Many images come to mind when I try to picture “America’s mayor,” Rudolf W. Giuliani. He’s standing at Ground Zero. He’s unzipping his fly in the Borat sequel, lying at the pinnacle of zero-effort male sexual contempt. Dye drips down his face in a line that mimics the results on a failing polygraph test. He gropes his assistant, and a geriatric Beavis muttering grinds out of his throat: “These are Rudy’s tits.” But mainly I think about him drinking wine.

Sometimes a wine-drunk Rudy butt-dials a reporter, and sometimes he does it again, but mostly his skull leers over the rim of his Super Tuscan, and all is right with his world.

There was a bit there, late in summer and early autumn of 2024, when the picture changed. On July 2, New York disbarred him for—pardon the legal jargon—becoming a human tornado of lies about the 2020 election. Ten days later, another court slapped down his attempts at filing for bankruptcy in the face of a $148 million defamation judgment, citing his hiding his assets from his radio show, a coffee-brand launch, and a book deal, all while he was dropping $28,000 a month on condos. Two months later, he was disbarred in Washington, DC. He was further humiliated by a judge for his “farcical” claims to not know where his valuables were and failing to fulfill his obligations to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the election workers whose lives he ruined with his 2020 election lies. By late November, they were dragging him back into court for contempt for defaming them again.

Finally, then—consequences. Finally, a notion that these people can experience punishment. But open his Instagram or Truth Social account, and there he is at the Sistine Chapel. A bankrupt guy who faced a $148 million bill went to Europe. It might have the substance of Christ in it, but—Ciao, baby!—Rudy’s in Rome, still drinking wine. A thought then occurs to me: I will vote for any Democrat who promises to prosecute every member of the Trump administration who can be prosecuted and to jail them for as long as the law allows.

I was born in the shadow of Watergate, close enough that I am, by one degree of separation, partially named for coconspirator and Committee to Reelect the President deputy director Jeb Stuart Magruder. When I was a kid, adults still kvetched about how the hell Jerry Ford could pardon Nixon. By the time I was reading the funnies, Bloom County was running an extended story of a Zygorthian Death Raider testifying before Congress between towering stacks of telegrams of support. What’s this about, I asked my mom. “Oliver North proudly admitting committing crimes,” came the answer. North was convicted, but his sentence was overturned. A few years later, President George H.W. Bush—almost certainly a coconspirator—pardoned the other coconspirators, on the advice of Attorney General Bill Barr. But at least Barr didn’t have a future after that, right?

That any of these people were in power at all owed a little something to Ronald Reagan’s people’s rat-fucking Jimmy Carter and the American hostages in Iran in 1980. They got the idea from the way Nixon and his personal emissary, Anna Chennault, rat-fucked Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 Vietnam peace talks, and in turn the two of them inspired Trump to ship his coconspirators to Moscow to rat-fuck the 2016 election and to Kyiv to try to rat-fuck 2020. In between, we had George W. Bush pursuing an American variation on the theme, and stealing the 2000 election using just his brother and the Supreme Court, a slow-moving rat-fuck that played out over a month of TV, complete with fake riots and criminals in robes.

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But they’re all charming little curios, aren’t they? The mainstream press has spent my lifetime simultaneously depicting Republicans as the party of law and order and as incorrigible little scamps who just can’t help themselves when it comes to seeing how much of your small sacred capacity for self-determination they can steal. Acts of vandalism incurred amid popular protests are so self-evidently a mortal threat to our civic order that a newsreader can bypass the trial and the jury and progress immediately toward demanding execution. But when it comes to the people running the United States, it’s not really a big deal, and who’s to say what’s illegal just because it’s in the criminal code? It’s only the world’s largest arsenal, nearly a $7 trillion budget, and your unalienable rights, but, let’s be honest—the only real crime is if it doesn’t work. As soon as someone starts getting away with it, they might as well get away with all of it, lest anyone on a cable pundit panel seem tragically unsavvy or like they hold a disqualifying partiality for laws.

Prison—the very idea of prison, let alone whether it’s deserved—is gauche, like asking how America is going to pay for sending Muslim newlyweds a cruise missile.

There are two jokes that seem to make the rounds daily on social media.

The first is from the former USSR. A man walks by the newsstand every day, scanning the front page of the paper before moving on, without buying it. Finally, one day, the newsagent can’t take any more of this and asks what he’s doing. “I’m looking for an obituary,” the man says. The newsagent corrects him. “They print those in the back of the paper, comrade,” he says. The man looks at him for a moment and then replies, “Not the one I’m looking for.”

The other joke is this: Every day, someone you may know or may have never heard of says, “Not really in the mood for posting today, just checking in to see if ‘it’ happened.” Everyone knows what “it” is. Whether it’s natural or unnatural, painless or excruciating, a quiet Wilsonian transient ischemia or the hooting and hollering of a crowd sending two people on the Bennie and Clara honeymoon, everyone knows.

This isn’t a new feeling in my lifetime either. If Quentin Tarantino had given his “write a revenge fantasy for a minority I’m not a part of” thing a miss and made his 2009 release Inglorious Basterds end with Merrill CEO John Thain’s head failing the Pink Mist Challenge, he could have made a million dollars just selling people glimpses of the poster. The world had just been broken by the wealthiest people in it, banks were printing foreclosures at the same rate that singles roll off the lines at the US Mint, and President Barack Obama told us all that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” (Granted, he was talking about punishing the previous administration for constructing a secret international torture regime, an unambiguous crime, but recoiling from accountability emerged early as a holistic approach.) Hell, if everyone mourning a loved one and/or quarantined at home and living in a sustained panic in 2020 had been given a free swing at Donald Trump after he suggested an interior bleach and UV application to cure Covid-19, the only thing left after half an hour would’ve been a smear.

Today, the Trump administration is committing crimes fast enough to rival the sheer spectacle of numbers rolling on the National Debt Clock in Times Square. If you tried to tally them on a conventional home calculator, you’d get one of those results with a “^” and an “E” in it, like at some point the damn thing just gave up. The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.

If you were to ring them up just on violations of data protections for people’s Social Security information, the indictment would start at over 330,000,000 counts. The number of federal workers fired illegally surely reaches into the tens of thousands. They are illegally impounding billions of dollars and illegally reaching into bank accounts to steal lawful deposits. They are using the Social Security Administration to pronounce thousands of people dead because they feel like they ought to be. They would have to write new state secrets acts to meet the scale of the offenses committed by Pete Hegseth or Elon Musk and DOGE. They are using the Department of Justice to criminally harass critics of a Sieg Heil–ing automaker whose wares they’re advertising in the White House driveway. They are extorting private law firms, publishers, and broadcasters. They are gaming the markets and tipping off their pals, and they are selling a fraudulent financial instrument whose biggest buyers are rewarded with face time with a corrupt president. They are illegally arresting judges who inconvenience them with applications of the law. They are spending public moneys through the nose to kidnap legal residents and traffic them to a torture gulag in El Salvador, where they’re paying a criminal to detain them. They are trading a corrupt quid pro quo with a corrupt mayor to be able to kidnap more people. They are nakedly violating court orders, playing keep-away with innocent people and—after years of performative disgust at Bill Clinton—answering questions like, “Is it your intention to comply with habeas corpus?” with their semiliterate version of “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

They are, even now, committing half a dozen more types of crimes that you’ve already forgotten about. And why wouldn’t they? Fifty years of wise American commentary and 50 years of terminally invertebrate opposition have given them all the permission structure they need—impotence mixed with savvy applause. The Supreme Court even went the extra mile in vacating former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s criminal conviction by effectively decriminalizing all public corruption that falls short of a standard of admission like, “Thank you for the $5,000 watch. It is my intention to show my gratitude for it by voting the way you would like me to on the subject you mentioned just before giving me the watch.” Rampant, foundational lawlessness was a boulder hanging off the edge of a very steep hill and waiting for Trump to lean on it. The only novel discovery this administration made was that nobody is going to stop you from committing every crime you want, all the time.

Over the years, a few people in my life have expressed the sentiment that the simplest and most effective way of reforming the criminal justice system is banning the death penalty for everything except white-collar crime, to which it should be widely and avidly applied, and I’m not sure they’re wrong. What I do know is the limit on how much restorative justice can work.

It is not possible to make restitution to 330 million people, nor is there any compensatory labor that can offset the theft and abuse of their economic power and the transformation of the instruments of government into a rolling crusade of petty grievance, vengeance, and culturally sanctioned sadism. Some injury is too vast—especially if it’s designed to drive home the vastness and implacability of damage that our leaders can unleash on a whim. The mentality that commits crime on this mass scale because it cannot be stopped—and that commits further crime to demonstrate its own immunity to consequence—cannot be persuaded to find paths of redemption. This kind of violative power knows only itself. Its practitioners will understand nothing less than being stripped of their own power and subjected to the uncompromising application of another.

We’ve tried retiring these people to some of America’s nicest corporate boards and little cottages within walking distance of where they teach their classes at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government or the Hoover Institute. Now it is time to lock them up.

The Democratic gerontocracy that cocreated, or at least cosigned, this immunity regime is not the answer. Nor are those lawmakers who spent four years responding to a failed coup by arguing for a more humane kidnapping regime with better paperwork, shaming media and universities for “cancel culture” and calling for DEI quotas among the leading lights of goose-stepping theory. You could count on your fingers and maybe, at a stretch, your toes the number of elected Democrats who have made it clear that basic accountability matters. This week, indeed, furnished just the kind of case study in opposition-party timorousness in the Trump era that you can set your watch by, as Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar filed an impeachment resolution citing seven articles against Trump, only to see leading House Democrats duly scatter and run for cover. Meanwhile, a Senate vote to condemn the Trump tariffs on grounds of runaway imperial prerogative in the Oval Office failed because Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who loves to offer cost-free denunciations of MAGA authoritarianism, couldn’t be bothered to interrupt a junket to South Korea.

The only way to make the law matter again is to primary everyone, and do it ourselves. If you are running in a Democratic primary this year or the next, here are the words that will send me and millions more crawling over glass to give you money: I will wage holy war on corruption, from the Supreme Court to the sheriff’s office to every snot-nosed fascist with a DOGE lanyard; I will scourge these diseased kidnappers and killers and thieves from public life, and I will jail them long enough that all of us have the privilege of eventually forgetting them.

Anything less, and Rudy’s still raising his glass in a well-appointed foreign watering hole, in a toast to another half century of impunity.