Don’t You Dare Go Back to Sleep

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I’ve spent the last couple of months at Democratic Party events all over Illinois and the country — fundraisers for James Talarico, for Peggy Flanagan, for a dozen other Democrats worth fighting for. And at almost every single one, I’ve heard the same question come up from the floor. Not from consultants. Not from staff. From regular people who took a night off and showed up.

The question is this:

How do we get accountability for the crimes and the corruption of Donald Trump’s administration?

I want to tell you how proud that question makes me. Because for decades the standard operating procedure in this country has been to forget. To let it slide. To “look forward, not back.” To let the corruption fall by the wayside and tell ourselves we’re being the bigger people. And meanwhile the rot spreads.

Not this time. The American people are not letting it slide. Good.

Because what we are watching right now is not normal. It is not politics as usual. We are living through a level of corruption that is unprecedented in modern American history.

Donald Trump has stolen billions from the American people. Billions. He has cut loose cop-beaters and drug dealers and crypto scammers — let them walk straight out of prison — because they put a little money back in his pocket. He has built a cottage industry for white-collar criminals, where if you’re rich enough and connected enough, you can do anything in this country with total impunity.

And at the exact same time? He throws out the rulebook for everyone else. He attacks immigrant communities. He goes after anybody who protests. He comes after independent content creators. He comes after activists — people like me. He comes after Democratic candidates because he doesn’t like what they say. He comes after elected officials. Over and over and over again.

Two sets of rules. One for the billionaires. One for the rest of us.

That’s the part I need you to sit with. That two-tier justice system is not a side effect. It is the rot at the core of this country.

And don’t tell me this is new. Trump did not invent this sickness. He exploited it. He saw the loophole that powerful men have been using forever and drove a truck straight through it.

We have been letting the powerful walk for a long time.

In 2008, Wall Street torched the entire American economy. They wiped out people’s homes, their retirements, their jobs — millions of lives gutted. And how many of the executives who did it went to prison? Basically none. We bailed them out, dusted them off, and sent them back to work. We are still living with the ramifications of that decision today. A whole generation watched the people who broke the country get rescued while they got foreclosed on, and they learned the lesson we taught them: the rules are for you, not for them.

Go back further. Richard Nixon ran a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office, and Nixon never spent a single day in prison, because Gerald Ford pardoned him. We told ourselves it was about “healing the nation.” What it actually did was establish the precedent that a president is above the law. That was bad for the country then, and we are paying for it now.

And right on cue — just yesterday — Vice President JD Vance stood up at the Nixon Library and praised Dick Nixon. Said his legacy is enjoying “a renaissance,” and “deservedly so.” Said if Watergate happened today it’d be a 12-hour news story. He’s rehabilitating one of the most corrupt presidents in American history out loud, in public, with a smile on his face. Which honestly makes perfect sense, because the man works for a pedophile protector. Of course he thinks the crimes don’t count. His whole job is making sure they never do.

That is the whole project. Not just committing the crimes. Not just covering them up. But training the country to stop caring. Training us to believe this country does not belong to us anymore. That government of the people, by the people, and for the people is just some old line in a textbook instead of a promise we are supposed to fight like hell to keep.

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Now here’s where I’m going to make some people in my own party uncomfortable.

A lot of our politicians, when this is over, are going to want to go back to the way things were. They’re going to want to rebuild the institutions. Restore stability. Return to normal. And I understand the instinct. I do.

But normal is what got us here.

We don’t need restoration. We need radical change. And radical change starts with accountability.

Because think about what we’re actually saying if we let this go. If the Epstein class — the people who used little girls and little boys — walk away clean, and the American people never even learn the truth, what kind of country is that? If Donald Trump can steal, cut deals with foreign governments, manipulate markets to enrich himself and his family, and never face a single consequence — not him, not his kids, not one person around him — then what do we actually have left?

I’ll tell you what we have. We have a country that deserves what’s coming to it. Because a nation that refuses to hold the powerful accountable is a nation that has already decided the powerful are above the law.

The only way this changes is you.

You have to keep getting in the faces of our elected officials and our candidates and demanding accountability. Not because they’re bad people — a lot of them mean every word they say on the campaign trail, and I’m not here to attack our own candidates. But because the gravity of this business pulls everyone back toward the same old, same old. Back toward hunky-dory politics where the comfortable stay comfortable. Left alone, they will drift. The realities of the world will get in the way. They’ll do the right thing only if we make the right thing the path of least resistance.

You can be polite about it. You don’t have to be mean. But you cannot stop asking.

And here’s the part nobody wants to hear:

When we win the midterms this November — when we take back the House and the Senate — the fight does not stop. When we elect a Democratic president in 2028, the fight does not stop. We do not get to go back to sleep.

That’s the trap. There is an expectation baked into my party that the second we get a boring, decent Democrat back in the Oval Office, everyone exhales. Everyone goes home. Everyone checks out.

That’s exactly how we drift. That’s exactly how good people in office quietly fail and how ‘accountability’ becomes a campaign slogan instead of a governing demand. We must be just as loud, just as organized, just as relentless when we’re winning as when we’re losing.

So keep showing up. Keep asking the hard question. Keep your foot on the gas.

Because accountability isn’t something they’re going to hand us.

It’s something we’re going to have to take.