Accountability Or Extinction: What Has To Happen The Day After Trump

No more reports. No more hearings. Orange jumpsuits or the next bastard walks in through the same fucking door.

Whether Donald Trump gets impeached and frog-marched out of the Oval Office. Whether the Senate finally locates its missing testicles and removes him. Whether he limps to the end of this second term and waddles off to Mar-a-Lago to fart into the upholstery for whatever years he’s got left. Or whether his cholesterol finally does the job that 80 years of cheeseburgers, hatred and Diet Coke have been quietly working towards.

One thing has to happen the second this convicted-felon-in-chief is no longer the convicted-felon-in-chief.

Accountability.

Real fucking accountability. Not the symbolic variety. Not the strongly worded letters. Not the bipartisan blue-ribbon panel that releases findings nobody reads on a Tuesday afternoon while everyone’s watching the football. Not the 9/11 Commission lite. Not the polite fucking gentleman’s agreement that we shake hands, agree it was all very unfortunate, and move on for the good of national healing.

Criminal prosecutions. Prison sentences. Orange jumpsuits replacing the spray tan with a colour the wearer didn’t choose for once in his miserable fucking life. The whole rotten lineup. Trump. Hegseth. Patel. Bondi. Every sycophant, every shill, every spineless little Yes Minister fuckwit who signed off on the destruction of the rule of law in exchange for a moment in the spotlight and a discounted Mar-a-Lago membership.

Because here’s the lesson the Democrats refused to learn the first time. The lesson the rest of the world is now paying for in blood, oil, fertiliser, fuel rationing and pension funds evaporating in real time. The lesson Joe Biden, in his terminal complacency, decided wasn’t worth bothering with.

When you let a wannabe dictator off the hook, he doesn’t go away. He fucking comes back. He comes back angrier, more vengeful, surrounded by a higher grade of sycophant, and convinced beyond any rational doubt that the rules don’t apply to him. Because you, you fucking bedwetters, just proved they don’t.

January 6 should have ended Donald Trump’s political career and most of his life expectancy. He led an insurrection. He sat on his fat fucking arse for 3 hours watching it unfold, eating Filet-O-Fish, while his own Vice President was being hunted through the corridors of the Capitol by a mob calling for his execution. He pissed on the Constitution from a height that would impress a Saudi crown prince. And the response from the party that was supposed to be defending democracy?

Reports. Hearings. A made-for-television committee. Some very firm finger-wagging. A Department of Justice that took its sweet fucking time getting moving and then fumbled the snap when it mattered. Merrick Garland walking around like a man trying very hard not to do his job in case it upset anyone.

And Joe Biden. The doddering, complacent old fool God bless him. Spent 4 years pretending the adults were back in charge and the system would just self-correct. Sat there in the Oval Office signing infrastructure bills and giving speeches about norms and decency, while the people who tried to overthrow the government were running for office, running for re-election, running the fucking House Judiciary Committee. Treated Trump like a problem that would solve itself if everyone just behaved professionally enough.

And then? Handed the fucking keys back. Just handed them over. Didn’t see it coming, even though every person with a functioning frontal lobe could see it coming from 50 miles away. Trump told you exactly what he was going to do. Stood in front of microphones and told you he was coming after you, your family, your party, and the very institutions you swore an oath to defend. And you, Joe, bet the entire fucking republic on the proposition that he didn’t really mean it.

Newsflash, Joe. He meant it.

He’s now installed himself at the top of the world’s biggest economy, with the launch codes, and a Cabinet selected for a single shared characteristic. The willingness to do whatever this bloated grift machine in a bad wig tells them to do, including breaking the law, ignoring the courts, and shitting on every checks-and-balances safeguard the Founding Fathers ever drafted.

Americans, the ones with critical thinking skills still functioning, the ones who haven’t drowned themselves in Fox News and Truth Social and the comforting fiction that everything’s fine, must be absolutely fucking livid. Gas prices doubled. No end in sight. The Strait of Hormuz a no-go zone. Fertiliser supply chains cratered. The economy in freefall. Their superannuation getting evaporated by tariffs and a war their President walked them into on a pack of lies. A foreign power, Israel, openly playing puppet master with the Oval Office. The whole world watching this national humiliation and fucking laughing at it.

And the question on every thinking American’s lips is the same fucking question.

What happens after?

What happens when this national fever finally breaks? Whether through impeachment, removal, the end of the term, or the inevitable medical event that comes for every 80-year-old who lives on processed meat and rage?

What. Fucking. Happens. After.

And the answer cannot be what it was last time.

It cannot be reports. It cannot be committees. It cannot be polite gestures towards moving forward and healing the national wound. The wound doesn’t heal until the people who inflicted it are answering to a judge.

People have lost faith in the Democrats. They’ve lost faith in the rule of law. They’ve lost faith in the proposition that nobody is above the law, because we have all watched, with our own fucking eyes, somebody be very obviously and very obnoxiously above the law for 10 years now.

That faith only gets restored one way.

Trials. Convictions. Sentences. The full weight of a justice system that has, for too long, decided that the rich and powerful occupy a separate legal universe from the rest of us.

And here, for the first and very probably last time in my fucking life, I find myself in agreement with something Donald Trump has put on the table.

Alcatraz.

The man wants to rebuild Alcatraz. Wants to retrofit it, modernise it, turn it back into a working federal prison.

Mate. Yes. Absolutely. Build the fucking thing.

Build it big. Build it secure. Build it cold. Build it for exactly the purpose it was always going to end up serving.

A purpose-built facility for the treasonous, thieving, lying rabble that ran your country into the ground.

I want to see Donald Trump in that yard. I want to see Pete Cocksbreth in that mess hall, eating reconstituted mince off a tray. I want to see Kash Patel learning how prison politics actually fucking work, as opposed to the cosplay version he’s been performing at the FBI. I want to see Pam Bondi, who turned the Department of Justice into a personal grievance bureau, explaining to a cellmate exactly what an Attorney General is supposed to do.

I want orange jumpsuits.

I want it televised. I want every minute of it documented. I want the whole world to see what happens when a country that calls itself a democracy finally remembers that the rule of law is not a fucking suggestion.

That’s accountability.

Anything less is just another invitation for the next tinpot would-be dictator to have a crack. And there is always, always a next one.

THE MECHANISM: WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

So what does this look like in practice? Because saying “lock them up” is exactly the kind of empty-headed chant that got America into this mess in the first place. We’re better than that. We have to be better than that. Because the difference between us and the Trump cult is that we actually believe in the fucking process.

Start with the charges, because there’s no shortage of them. Seditious conspiracy under 18 USC 2384, the same statute used against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, except this time aimed at the man who actually orchestrated the thing. Conspiracy to defraud the United States, 18 USC 371, for the fake electors scheme, the pressure campaign on state officials, the entire choreographed effort to overturn a free and fair election. Obstruction of an official proceeding. Witness tampering. Theft and mishandling of classified national defence information, the Mar-a-Lago documents case that Aileen Cannon spent 18 months ragdolling through the courts before finally torching it on bullshit grounds. Bring it back. Refile it. Do it properly this time.

And the new charges. The ones that have piled up since the felonious mango took office for the second time. Bribery. Emoluments violations. Obstruction of justice in the firing of every inspector general who looked at him sideways. Conspiracy against rights, 18 USC 241, for the systematic targeting of political opponents through the weaponised Department of Justice. Civil rights violations baked into every executive order this rancid sphincter has signed.

The court. Federal District Court, DC. Or Southern District of New York. You don’t need a special tribunal. You don’t need a Nuremberg-style international body, however emotionally satisfying that fantasy is. The American justice system already has every tool it fucking needs. What it has lacked, every single time, is the political will to actually use them on a man who has spent 50 years bullying it into submission.

The sentence structure. Federal time, no parole, in a facility chosen for security and not comfort. None of this Allenwood country club bollocks. None of this Camp Cupcake, work-release, ankle-monitor-and-a-yoga-mat horseshit. We’re not talking about Martha Stewart selling some shares she shouldn’t have. We’re talking about a man who tried to overthrow the government of the largest economy on earth, and the Cabinet of toadies, freaks and credulous ideologues who helped him do it.

Which brings us to the rest of the lineup. Because the man at the top is the symptom. The disease is the system that propped him up.

Pete Cocksbreth. Pete fucking Hegseth. The shartcloth strongman of the Pentagon, currently running the largest military on earth like a frat house with a bigger keg. Charges? Take your pick. The Signal chat where he fed strike package details to a journalist by mistake. The retaliatory firings of generals who wouldn’t bend the knee. The ongoing politicisation of an institution that, for all its faults, was supposed to be the one organ of state that didn’t take orders based on which billionaire donor was on speakerphone. Federal time. In Alcatraz. Watching the ferries from a window that doesn’t open.

Kash Patel. The wannabe-FBI-Director-turned-actual-FBI-Director, who spent the entirety of his pre-confirmation career maintaining literal enemies lists of anyone who’d ever crossed his Dear Leader. The man who has spent the bones of the year systematically dismantling FBI investigations into Republican wrongdoing, redirecting agents to harass journalists, and turning the Bureau into a personal protection racket for the Mar-a-Lago crime family. Federal time. Conspiracy against rights. Obstruction. Abuse of power. Throw him in a cell and let him write the third volume of his shitty children’s book, the one where King Donald slays the deep-state dragon, except this time with a much more realistic ending.

Pam Bondi. The Attorney General who turned the Department of Justice into the legal arm of a personal vendetta. The woman who took the Epstein files, dangled them in front of the cameras, then quietly buried the inconvenient bits because heaven fucking forfend the world should learn what was actually in there. Obstruction. Evidence tampering. Conspiracy. Federal time. And while she’s there, let her explain to the inmates exactly how the law is supposed to work.

And down the list we go. Stephen Miller, the racist little hall monitor with the eyes of a man who’s never been kissed, architect of every cruelty inflicted on migrants since 2017. Russ Vought, the Project 2025 ghoul who spent years drafting the blueprint for dismantling the federal government from within. Every Cabinet secretary, every senior appointee, every Justice Department lawyer who signed off on illegal orders, every general who didn’t refuse an unlawful command, every congressional Republican who stood up on the floor of the House and lied about election fraud they fucking knew was a fantasy.

Some of them go to prison. Some of them lose their licences to practise law. Some of them get banned from holding federal office for life, under section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the constitutional provision that already exists for exactly this situation, that the courts gutted in Trump v Anderson because they didn’t have the spine to actually enforce the document they swore an oath to. Reverse it. Apply it. Use it.

This is the mechanism. None of it is novel. None of it requires new laws. All of it requires one thing the Democrats have shown, repeatedly and humiliatingly, that they do not possess.

A fucking spine.

Because here’s the cold hard truth, my fellow travellers. Donald Trump didn’t get away with January 6 because the law was insufficient. He got away with it because the people charged with enforcing the law decided, again and again, that the political cost of holding him accountable was too high.

Merrick Garland sat on the evidence for 18 months while the statute of limitations clock ticked. Joe Biden refused to even publicly demand prosecution, on the grounds that doing so would politicise the Justice Department, as if Trump’s Justice Department had ever been anything other than a fully-owned political weapon. The Democrats running the January 6 committee did extraordinary investigative work and then handed it to a DOJ that fumbled it like a dropped phone in a urinal.

And here’s the part that should make every Democrat reading this set their hair on fire. Trump told you. He told you. He told you in 2022, in 2023, in 2024, on every stage, in every interview, in every fucking Truth Social shitpost, that if he got back into power he was going to come after you. He named names. He published lists. He said “retribution” was the entire campaign platform. And the Democratic response, led by an octogenarian who could no longer reliably finish a sentence, was to assume he didn’t mean it.

He meant it. He always meant it. He’s doing it right now.

If, by some miracle of cardiology or constitutional intervention, this country gets a second chance at this, the next Democratic administration cannot, must not, will not repeat the same fucking mistake.

Day one of the post-Trump administration. Special Counsel appointed. Independent. Insulated. Funded for the duration. Mandate to investigate every member of the Trump administration for crimes committed in office. Public hearings. Public charges. Public trials. Public sentencing.

If that’s politicising the Justice Department, then good. The alternative is the slow death of every institution America still has left, and the smug fucking certainty of every future would-be tyrant that the consequences of trying to seize power are, at worst, a sternly worded book deal.

THE AUSTRALIAN ANGLE: WHY YOU SHOULD GIVE A FUCK

Now I can hear the Australian readership already. Mate, what’s this got to do with us? We’re 15,000 kilometres away. We’ve got our own problems. We’ve got an election to digest, a gas industry that pays less tax than a Centrelink recipient, a Defence Minister who can’t find his arse with both hands and a torch.

Sit down. Pour yourself a beer. Let me explain.

We are tied to this disaster at the hip. Whether we like it or not, whether we asked for it or not, whether the alliance still serves us or not. The decisions made in Washington over the next 3 years are going to land in your fuel tank, your superannuation statement, your kid’s job prospects, your ability to defend the bloody continent.

AUKUS. The submarine deal. The 368 billion dollar punt we made on the proposition that the United States would still be a stable, rules-based partner in 2040. That deal is being administered, right now, by a Defence Department run by a man who can’t be trusted to keep strike plans off a Signal chat with his mates. The Virginia-class boats we’re meant to be receiving in the early 2030s are dependent on a US shipbuilding industry that is currently producing about 1.2 boats a year against a need of 2.3, and an administration that views every alliance as a transactional shakedown opportunity. The whole bet is being run by people who think NATO is a protection racket and ANZUS is a quaint historical document.

We are exposed. Spectacularly, ruinously exposed. And the people we sold the future to are now demonstrating, in real time, that they cannot be trusted to remember what country they’re in, let alone honour a 40-year strategic agreement.

Fuel security. The thing I’ve been banging on about for 6 months and that became unignorable the moment Trump’s mate Bibi started lobbing missiles into Iranian nuclear facilities. Australia has, on a good day, about 30 days of fuel reserves. We have 2 functioning refineries. We have been in violation of our IEA 90-day stockholding obligation since 2012 and successive governments, Labor and Coalition, have done sweet fuck all about it.

Why does this matter to a column about American accountability? Because the next time this ageing carnival barker of a US president decides to start a war in the Middle East to distract from a domestic scandal, or because his son-in-law’s Saudi business partners asked him to, our petrol bowsers are at the mercy of a man who could not pass a high school civics test if you spotted him the answers and a translator. Our economy, our food supply, our agricultural sector, our truck fleet, our airline industry, all of it, hostage to the impulse control of a man who eats his steak well done with ketchup.

The Republicans have demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that they regard alliances as a one-way fucking street. Pay tribute, get protection. Stop paying tribute, get hung out to dry. Every Australian with a strategic memory longer than a Tuesday should be looking at this and asking, urgently, what the alternatives are.

And here’s the bit that should hit home for anyone who’s watched Australian politics for more than 5 minutes.

The same fucking poison is in our water.

Pauline Hanson, freshly returned from her undisclosed flights on Gina Rinehart’s private jet, is currently polling at One Nation’s highest ever level. The same hateful, divisive, anti-immigrant, anti-renewables, pro-Russia, pro-Trump rhetoric that turned the Republican Party into a death cult is being imported into Australian politics in real time, by people who watched what happened to America and decided yes, that, please, give me that.

Angus Taylor is doing a MAGA cosplay on migration. Peter Dutton’s culture war playbook is lifted, line for line, from the Heritage Foundation. The Murdoch press, the same outfit that platformed Trump for a decade and is now getting sued out of existence for it, is running the same playbook here. Sky News After Dark is just Fox News with worse lighting and a hostage smile.

The lesson of America 2025 is not that the Americans are stupid, although that is a contributing factor. The lesson is that this rot spreads if you let it. It spreads if you don’t punish it. It spreads if you don’t make examples of the people who tried it the first time. It spreads if you treat civility and decorum as more important than the survival of democratic institutions.

Australia gets one shot at watching this happen to someone else and learning from it. One shot. The next Australian government, of whichever stripe, has to look at the smoking ruin of the American republic and ask itself a single question.

What was the moment they could have stopped this, and didn’t?

Because we are right now in our equivalent of that moment. The Pauline Hansons, the Clive Palmers, the Trumpet Of Patriots fuckwits, the rising One Nation vote, the Murdoch-poisoned discourse, the conspiracy-soaked Liberal Party backbench. This is the seed bed. This is where it starts. This is the bit where the Americans, looking back, are now saying we should have done something.

So when you watch Donald Trump finally face the consequences he should have faced 4 years ago, when the cuffs go on, when the orange jumpsuit gets handed over, when the Alcatraz cell door closes behind him and his rancid coterie of enablers, do not think of it as American justice catching up with an American problem.

Think of it as a lesson. A worked example. A demonstration of what democracies are supposed to do, eventually, with the people who try to destroy them.

And then look at your own ballot. Your own preferences. Your own newsfeed. Your own dinner table arguments with the uncle who’s got Fox News on at 2pm on a Tuesday. And ask yourself, with the kind of clarity America didn’t manage in time.

Are you the country that lets the bastards off the hook, or are you the country that finally makes them pay?

IFLA ~ Gman

AUSSIE-TO-YANK GLOSSARY

For our American readers trying to follow along.

Centrelink. The Australian government welfare and services agency. Pensions, unemployment benefits, family payments, disability support. The phrase “pays less tax than a Centrelink recipient” is the Aussie equivalent of saying a multinational pays less tax than someone living on food stamps, except our welfare recipients are actually doing it tougher than your Walmart greeters.

Superannuation, or “super”. Australia’s compulsory retirement savings system. Your boss has to put a percentage of your wage into a super fund every payday, and you can’t touch it until you’re 60. Think 401(k), except mandatory, universal, and not optional for employers to skip when they feel like screwing you. Yes, we know. We’re sorry.

Bowser. The petrol pump at a service station. Americans call it a gas pump. Australians call it a bowser, after Sylvanus Bowser, the bloke who invented the thing in 1885. The word survived in Australia and died in America, which feels metaphorical somehow.

Fuckwit. Untranslatable, but essentially a person of profound, almost spiritual stupidity, often combined with arrogance. An idiot who is also a dickhead. The Sistine Chapel of Australian insults. Can be applied across the political spectrum but feels especially at home pointed at a politician.

Sky News After Dark. The Australian Murdoch-owned cable news network’s evening lineup. A nightly festival of culture-war shouting, climate denial and migration panic. Imagine Fox News, but with worse production values, smaller audiences, and presenters who look like they’ve been bullied into doing it. This is where Australia’s Trump-curious right go to feel validated.