Stop assuming corruption defeats MAGA. America’s history shows powerful men, from slaveholding founders to corporate-backed authoritarianism, get a pass unless people organize for accountability.
Summary
America’s accountability crisis did not begin with Trump. Too many progressives assume that politicians like Donald Trump, Ken Paxton, and other MAGA power brokers are so transparently corrupt, cruel, or authoritarian that voters will automatically reject them. That assumption ignores a much deeper American pattern. From the nation’s founding, America has given powerful men a pass when their abuses served wealth, racial hierarchy, patriarchy, empire, or partisan identity. The country excused slaveholding founders while minimizing the abolitionists who saw clearly through the evil of their era. It condemns Trump’s abuse of women while sanitizing founders who held enslaved women under total power. It denounces terrorism while ignoring U.S. support for violent proxies. It fears nuclear weapons in other hands while forgetting America remains the only nation to use atomic bombs against human beings. It claims exceptionalism while denying healthcare to millions. And it screams “socialism” at humane public policy while tolerating right-wing state intervention that benefits favored corporations.
- Progressives must stop assuming scandal alone defeats authoritarian politicians; America has long protected powerful men from accountability.
- The “men of their time” excuse for slaveholding founders collapses because abolitionists existed in those same times and chose moral courage.
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America’s selective outrage over sexual abuse loses credibility when it sanitizes enslavers who held total power over women they enslaved.
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U.S. foreign policy often projects innocence while the historical record shows support for violent proxies and the only wartime use of nuclear weapons.
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The Right falsely brands democratic public goods as communism while embracing state power when it serves corporations and authoritarian politics.
The path forward requires moral reconstruction, not mythology. Progressives must tell the truth about America’s history, reject selective accountability, and build a politics that places people above predators, patients above insurers, workers above shareholders, peace above arms merchants, and democracy above personality cults.
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America’s Accountability Problem Did Not Start With Trump. Progressives must stop believing that bad behavior alone guarantees political defeat. That belief misunderstands America. It misunderstands history. It misunderstands the depth of our national habit of excusing powerful men when they serve the interests, fears, or identities of a favored political sect.
Donald Trump, Ken Paxton, and others remain politically viable not because the evidence against them is invisible. They remain viable because too many Americans have been trained to separate accountability from power. They see corruption, cruelty, misogyny, racism, and authoritarian behavior, and they still ask whether the offender is “on our side.” That is not new. That is America’s original sin operating in modern clothing.
Ken Paxton faced a securities fraud case for nearly nine years before prosecutors agreed in 2024 to drop the charges if he completed community service, took legal ethics courses, and paid restitution. He survived impeachment in the Texas Senate and remained a dominant Republican figure. Donald Trump was found liable by a civil jury for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, and the Supreme Court recently declined to disturb the $5 million judgment against him. Yet he still commands loyalty from millions who insist he is the victim, not the women, workers, voters, immigrants, or democratic institutions he has harmed.
Progressives who believe that facts alone will end this madness have not paid attention to the country they live in. America has a long tradition of building monuments to men whose behavior should have disqualified them from moral sainthood. The Founding Fathers gave us ideals worth defending, but many also enslaved human beings while writing about liberty. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison owned enslaved people. Four of the first five presidents were enslavers, and twelve of the first eighteen presidents owned enslaved people in some capacity.
The standard excuse says they were “men of their time.” That excuse fails morally and historically. In those same times, abolitionists existed. Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, Benjamin Lay, and others saw slavery clearly for what it was. They did not need a modern seminar, a future social movement, or a poll-tested consultant to tell them that owning people was evil. They allowed humane morality to reign in an era when many powerful men used culture, law, commerce, religion, and violence to suppress their consciences. Benezet helped educate Black Philadelphians and wrote anti-slavery pamphlets that influenced the broader abolitionist movement. Woolman and Benezet helped push Quaker communities toward condemning slaveholding.
So let us stop pretending morality had not yet been invented. It had. The problem was not ignorance. The problem was profit. The problem was power. The problem was the willingness of a society to excuse brutality when brutality benefited the respectable class.
That same moral laundering continues today. We rightly condemn Americans who give Trump a pass for abusing women. But we must also ask why this pattern feels so familiar. For generations, many Americans gave the founders a pass while ignoring the enslaved women they controlled. Thomas Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime. The historical record and DNA evidence support the conclusion that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello. Those children were born into their mother’s condition, under a system that made freedom dependent on the will of the man who held power over the family.
That is not romance. That is not private life. That is power without consent in a slave society. When we sanitize it, we teach future generations that charisma, intellect, wealth, and political symbolism can soften the effects of exploitation. Then we act shocked when modern voters excuse powerful men who abuse women, mock the vulnerable, lie as a strategy, and treat the law as a nuisance.
America’s problem is not simply Trumpism. Trumpism is a symptom. The disease is selective accountability.
Progressives must also confront another national habit: projection. America projects virtue outward while refusing to interrogate its own record. We decry terrorism, and we should. Political violence against civilians is indefensible. But this country has also armed, funded, trained, or supported forces around the world when those forces served American strategic or corporate interests. In Afghanistan, the CIA funded and armed mujahideen forces during the Soviet war. Later, in the so-called war on terror, CIA-backed Afghan paramilitary units raised serious human rights concerns. That history does not excuse terrorism by others. It exposes the hypocrisy of pretending the United States has always opposed violent proxies as a matter of principle.
We fear that other nations would use nuclear weapons, and that fear is rational. Nuclear weapons threaten human survival. But the United States remains the only country that has used nuclear weapons against human beings, bombing Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Any American discussion of nuclear morality that omits that fact is not serious.
We call ourselves exceptional while millions remain uninsured or underinsured. In 2024, 26.7 million people under age 65 in the United States lacked health coverage, and the uninsured rate for that group increased to 9.8 percent. The Commonwealth Fund reported that many adults had coverage year-round yet remained underinsured, meaning their insurance existed on paper but failed them in practice. Meanwhile, many countries with far less wealth treat healthcare as a public responsibility rather than a profit extraction machine.
That is where American exceptionalism collapses under the weight of American cruelty. A country that can subsidize corporations, build weapons systems, rescue banks, and enrich private insurers can also guarantee healthcare. It chooses not to because the people who profit from sickness have more power than the people who suffer from it.
Then comes the word “socialism,” the scarecrow of American politics. The Right uses it to frighten voters into defending corporate domination. They call every humane public policy “Soviet-style communism.” Paid family leave becomes communism. Medicare for All becomes communism. Publicly owned utilities become communist. Affordable housing becomes communism. A government that negotiates drug prices becomes communist. But when Trump uses taxpayer dollars to take stakes in private companies, pick corporate winners and losers, and blur the line between state power and favored private capital, many of the same people suddenly discover nuance.
The Trump administration’s Intel deal converted federal support into a roughly 10 percent government equity stake in the company. Intel itself announced an $8.9 billion U.S. government investment in common stock. Reuters reported investor concern that the deal could mark a new era of U.S. industrial policy. PBS described the move as rare because the government invested in a private company not facing the kind of immediate failure that usually justifies extraordinary intervention.
Now, progressives should not oppose public ownership as a principle. The public should receive public value when public money builds private wealth. But the hypocrisy must be named. When the public demands healthcare, childcare, clean water, public transit, affordable housing, or debt-free education, the Right screams socialism. When a right-wing administration uses taxpayer dollars to intervene directly in private markets, it calls it patriotism, national security, or industrial strategy.
The difference is not whether the government acts. The government always acts. The difference is who the government serves.
Progressives want government—meaning we the people—to control or heavily regulate sectors where profiteering becomes immoral. Healthcare should not be a casino. Water should not be a commodity. Prisons should not generate private profit. Energy should not be structured so that fossil fuel executives get rich while communities flood, burn, and breathe poison. Education should not bury young adults under debt so financiers can harvest interest. Housing should not function as a speculative asset while working families sleep in cars.
That is not Soviet communism. That is democracy with a moral backbone.
The danger today is that Trump and his movement do not merely want a larger role for government. They want a government loyal to one man, one party, and one political tribe. They attack independent institutions, threaten opponents, demonize the press, purge civil servants, and normalize the idea that loyalty matters more than law. That is not populism. That is authoritarianism wrapped in a flag and sold to people who have been trained to fear the wrong enemy.
The real enemy is not the immigrant picking crops, the trans kid asking to live, the Black voter waiting in line, the union worker demanding a contract, or the young person asking for a livable planet. The real enemy is the system that convinces ordinary people to protect powerful abusers because those abusers speak their cultural language.
That is why progressives cannot campaign as if Paxton, Trump, or any other figure will collapse under the weight of scandal. Scandal only matters when a society still values accountability. In America, accountability has always been conditional. It applied to the enslaved, not the enslaver. It applied to the poor, not the banker. It applied to the protester, not the politician. It applied to the woman who spoke out, not the man who abused power. It applied to the whistleblower, not the corrupt official.
Winning requires more than saying, “Look how bad they are.” People already know. Some do not care. Some have been taught not to care. Some see the cruelty as the point. Some believe accountability for their leader means accountability for their identity. That is why the progressive message must go deeper.
Progressives must say: America does not need saviors. America needs a moral reconstruction.
That reconstruction starts by telling the truth about the founders without throwing away the democratic promise they failed to honor. It means honoring abolitionists more loudly than enslavers. It means refusing to excuse sexual abuse because the abuser has power. It means ending foreign policy hypocrisy. It means building a healthcare system that treats life as sacred. It means rejecting fake anti-socialist hysteria while demanding democratic control where private profit destroys human dignity.
The country does not move forward by worshiping flawed men. It moves forward by choosing the people whom those men exploited. It moves forward by choosing Sally Hemings over sanitized Jefferson mythology. It moves forward by choosing abolitionists over plantation nostalgia. It moves forward by choosing women over powerful predators. It moves forward by choosing patients over insurers, workers over shareholders, peace over arms merchants, and democracy over cults of personality.
Progressives must stop assuming that the truth wins on its own. Truth needs organization. Truth needs repetition. Truth needs courage. Truth needs candidates and movements that connect morality to material life.
The message must be clear: Trumpism did not appear out of nowhere. It grew from the soil America has watered for centuries. But soil can be changed. Culture can be changed. Politics can be changed. The people can decide that no office, no fortune, no founding myth, no party label, and no flag pin give any human being a pass from accountability.
That is the America worth fighting for.
