Lefty Pundits Absolve Their Own Failures on Holding Trump Accountable for His Coup

Let me start this post with a quiz.

Who are the two Trump associates newly treated as co-conspirators in the October 2024 immunity brief?

The answer?

Steve Bannon and Mike Roman (yeah, sure, I gave a big hint).

While neither was added as a labeled c0-conspirator in the August 2024 superseding indictment (that is, as a CC1 through CC6, as Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Ken Chesebro, [Jeffrey Clark], and Boris Epshteyn were), they were treated as co-conspirators in the immunity filing. Bannon was described in a list of the “private co-conspirators” early in the brief. And while the brief described Roman as an agent early on, when it described how he deliberately tried to stoke violence at the TCF Center in Detroit during the vote count in November 2020, it described him as a co-conspirator. Thus, both Bannon and Roman were treated as co-conspirators specifically in response to their premediations of violence.

A month before the election, in defiance of Trump’s efforts to suppress the information, Jack Smith introduced new details about how Trump premeditated violence in 2020. He revealed that the guy whom Trump pardoned on his way out the door in January 2021, the guy who was at that moment sitting in Danbury Prison for refusing to tell the January 6 Committee about that premeditated violence, had been involved in the plot from the beginning.

When I asked this question on Bluesky, four people eventually got the answer correct, but most people struggled. One extremely knowledgable legal writer got Bannon, but not Roman. A higher profile pundit confessed they had “no clue.”

This may seem like a totally picayune detail. Except I spent yesterday watching pundit after pundit expounding with confidence about what happened with the DOJ investigation, virtually all of whom got basic details of the investigation wrong. Which is why I thought I’d test whether they knew this detail. If you don’t know that Smith newly treated Bannon and Roman as co-conspirators, you don’t know where the investigation might have been headed when SCOTUS stalled everything in December 2023. You don’t know what happened in the case right in the middle of election season. That is, a legally significant — premeditation of violence!! — development happened when you should have been paying closest attention … and you missed it.

And as a result, you did nothing to convey that to voters. I’m not sure these lefty pundits, many of whom are wailing that someone at DOJ didn’t tell them what was going on, even noted the immunity brief.

Like a lot of pundits writing yesterday, Dan Drezner blamed a slew of people for not holding Trump accountable, claiming with no evidence that Merrick Garland waited “too long” before turning to Trump and ignoring the delays and some of the legal shenanigans SCOTUS caused. He ranked his villains in what he views as their ascending order of responsibility.

1. Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020 but due to a combination of hubris, age, and ego stayed in the 2024 race far too long, stacking the deck against anyone who challenged Donald Trump;
2. Merrick Garland, who took way too long to mobilize any serious Justice Department investigation into Trump’s myriad felonies;
3. The Supreme Court of the United States, who repeatedly, persistently evinced zero interest in applying any legal or constitutional constraint on Donald Trump. As a result, no future president will feel constrained in any way whatsoever by the Emoluments Clause, Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, as it turns out, pretty much any law that might otherwise restrict the President of the United States;
4. Mitch McConnell, who could have tipped the scales on Trump’s second impeachment (and made it pretty clear afterwards how he felt about Trump) but, in the end, did not vote to convict;
5. Congressional Republicans, who acted and sounded pretty goddamn terrified when the rioters attacked on January 6th. If they had all decided to jump at once and vote to impeach and then convict Trump, his political power would have evaporated. Instead, scared of their own partisans, they capitulated to Trump;
6. Donald J. Trump, who whipped his supporters into a frenzy, attempted to organize slates of alternate electors, refused to recognize the results of any election that he has lost, and has promised to pardon those who violated laws to serve his interests. And finally,
7. The American people, who had plenty of opportunities not to vote for Trump again. In early 2024, Republicans could have gone to the polls and selected a Trump clone who had not committed multiple felonies. In November 2024 voters could have gone to the polls and selected a different candidate who, to repeat a theme, had not committed multiple felonies. And yet, in the end, a plurality voted for the toddler.

The list doesn’t include lefty pundits, the people who might be expected to identify salient details of the investigation — like that Jack Smith got evidence that Trump and his c0-conspirators premeditated violence — the people who might drive the press focus on those salient details.

He doesn’t include the people whose job it is to be informed of and comment on such matters, who yesterday, affirmed that role loudly.

So he held American voters responsible. But not the people who failed to inform voters of key details in the investigation of Trump.

The failure to incur any electoral cost on Trump for his coup attempt is a political failure. It reflects the political failure to rebut Trump’s relentless campaign of grievance. In his list, Drezner conveyed that by assigning to voters even more responsibility than Trump himself. Yet he doesn’t include the political failures — his own political failure — of the pundit class at all.

None of these pundits did.

It is, perhaps, a gimmick to ask the pundits who sternly weighed in yesterday to take a simple test.

It is, perhaps, too much to ask from pundits that they do the homework for the gig.

It is, perhaps, churlish to expect that pundits hold themselves to account for this political failure.

The flood of columns we got yesterday, some of it quite good? That’s what was needed in February. And March. And April. And May. A constant stream of punditry focused on Trump’s assault on democracy. More often than not, that punditry was focused on Merrick Garland, not Trump. And in the vacuum, Trump sold his grievance narrative to millions of Americans, many unaware of the actual details of the case or — more importantly — the justice of the case against him.

The failure to hold Trump accountable is a failure with many authors. It’s time lefty pundits consider their own role in that.