READ: “Blizzard of illegality” hits America

Why “accountability” is at risk of getting lost in the storm.

This weekend on MSNBC, I pushed back on an extraordinary claim from one of Donald Trump’s closest allies. Tom Homan — a man I worked alongside for more than two years in the first Trump administration — said there are “no limitations” on the president’s authority amidst his security crackdown in D.C.

That’s simply false. Tom knows better. And the American people deserve better.

There is a very clear limitation on the president’s authority: it’s called the United States Constitution. Right now we are watching that document, the bedrock of our democracy, be treated like an inconvenience by Trump and his team as they stage their federal occupation of the nation’s capital and as they talk openly about stationing U.S. troops in other cities.

Actually, let me clarify here. They are not talking about “other cities.” The president and his allies have called for the deployment of armed forces in “Democrat cities.” In all of American history, few declarations have had more of an authoritarian bent than this.

The ominous threat to take over left-leaning localities comes against an even darker backdrop.

We are in the middle of what I described on-air as a “blizzard of illegality.” Each flake in the storm is an action Trump’s team has taken that courts have already determined to be potentially unlawful at best and unconstitutional at worst. These actions are coming so rapidly, so relentlessly, that the greatest danger is that they will blur together and that no single offense will stand out long enough to attract accountability.

A single snowflake seems harmless. You can watch it fall and see it melt. But a blizzard like this buries everything. Believe me, that is Trump’s strategy. He tries to overwhelm the system with so much misconduct that America loses the ability to hold him responsible for any of it.

I saw this pattern in his first term. I see it even more clearly now in his second. Each day brings new offenses, including firing civil servants for political reasons, misusing federal disaster funds for ideological punishment, embedding military personnel into domestic policing operations, or pressuring agencies to falsify data to fit his narrative. These are part of a deliberate, systematic assault on the rule of law that has no comparison since our nation’s founding.

Yet Trump’s allies like Tom Homan want you to believe there are “no limitations” to his authority. They are saying words like this — words they know are wrong — because it pleases their boss, who does believe it. Recall that Trump laid out his personal view directly during the pandemic: “When somebody's the president of the United States, the authority is total.”

That is the language of monarchs, not presidents. If we accept that premise, then the Constitution ceases to function as a check on power. The founders devised limitations on the presidency precisely because they had lived through a king who claimed divine authority.

So what’s happening now is an experiment, of sorts. Trump is sending troops into cities and stress-testing how far he can go before Americans remember the meaning of checks-and-balances and push back. If they don’t and if the blizzard strategy succeeds, then the president will have succeeded in ensuring illegality becomes normal.

Democracies die this way, which is why I have a modest proposal.

If Democrats retake either chamber of Congress, the response cannot be business as usual. They must launch the most sweeping damage assessment of the rule of law in American history. These cannot be piecemeal oversight hearings. Not a handful of symbolic subpoenas. But a full-scale investigation into the ways Donald Trump and his administration sought to break the law in office, evade accountability, and bend federal power to his personal will.

This should be the largest and most serious congressional investigation ever conducted — bigger than Watergate, broader than Iran-Contra, and more thorough than any inquiry into executive overreach ever before.

If we want democracy to survive, we cannot allow official misconduct to go unaddressed. Accountability delayed is accountability denied. And denial, in the face of a blizzard this bad, guarantees that a free society like ours will be buried.