrats should harass Trump staffers baselessly, to discourage young Republicans from working in politics. In context, it’s clear that she’s saying she wants to expose actual corruption by White House staffers in order to alert college grads to the true nature of the Trump administration (in the admittedly unlikely event that they don’t know already). Those kids might have good intentions in applying for a job with the president, believing they’re joining a traditional political operation, only to realize too late that what they’ve actually joined is a criminal syndicate.

 

If a cop warns a teenager not to join the local gang because the gang will expect him to do things that will land him in prison, is the cop threatening the teen? Or is he giving him good advice?

 

No matter. This is lawfare, the Talarico truthers (and the Wall Street Journal editorial page) insist. Elissa Slotkin wants to weaponize government.

 

What’s the alternative to “weaponization” in this? Total, up-front criminal impunity for all?

 

Real outrage or fake?

 

I’m not taking the outrage at Slotkin seriously. Almost certainly, as with the Talarico smear, it’s a last-ditch bid by right-wing activists to jumpstart Republican outrage—and turnout—in a dismal election cycle. They’re demoralized by the polls and by Trump’s idiocy, and they’re sick to death of having to play defense politically after doing so for the past 21 months.

 

They became activists in the first place because they relish feasting on the left. Deprived of a foil since January 2025, they’ve grown ravenously hungry. So they’re making a meal out of a distortion of her point.

 

But let’s say I’m wrong and their outrage is sincere. It can’t be that they sincerely doubt that the Trump administration is corrupt, can it?

 

I don’t believe it. Even right-wing media, which can convince its audience of almost anything, has struggled to contain the evidence of rampant malfeasance in the government. The data bears that out: In addition to corruption rising to the top of voters’ list of issues about which they’re “very concerned,” nearly two-thirds of Americans now say they believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself. That includes 34 percent of Republicans, up from 22 percent last year.

 

CNN reported this week that GOP strategists were “taken aback” recently by what they heard from a focus group of Republican voters in the Midwest. “Asked what they blamed for rising gas prices, those voters pointed to ‘corrupt politicians’ and ‘billionaires,’” the outlet noted, “a response that surprised some longtime strategists who’ve never seen government corruption emerge as a top issue for so many Republican voters in congressional races.” This issue has broken through.

 

And no wonder. New exposés of self-dealing and suspected influence peddling by the president or his toadies circulate practically every day. This weekend the New York Times reported that the ongoing spat between Trump inner-circlers Ric Grenell and Alina Habba Mildon now involves a mysterious $17 million transfer from the Democratic Republic of Congo—and I haven’t mentioned it until now, because why bother? Who has time? There’ll be another story like it in a few days at most.

 

Can’t blog ‘em all.

 

And that’s just financial corruption. If we widen the aperture to include other forms of unethical conduct, every filthy thing that the president’s Justice Department has done to aid his political allies and persecute his political enemies is part of this discussion as well. In a piece about Slotkin, law professor Jack Goldsmith couldn’t resist quoting the most ludicrously over-the-top examples of Republicans criticizing her this week for “weaponizing” government while Team Trump goes about trying to lock up James Comey for posting a photo of seashells and launches antitrust probes of news networks for boycotting the president’s appearances.

 

Tit for tat.

 

Slotkin herself is a victim of Trump administration “lawfare,” in fact. She was one of six Democrats who contributed to a video last year reminding military personnel not to obey any illegal orders they might receive—functionally the same advice she gave to young Republicans this week when she urged them not to get involved in the president’s racketeering operation, as Slotkin herself pointed out in an interview. The Justice Department responded to her “illegal orders” video by opening an investigation into her.

 

Even the umbrage taken at the senator for supposedly trying to discourage young right-wingers from working in politics is comically hypocritical. If you’re a civic-minded young conservative who’s willing to blow the whistle on wrongdoing when you see it, how eager are you to work for this government as you watch Trump’s Justice Department try to railroad Cassidy Hutchinson for testifying against him?

 

At best, we might fault Slotkin for wanting to target relatively powerless Trump staffers in corruption inquiries instead of sticking to the principals. But, realistically, what choice do she and Democrats have? The whole reason the president pardoned his January 6 henchmen en masse and later tried to remunerate them with taxpayer money is because he wants to incentivize his enablers to behave corruptly on his behalf. That incentive needs to be countered.

 

If any part of the right-wing outrage at Slotkin is sincere, then, its sincerity has little to do with whether Trump is corrupt. What it has to do with, I think, is needing to believe that his corruption is justified. That’s why the president continues to waste DOJ resources on trying to prove some “grand conspiracy” within federal law enforcement to discredit and undermine him dating back to 2016. If he can show that Democrats were corrupt first, all of his own subsequent abuses become nothing worse than tit for tat. Rough justice, if you will.

 

And as the right is reassured that Democrats are no better than Trump is, it will also feel reassured that its pitiful indulgence of his runaway corruption is less a catastrophic moral failing than simply politics as usual. That’s why Slotkin’s comments created a sensation among MAGA, I suspect: Sure, the Republican president is blatantly using government power to persecute innocent partisan enemies—but look, here’s a Democratic senator who wants to do the same thing, at least according to the bowdlerized version of what she said. Tit for tat.

 

Why, if anything, she’s more ruthless than the president is, aiming to go after the fine young staffers in the other party.

 

Goldsmith wonders how the cycle will ever end. Referring to Jack Smith’s indictments of the president, he writes in his piece on Slotkin that Trump has “engaged in astonishingly harsh and broad retaliation for what the Biden administration did, in order to deter rivals on many dimensions. The Democrats are now contemplating whether and how to respond when they gain power. The incentive for brutal retaliation will be overwhelming, especially since it will be argued … that the other side has already done it, will do it again if possible, and thus must be maximally deterred.” And of course, if Democrats gain power and move to hold Trump apparatchiks legally accountable, Republicans will retaliate once they’re back in charge.

 

There’s no way out of tit for tat. Or is there?

 

1975.

 

Here’s a question. Why wasn’t the Justice Department “weaponized” against Democrats in 1975?

 

Gerald Ford, a Republican, was president. His predecessor, Richard Nixon, had just been driven from office by congressional Democrats’ investigation of the Watergate scandal. Tit for tat: After the opposition used government power to claim the ultimate Republican scalp, the GOP was in a position to sic the DOJ on Democratic bigwigs and repay the favor. Why didn’t it?

 

“Because Ford was a patriot and a decent man” is true and part of the answer, but a minor part. The greater part is that Nixon was guilty. He did it. And most Americans understood, and accepted, that the partisan valence of congressional Democrats’ investigation into his chicanery didn’t mean that their investigation was illegitimate.

 

They accepted it so overwhelmingly, in fact, that Nixon’s Republican Party was obliterated at the polls in 1974, three months after he resigned. Democrats gained four seats in the Senate that year, pushing their majority above 60, and 49 seats in the House, handing them a supermajority.

 

So strong was the national consensus in favor of accountability that it was Ford’s own Republican-led Justice Department that prosecuted Nixon’s various toadies and co-conspirators, an unthinkable development today. And when Ford ran for the presidency a year later and lost, his defeat wasn’t blamed on his willingness to go after members of his own party. It was blamed (in part) on his decision to pardon Nixon—that is, to drop a meritorious criminal case just because the suspect once held an important government job.

 

To end the cycle of tit for tat, we need the Republican Party and its base to accept that legal accountability for Trump and his toadies isn’t per se illegitimate simply because Democrats are the ones pursuing it. They need to care about punishing actual, bona fide corruption more than they care about lib-owning.

 

They didn’t care in 2024. Trump almost certainly committed federal crimes when he concealed classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, one of the two cases brought against him by Jack Smith while he campaigned for reelection. In the other, he was charged with fraud and obstruction of justice related to his post-election shenanigans in 2020, as that was the best Smith could do to shoehorn a coup attempt—the worst thing any president has ever done, and which Congress never thought to explicitly criminalize because such a thing seemed unimaginable—into the federal code.

 

There’s no doubt that partisan motives figured into Democrats’ decision to pursue Trump, just as there’s no doubt that partisan motives are driving the current administration’s interest in Ilhan Omar. (Republican officials suspected of crimes get off scot-free in this administration.) But as with the congresswoman, so with the president: If there really is a crime, there should be punishment. The American people of 1975 didn’t let congressional Democrats’ glaring partisan interest in unseating Nixon undermine the higher civic imperative to make sure that corruption was punished.

 

Nixon deserved what he got, so there was no subsequent tit for at. The same will be true if and when grassroots Republicans accept that Trump’s administration should be held accountable for its abuses—even by Democrats, if need be—for the good of the party and the country. An optimist might even point to the recent polling on corruption that I flagged earlier and see a glimmer of hope that the right is slowly stumbling toward enlightenment.

 

But not me.

 

It’s no coincidence, I think, that the Trumpist right has begun “Nixonmaxxing,” peddling revisionist history about the 37^th president to try to will into being a new Republican consensus that Tricky Dick got a bad rap. Rehabbing Nixon was inevitable in this movement, and not just because his ruthlessness appeals instinctively to postliberal cutthroats. Here, as with Slotkin, modern Republicans are eager to believe that their own moral degeneracy isn’t all that awful and aberrant but really just politics as usual—and has been so since 1974.

 

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” J.D. Vance told an audience this summer. “Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.” That’s a supremely efficient example of how Republicans rationalize the corruption they’ve chosen to condone: Somehow, in a single breath, Nixon’s criminality is both true and false, minor malfeasance at best but also a hoax that was invented by his enemies to ruin him.

 

No big deal either way. Certainly nothing to demand accountability for.

 

If you’re angrier at Elissa Slotkin for trying to discourage young Republicans from joining a nihilist outfit that believes such things than you are at Vance for promoting that nihilism, you’re an enabler yourself. And part of the reason why tit for tat will continue.