THE COLLABORATIONISTS

The line that held—and the one that didn’t

Apr 09, 2026

IT’S BEEN ANOTHER Trumpian week of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, as our president Tweet-shouts, in a cinematic display of potential war crimes, his threat to eradicate Iran’s entire civilization while declaring, incredulously, that its people love to have American bombs dropped on their homeland. It’s been a week when journalist Aaron Rupar (who watches Trump up to 80 hours a week) tries to convey just how unhinged Trump is. It’s been a week when Paul Krugman sends out his “Our Darkest Hour” video in one of many attempts of important writers and thinkers to flag this as our national shame and stain and to emphasize that all Americans must stand up for Right in the face of this, our presidential evil.

a picture of a man with a jail cell — Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Then there’s the little matter of Trump’s proposed elimination of protections for Chaco Canyon in New Mexico that critics say “would reopen the lands within 10 miles of the park’s boundaries to new oil and gas drilling, threatening a cultural landscape with more than a thousand years of history. Chaco Culture National Historical Park, (is) also a UNESCO World Heritage Site…New drilling would damage sacred sites and worsen air pollution.”

I keep reading that there are many GOP Congresspeople and Senators who don’t believe Trump’s firehosing of falsehoods and know that he’s leading us down the road to ruin…but they continue to empower him to keep wrecking the world as he sees fit.

When all is said and done, however—when we’ve de-Trumpified the now garish White House and other tackied-up Washington landmarks, when we’ve finally erased every miserable sign that Donald J. Trump ever existed—we will still ask ourselves how this could ever have happened, and we’ll vow that it can never happen again. And when we do, we’ll look at Nuremberg as the example that should’ve lived in our consciousness but that, somehow, we just didn’t pay enough attention to.

The Nuremberg Trials (1945–1949) were crucial for establishing modern international law, holding high-ranking Nazi officials individually accountable for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. These trials introduced the principle that “following orders” is not a defense; created lasting legal precedents; and provided a detailed, evidence-based record of the Holocaust.

NOTE: The Academy Award-winning film Judgment at Nuremberg is Stanley Kramer’s 1961 dramatization of the postwar trials of German judges who served under the Nazi regime. The film depicts screenwriter Abby Mann’s fictionalized version – with fictional characters – of one of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals conducted under the auspices of the U.S. military. With a cast that includes Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, and Montgomery Clift, the film received 10 Academy Award nominations. It is about history but it’s more about a question that never goes away: At what point does following “the law” become participating in the crime?

This is the first court scene in the film Judgment at Nuremberg. It’s worth your time to read it:

DATELINE: Nuremberg, Germany, 1948
Tribunal Justice Haywood (Spencer Tracy): The prosecution will begin its opening address.
Prosecutor Lawson (Richard Widmark): The case is unusual in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law. These men, together with their deceased or fugitive colleagues are the embodiment of what passed for justice during the Third Reich. The defendants served as judges during the period of the Third Reich. Therefore, you, Your Honors, as judges on the bench will be sitting in judgment of judges in the dock. And this is as it should be. For only a judge knows how much more a court is than a courtroom. It is a process and a spirit. It is the house of law. The defendants knew this, too. They knew courtrooms well. They sat in their black robes and they distorted, they perverted, they destroyed justice and law in Germany.
Justice Haywood (Spencer Tracy): Will the prosecution please watch the light? The interpreter cannot follow you.
Prosecutor Lawson: I’m sorry, Your Honor. They distorted, they perverted, they destroyed justice and law in Germany. Now, this in itself is undoubtedly a great crime. But the prosecution is not calling the defendants to account for violating constitutional guarantees or withholding due process of law. The prosecution is calling them to account for murder, brutalities, torture, atrocities. They share with all the leaders of the Third Reich responsibility for the most malignant, the most calculated, the most devastating crimes in the history of all mankind. And they are perhaps more guilty than some of the others. For they had attained maturity long before Hitler’s rise to power. Their minds weren’t warped at an early age by Nazi teachings. They embraced the ideologies of the Third Reich as educated adults when they, most of all, should have valued justice. Here they’ll receive the justice they denied others. They’ll be judged according to the evidence presented in this courtroom. The prosecution asks nothing more.
Justice Haywood: Herr Rolfe will make the opening statement for the defense.
Defense Attorney Rolfe (Maximilien Schell): May it please the tribunal, it is not only a great honor but also a great challenge for an advocate to aid this tribunal in its task. The entire civilized world will follow closely what we do here. For this is not an ordinary trial by any means of the accepted, parochial sense. The avowed purpose of this tribunal is broader than the visiting of retribution on a few men. It is dedicated to the reconsecration of the temple of justice. It is dedicated to finding a code of justice the whole world will be responsible to. How will this code be established? It will be established in a clear honest evaluation of the responsibility for the crimes in the indictment stated by the prosecution. In the words of the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: “This responsibility will not be found only in documents that no one contests or denies. It will be found in considerations of a political or social nature. It will be found, most of all, in the character of men.”

It is the character and the integrity of men that we in the U.S. are considering today, along with the concepts of national honor and trust that have been destroyed in the years that Donald Trump has monopolized our consciousness. His example is one of a complete absence of morality. He possesses none of the strengths or qualities that resonate from a worthy leader.

I know this not just from observing Donald Trump, but also from having been brought up by a father who, like other men of his generation, prepared himself for life the way they felt it should be lived—with books, with thoughts and reflection, and with a quiet, steady belief that every man owed the world his best judgment. My father kept a small file box with inspirational quotes entered on badly typed index cards, or that he wrote out in his hard-to-read scrawl. He ripped out newspaper and magazine pieces that referred to the kind of man who would recognize The Moment—and would give his all to meet it.

My father was a trial lawyer with stature, the kind of man people trusted when something serious was at stake. He represented a different standard and prepared himself to lead. He wouldn’t have gone into a war without strategy and plans to carry it through and then limp away. He wouldn’t have gone into this war with Iran at all. What thinking person would have?

But Trump has a tragically warped view of the world and the people in it. He doesn’t understand what the word character means. He wasn’t taught the concept of kindness or of doing The Right Thing. He never spent time around men or women with moral strength, except visiting world leaders like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom Trump treated with unforgiveable disrespect and contempt. Our president humiliated himself and all Americans.

And this is where we are today. Trump sounds like a demented madman threatening massive war crimes as if they were nothing, as if people’s lives were nothing. And with the cruel dismantling of USAID and our social infrastructure, he has shown that human lives mean nothing to him. Trump hasn’t been convicted of war crimes—yet—but his record includes conduct that human-rights groups and international-law experts say should be investigated as war crimes, as well as policies that could amount to complicity in war crimes, especially in Yemen and in U.S. support for Israel’s conduct in Gaza. And now what he’s threatening in Iran—with Netanyahu pushing him to keep an aggressive military campaign. This is how it happens: not all at once, and not by force alone, but by a series of decisions that shouldn’t have been made…and that no one in authority has the character to stop. And Netanyahu has his own agenda, which isn’t ours.

In Judgment at Nuremberg, Defense Attorney Rolfe asks the court if his client—an influential German judge—should’ve carried out the Nazi-era laws of his country, or refused to carry them out and become a traitor to his country. In our time, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fired all the military grown-ups who might’ve interceded to stop Trump’s ignorant, uninformed, and childish judgment. Meanwhile, the Republican Congress blesses him, enables him, and authorizes him to do whatever he wants. So the buck also stops with all of them. They have pledged their loyalty to Donald Trump instead of to the U.S. Constitution. They will forever after have to live with this cowardice and shame.

***

MANY OF US who are living through this Trump hellscape also watched the Watergate Scandal play out. Richard Nixon began his second term on January 20, 1973, but the U.S House Judiciary Committee had already approved three articles of impeachment by July 1974. If Nixon had not resigned, the full House almost certainly would’ve impeached him, and the Senate likely would’ve voted to convict.

Without going into a lot of detail, the three articles of impeachment were:
1. Obstruction of Justice—Interfering with the Watergate investigation.
2. Abuse of Power—For participating in the plan to cover up the break-in.
3. Contempt of Congress—For using federal agencies to target individuals unlawfully.

Nixon was removed from his office because members of his own party finally acknowledged that he was guilty of misconduct. Republican leaders—including Barry Goldwater—went to the White House and told him face to face that (a) he would be impeached; (b) he would be convicted; and (c) he had lost his party’s support.

And Nixon resigned. Our system held because the men inside it chose to uphold the principles to which they, and the president, had sworn allegiance. Unfortunately, that moment has no equivalent now. Republican congressmen and -women with integrity and honor do not now exist.

***

RECENTLY, I CAME across the word collaborationist. It stopped me. I tried to remember if I knew this word, even as I looked it up.

Collaborationists (or collaborationnistes) are individuals who voluntarily cooperate with an occupying enemy out of ideological, political, or fanatical affinity. Collaborators is a broader term covering anyone working with the enemy, including those doing so for pragmatic, involuntary, or survival reasons.

When France was liberated in 1944, there was a reckoning for those who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation. Some were tried and imprisoned; some were executed. Others were publicly shamed, their punishment carried out in the open for everyone to see. It wasn’t a perfect process, and it wasn’t always fair. But it was an acknowledgment—however imperfect—that there had been a line, and that those who had crossed it would be held to account.

Since returning to power in January 2025, Trump and his administration have repeatedly tested—and in multiple cases crossed—the boundaries of the law, with federal courts ruling a series of actions unlawful or unconstitutional. Judges have struck down his attempt to impose sweeping global tariffs without proper authority, blocked efforts to punish or restrict press organizations in violation of the First Amendment, and halted policies that cut off public funding to disfavored outlets. Courts have also ruled against key immigration measures, including mass terminations of legal status and deportation practices that denied basic due process, as well as parts of his health and housing policies imposed without legal basis. Other major actions remain under active legal challenge. Taken together, the pattern is not of isolated overreach, but of an administration willing to push past legal limits—and to keep going until stopped. By comparison, Nixon’s abuses now seem almost narrow in scope.

This was the Trump scheme all along. Russell Vought and the Heritage Foundation—Christian nationalists—put this plan in place to dismantle our government infrastructure and social safety net piece by piece, often illegally. Vought must’ve studied Nixon’s strategy of using executive privilege to slow or stop hearings that would move the Watergate investigation forward and patterned his blueprint for Trump on that.

So I’m calling this Republican Congress collaborationists with Trump. In contrast, the men around Richard Nixon finally chose the country over the man. That is the difference between that era and this one, and it is everything. Remember this:

--Nixon broke the law. His party eventually refused to break the country with him.
--Nixon had enablers. He did not have a party willing to become extensions of him.
--There was corruption—but there was still a line. And when it was crossed, it held.
--They didn’t save Nixon. They saved the system from Nixon.

What could Barry Goldwater teach these men and women about doing the right thing for their country? About not being collaborationists—and about their personal accountability for what they’ve done?

***

WHEN TRIBUNAL JUSTICE Spencer Tracy delivered his findings in Judgment at Nuremberg, he gave a good outline about the moral duty of a government, a country and its leaders. Again, worth reading:

Tribunal Justice: The trial conducted before this Tribunal began over eight months ago. The record of evidence is more than ten thousand pages long, and final arguments of counsel have been concluded.
Simple murders and atrocities do not constitute the gravamen of the charges in this indictment. Rather, the charge is that of conscious participation in a nationwide, government organized system of cruelty and injustice in violation of every moral and legal principle known to all civilized nations. The Tribunal has carefully studied the record and found therein abundant evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt the charges against these defendants.
Herr Rolfe, in his very skillful defense, has asserted that there are others who must share the ultimate responsibility for what happened here in Germany. There is truth in this. The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization. But the Tribunal does say that the men in the dock are responsible for their actions, men who sat in black robes in judgment on other men, men who took part in the enactment of laws and decrees, the purpose of which was the extermination of human beings, men who in executive positions actively participated in the enforcement of these laws—illegal even under German law. The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime—is guilty.
Herr Rolfe further asserts that the defendant, Janning, was an extraordinary jurist and acted in what he thought was the best interest of this country. There is truth in this also. Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the Government of which he was a part. Janning’s record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial: If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe. But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary—even able and extraordinary—men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen.
There are those in our own country too who today speak of the “protection of country”—of “survival.” A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient—to look the other way.
Well, the answer to that is “survival as what?” A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!
Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.

***

Every American needs to watch this film and understand what it means. Can we remember who we are? We all have to stand up against Trump’s moral depravity—and hold him and everyone associated with him accountable.

I hope you’ll leave a comment. Lots to discuss here, and some of it is stuff we need to say out loud.

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