Bring Exile Back

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Cape Up!

Tired of political gridlock? Fed up with pols—even the ones you support—saying the same thing over and over? Wondering why even Dems can’t agree among themselves? Despairing for the future of our democracy? Then I have two words for you: “Cape Up!” That is, listen to Jonathan Capehart’s eponymous Washington Post podcast. All by itself, it’s worth the price of a WaPo subscription. An ex-engineer and ex-scientist turned lawyer and law professor, I’m an efficiency freak. I don’t listen when I can read: reading’s much faster. I’m also retired and don’t commute to work. So as a rule, I don’t listen to podcasts. But after three mainline injections of hope, I’m making an exception for Cape Up. The first two were Capehart’s interviews with Jaime Harrison, who tragically just lost to Lindsey Graham in the South Carolina Senate race, and Julián Castro, former mayor of San Antonio and Obama’s HUD Secretary. The third and best, this Thursday, was Capehart’s interview with Ritchie Torres, the South Bronx’ new congressman-elect. Both Harrison and Torres were raised in poverty by single moms. Both are Black. Torres is also Afro-Latino and openly gay. But that’s not all that’s inspiring about them. Both are brilliant, practical and superbly articulate. Here’s how Torres responded to a pie-in-the-sky question about a possible interim Senate appointment before attending his first official day in the House: “As much as I respect you, Jonathan, I’m gonna resist commenting on fanciful hypotheticals.” Responses like that, uttered without hesitation on the spur of the moment—not composed with painstaking care (and plenty of time) like this Blog—impress me. If you listen to just one interview, pick the one with Torres, if only because he won. In January he’ll improve our Congress with his presence. I won’t spoil the interview by giving away its gist; it covers a lot of ground. It reveals how “no one” from nowhere can win, why Pelosi is Speaker, why old-fashioned door-to-door campaigning still works, why the Dems are divided, how to defeat mental illness, how best to help poor people with kids, how to fix our nation’s biggest housing project, and how to be superbly progressive without once walking into a verbal minefield. As a small-d democrat, I’ve always believed that great leaders can arise from the most unlikely circumstances. At 75, I still hope that new, diverse leaders will truly make America great again. Cape Up has made that hope flesh. Thank you, Jonathan Capehart!

“Now is no time for self-congratulation or complacency. We must act with the unique urgency and courage of those who know they are living on borrowed time.” — Susan Rice, “Our Democracy’s Near-Death Experience,” December 1, 2020.

We Americans think we live in history’s greatest democracy. If so, why does Susan Rice’s warning sound so apt and so right? The state to which President Trump has reduced us in four years is not going to vanish overnight, far less if the party that has become a cult of his personality still controls our Senate.

So it behooves us to search our species’ five-thousand year recorded history for something that might help. We ought to seek expedients that once worked well but that we might have forgotten.

One of them is exile. The two greatest ancient democracies—Greece’s and Rome’s—used exile to rid themselves of troublemakers.

Exile was a clever and sophisticated answer to troublemaking. Unlike murder, it’s not final. So it avoids martyrdom and all the consequences of martyrdom. (Just ask the Christians and Muslims.)

Instead, exile is supremely “civilized” and can be reversed. Unlike imprisonment, it reduces the troublemaker’s ability to make future trouble in the homeland. (How this might work in the Internet age we’ll get to.) Unlike execution or torture, it leaves no lasting scars. And it always leaves open the opportunity for bargaining among the exiled and the exilers.

How might exile work with Donald Trump and his family? We couldn’t just impose it by decree, or even by adjudication. Our Constitution and our legal system don’t work that way. But what if we could make the Trumps an offer they couldn’t refuse?

After January 20, the Trump brood will be in a world of hurt. The patriarch faces a reported debt of $421 million, ready for foreclosure. The infamous Department of Justice memorandum that immunizes a sitting president from federal prosecution will no longer apply. Even if Trump’s stacked Supreme Court eventually approves his “pre-emptive” pardons—an unlikely outcome!—the president’s federal pardon power does not extend to criminal actions by the states, nor to private civil lawsuits by anyone.

The soon-to-be-ex president’s tax returns are still under serious audit. Soon they will face a new administration far less eager to compromise and—with the pandemic still raging and McConnell maybe at the Senate’s helm—far more in need of tax revenue.

So after January 20, Trump and his spawn face debt foreclosures, federal prosecutions, state prosecutions, increasing tax scrutiny, and private suits by aggrieved parties (including big banks and other corporations) no longer worried about offending POTUS. Through its exercise of prosecutorial and executive discretion, the federal government will have the power to fast-track many of these actions, and to recommend that the states and their courts do the same. After all, what could be more compelling than to bring the law to bear, at last, on a loser president who did his best while in office to destroy the rule of law?

These would be the sticks. What about the carrots? The federal and state governments could slow-walk the prosecutions just as well as speed them up. They could even dismiss them, but without prejudice to their renewal, within the relevant statutes of limitations.

Yet the private sector would be quickest and most effective in providing carrots. Mike Bloomberg reportedly gave $100 million of his billions to the successful effort to elect Joe Biden president. Could he give (or raise) an equal amount to exile the Trump family and maybe save our democracy from incessant predation at home? What about other rich benefactors, like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates,or George Soros. What about small donors?

In ancient Greece and Rome, the idea of exile was to remove troublemakers from the field of action. They just couldn’t influence things from a distant land as much as they could at home.

That impotence is harder to arrange in the Internet Age than before the invention of the pony express. But it’s not impossible. The trick would be keeping the whole family on a short leash.

Offer them a stipend, say $ 2 million per month for the whole lot. Even they could probably live well on that. But make the stipend strictly subject to three conditions.

First, none of the exiles could visit the United States, its territories or possessions. Second, none could communicate in any way with anyone in the US, its territories or possessions, or with any news medium serving them. No Tweets, no Facebook posts, no dark Web, no interviews with or messages to any news source. Any communication of “news”—even a single Tweet or re-Tweet—would break this condition, which would be a principal purpose of the exile.

Third and finally, the exiles’ cars, planes, yachts, every room of their homes and offices, and their every communication device would be bugged and monitored for compliance by the best of our governmental and/or private security 24/7/365. No word could get out or in without the exile monitors knowing.

As long as the exiles maintained the conditions, all this surveillance data would be strictly secret. But at the first sign of any attempt to break the first or second condition, the stipend would cease, and so would secrecy. All exiles would sign a waiver allowing (in that circumstance) any archived surveillance data to be used for any criminal prosecution by the federal or any state government. Use in private lawsuits could be a bargaining point.

As for their US-based businesses, the exiles would have to put them into a blind trust, run at home by professional managers with no direction from the exiles. This would be no more than what they should have done, for ethical reasons, before storming the White House en famille.

Would this work? Would the Trumps accept their exile? We’ll never know without trying, will we?

A lot depends on how vigorously the private sector and (to the extent able) the federal and state governments exercise their powers to foreclose, sue and prosecute. Collectively, they can exert horrendous financial and legal pressure on the Trump family, which the Trumps could switch off simply by agreeing to the terms of their exile.

In ancient times, exile was both an expedient and a punishment. Then it was hard for anyone—especially the wealthy and powerful—to tolerate life outside centers of civilization, let alone far away in “barbarian” lands. But the world is much flatter today, and the Trumps could be comfortable in many parts of the world. There they could live in luxury, be suitably entertained, and spin it all (in their place of exile) as a “win” in which the US and its donors paid to let them live in wealth. They might even dabble in “local” politics.

Punishment would not be a purpose of this exile. However much we might desire retribution or vengeance (and I would!), getting this cancer out of our body politic is infinitely more important. Letting Trump and his brood live out their lives in anonymous and incognito luxury would be a small price to pay. (Hell, even I would give $1,000 to see their backs.)

The only trick might be finding a country that would take them, and that would help enforce the terms of their exile. Perhaps one of the lesser Arab powers—now threatened by the coming conflagration between a budding Israeli-Saudi alliance against an imperial Iran—might be induced to host them in exchange for a defense against Iran’s precision missiles. Maybe Trump’s buddy Putin would take him into the Kremlin, as an adviser on American disinformation. (If so, we should also require that Trump and his brood renounce their American citizenship.)

It’s certainly worth a try. Right now, no one knows what greater horrors Trump has in store for us. Probably not even he knows. But we’ve already seen enough of his fevered machinations to justify Susan Rice’s headpiece quote above.

Trump might just become an ever-more-deranged Tucker Carlson, with a bigger media presence, an unconscionable income, and the ability to raise a private “Brown-Shirt” army at the drop of a Tweet. Or he might continue to subvert the Republican Party, squeezing out all vestiges of courage, sanity and respect for democracy and science—in preparation for a final assault on the citadel in 2024.

Either way, having Trump and his brood safely and privately ensconced, incommunicado, in a remote foreign land might be the best way to handle the worst threat to democracy, science and the Enlightenment that our nation has ever faced. Exile worked well for the ancient Greeks and Romans. It helped protect their democracies from assault by gifted troublemakers. Maybe it could work for us.

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