B4 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022slipping choice morsels into my grandmoth-
er’s bowl at the dinner table. Shopkeepers in
Beijing always bragged about how quickly
they identified that I had returned from
overseas — something about the directness of
my gaze and my unfeminine body language.
So many people who had never been to the
States were amazingly confident about what
my fluency in Mandarin or my mannerisms
meant about how Chinese or American I was.
My Americanness seems to seep visibly from
my pores; anyone and everyone feels entitled
to interrogate me about it.
I’ve long grown used to having my Chinese-
ness and Americanness quotients measured
with an air of scientific precision: Which has
the greater weight? Just as Americans would
casually chalk up my respect for my parents to
“Chinese collectivism,” Chinese people would
attribute my argumentative personality to
“American individualism.” This “analysis”
made no room for the complexity of cultural
influences, and reduced me to a collection of
separable Chinese and American parts, some-
how symbolic of the United States and China
as rival political entities. Since growing a thick
skin against the regular barrage of racism I
experienced in the United States, I was sur-
prised by how much this treatment hurt; I felt
like a dog walking on two legs. I beat myself up
for feeling this way; perhaps I’d been too
presumptuous of the bond of shared ethnocul-
tural heritage.
I could never escape getting grilled about
which country I like more. I used to field
questions about my preference for China or
the United States candidly, earnestly explain-
ing how I loved to be closer to family while in
China but enjoyed my education in the
United States. At a certain point, I realized
that people were rarely interested in person-
al, nuanced answers. If I said I preferred
China, I would be rewarded with approval: I
hadn’t forgotten where I came from. If I said I
preferred the United States, I’d get some kind
of proclamation that I had become “Western-
ized.”
Gu is steadfast in maintaining an apolitical
stance. She insists she is focused on “pushing
the human limit” and is equally proud of her
Chinese and American heritage. But the Chi-
nese media frequently takes the liberty toGU FROM B1Trying to emulate Gu’sexample is a dead endFormer p resident
Donald Trump
holds an outdoor
rally in Florence,
Ariz., on Jan. 15.Eileen Gu talks to
reporters at the
Winter Olympics
on Thursday in
Zhangjiakou,
China.identity be scored based on performance?
Who has the authority to judge something as
intimate and complicated as what Chinese
identity means to me? The Chinese diaspora
experience runs so much deeper than uncriti-
cally loving China or pledging political alle-
giance to it. Being Chinese American need not
be considered a fractured experience: There’s
no division between where the Chinese part of
me ends and the American part begins.
It seems as though it would be a great
comfort to find belonging in China — especial-
ly when it seems as if a great many Americans
wish us dead. But Eileen Gu’s impossible
celebrity makes clear to me: Seeking accep-
tance by achieving excellence is like chasing
fool’s gold.public, they must choose China and win.
As one looks even closer at the many facets
of Gu’s celebrity, and the qualities for which
she’s celebrated, it becomes clearer that she
functions, within China, as a different sort of
model minority. With her academic prowess,
her beauty, her yearly visits to China, her
fluency in Mandarin with a Beijing accent
and, of course, gaining Chinese nationality to
ski for Team China, Gu stands in for the ideal
Chinese American — one worth rooting for.
It’s a cartoonishly impossible ideal that no one
else could ever meet, leaving me to wonder:
What about those of us who are happily
ordinary?
Like many Chinese Americans, I long to be
embraced by the homeland to which I feel a
strong tie. For years, I was made to feel that my
Chinese identity was diluted by my American
identity, and that it’s something for which I
ought to apologize — a defect or personal
failing that requires an arbitrary display of
excellence and deference to overcome.
But how can the validity of my Chineseproclaim her decision to represent China as
political. The word “patriot” gets thrown
around not infrequently, along with praise for
Gu’s loyalty to where she comes from. Gu is
rarely discussed solely as an amazing athlete;
she is much more frequently mentioned as an
amazing athlete winning glory for her moth-
erland.
It's true that this sort of nationalistic
projection, obscuring individual humanity
and seeing everything in terms of geopolitics,
may be part and parcel of an international
sporting event such as the Olympics. But it’s
worth contrasting Gu’s reception with the way
other Chinese Americans on Team China are
treated: Take skater Zhu Yi, who renounced
her American citizenship. (Gu has not com-
mented on whether she has done the same.)
Zhu has been mercilessly disparaged in Chi-
nese social media for her lackluster perform-
ance on the ice; commenters criticized her
fluency in Mandarin and even told her to “go
back to America.” For a Chinese American to
gain the love and acceptance from the ChineseFRANCISCO SECO/ASSOCIATED PRESSTwitter: @ourobororoboruoFrankie Huang is a Chinese American writer,
editor and illustrator whose work explores diaspora
identity and feminism. She is the deputy editor in
chief of JoySauce, an Asian American media
platform.National Committee defended the police-beat-
ing armed rioters at the Capitol who sought to
block Biden’s electoral certification by Con-
gress as engaged in “legitimate political dis-
course.”
Although Trump has long sanctioned vio-
lence among his supporters — calling white
supremacists in Charlottesville “fine people”;
ordering the Proud Boys to “stand back and
stand by”; urging a crowd to “march” on the
Capitol and “fight like hell” to overturn the
allegedly stolen election; tweeting “liberate
Michigan” to followers a few months before a
plot to kidnap and murder the state’s Demo-
cratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was dis-
covered — the failure to prosecute Trump for
any crimes he himself commits empowers him
to do it louder.
Writing in the Atlantic, David Frum asked:
“Will the politics of violence be accepted in the
United States — or will it be punished and
discredited?” Trump’s supporters are watch-
ing. After years of his burn-it-all-down oratory
and above-the-law governance, they are em-
boldened. Like him, they see themselves as
answering to an ideology, not to the laws. Like
him, they claim to be fighting for freedom, even
if their acts intimidate, harm and harass.
Not prosecuting Trump has already signaled
to his supporters that accountability is for
suckers. “The warning signs of instability that
we have identified in other places are the same
signs that, over the past decade, I’ve begun to
see on our own soil,” political scientist Barbara
Walter wrote in “How Civil Wars Start.” The
signs include a hollowing out of institutions,
“manipulated to serve the interests of some
over others.” Trump’s continued ability to ma-
nipulate institutions to serve his interests and
his supporters’ interests has eroded yet an-
other democratic norm. “I have an Article II,
where I have to the right to do whatever I want
as president,” Trump told the conservative
organization Turning Point USA when he held
the office. Until the criminal justice system
stops him, he will continue to believe that.
Ford’s pardon of Nixon was noble in its
intentions: He was trying to unite the country,
and he expended political capital to issue it,
ultimately losing his 1976 campaign largely as a
result. And in fact the pardon never rehabilitat-
ed Nixon. Unlike Trump, Nixon left office
severely weakened. His approval rating stood
at 24 percent; comparatively few Americans
were clamoring for him to make a comeback
bid in 1976, and most Republican officials had
abandoned him. He was never invited to an-
other Republican convention. The “big lie” —
that Democrats stole the election from Trump
— has far more traction now than any Nixon-
was-robbed sentiment had then. But Ford’s
pardon still did damage: Nixon never had to
face a jury, never had to pay for his crimes. In
his post-presidency, he published books, made
television appearances and consulted with
other presidents.
These days, it’s fashionable to say the system
worked after Watergate. But that’s not quite
right. The system forced the president to resign
his office, but it also protected the disgraced
ex-president from criminal punishment. In
1974, Americans viewed the pardon as a blow to
the rule of law. It’s not too late to learn from
Ford’s mistake.umphs; when some citizens feel they can do
pretty much what they want with impunity. As
historian Eric Foner has pointed out, in 1873, in
reaction to the election of a biracial govern-
ment in Colfax, La., a White mob assaulted the
county courthouse, murdered a group of Afri-
can Americans and seized control of the town
government without substantial consequenc-
es. In 1874, in New Orleans, a white suprema-
cist organization known as the White League
tried to topple the state government (U.S.
troops at least suppressed this riot). In 1898,
long after Reconstruction, armed Whites over-
turned a duly elected biracial government in
Wilmington, N.C. Because there was no law
enforcement, no accountability and no conse-
quences, such violence was condoned, sanc-
tioned by the state and some leaders — which
thus empowered anti-democratic forces for
decades across the Deep South and elsewhere.
(One of the impeachment charges against An-
drew Johnson said he had fomented post-Civil
War white supremacist violence in New Or-
leans and Memphis.)
Lessons from overseas also paint a bracing
picture: Refusing to hold officials accountable
for crimes emboldens them. Putting someone
above the law is simply unsustainable for any
mature democratic system. In the 20th cen-
tury, Mexico’s long-time ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party refused to prosecute sen-
ior officials for corruption, choosing what
three political scientists called “stability” in the
political system over “accountability” in the
legal one, and corruption became endemic.
These scholars argue that nations transition-
ing toward democracy sometimes do better
when they don’t prosecute former leaders and
instead allow “democracy to take root.”
But the United States claims to be an ad-
vanced democracy. The costs of not prosecu-
ting Trump have already been significant —
and they’re already grounds for fear. Trump
continues to stir up violence; he acts as if he
remains untouchable. He praised the anti-pub-
lic-health trucker convoy that shut down a key
bridge linking Detroit to Ontario and has
wreaked havoc in Ottawa: “I see they have
Trump signs all over the place and I’m proud
that they do,” Trump bragged to “Fox &
Friends,” before suggesting that the truckers
do the same in the United States, an even
greater “tinderbox.” Trump’s acolytes take his
cue. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) expressed his hope
that the truckers would bring their mayhem
inside America’s borders, while the Republicanexplicit approval of lawlessness. But prosecu-
ting deposed leaders is the stuff of banana
republics.
The fear of the banana republic is hardly an
idle one — and here Trump is a central figure,
too. He has boasted of his willingness to go that
route: In 2016, he ran by pledging that he
intended to use the power of federal law en-
forcement to help his friends and pay back his
enemies. His rallies routinely erupted with
chants of “lock her up,” directed at his oppo-
nent, Hillary Clinton. When as president he
told then-FBI Director James Comey that he
should be “letting Flynn go,” he was doing as he
had promised, using the presidency to try to
save an ally from criminal investigation.
Trump sees the law and law enforcement as a
weapon: He wielded it to protect himself and
rout his foes, as when his attorney general
William P. Barr ordered the violent breakup of
peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrations
near Lafayette Square. Trump has said that if
he gets a second term, he would pardon hun-
dreds of violent insurrectionists charged in the
attack on the Capitol. More recently, his re-
marks about the investigation his administra-
tion began under special counsel John Dur-
ham suggest that he is still game to go after foes
by wildly accusing them of crimes. Trump
continually mischaracterizes the Durham in-
vestigation as having shown that Clinton’s
aides “spied” on his campaign and his presi-
dency, and he issued a statement saying that
“in a stronger period of time in our country, this
crime would have been punishable by death.”
This was “treason at the highest level,” he said.
Of course, there’s also an appearance of
impropriety when a Democratic elected offi-
cial investigates Trump, lending a whiff of
credence to the notion that politics sway pros-
ecution decisions regardless of which side is
doing it. Biden himself, before he was elected
(and before Trump committed some of his
most egregious misdeeds), said that prosecu-
ting him would be a “very unusual thing and
probably not very ... good for democracy,”
although he also promised to leave any deci-
sions in the hands of the Justice Department.
Indicting could trigger violence, spark a cycle
of retribution once Republicans take back
power, and erode yet another democratic
norm.
But the far graver peril in this situation is
inaction, a paralyzing refusal to hold Trump
criminally liable for his behavior. The country
has seen what happens when lawlessness tri-Mehta told a convicted Jan. 6 Capitol rioter
that he was a pawn in a scheme by more
powerful people, and the legal community is
debating whether Trump’s seeming incitement
of the insurrection has opened him up to
criminal charges. The National Archives re-
quested that the Justice Department open an
investigation into Trump’s mishandling of top-
secret documents that the government recent-
ly retrieved from his Florida estate. Trump still
faces legal jeopardy for obstructing justice
during Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian
interference in the 2016 election (remember
that one?). During the 2016 campaign, Trump
allegedly orchestrated hush-money payments
to Stormy Daniels (the charges that landed his
handler Michael Cohen in prison referred to
Trump as Individual #1). This list is hardly
exhaustive and omits the dozen-plus civil law-
suits and civil investigations Trump faces.
In some cases, prosecutors would need to
prove “intent” — a high bar. But it isn’t insur-
mountable; Trump’s words and deeds have
demonstrated that his actions tend to be inten-
tional. If an ordinary citizen had pressured
Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes to
overturn the 2020 election; systematically mis-
represented the value of his assets to the IRS
and banks; funneled money to silence a par-
amour; or put government documents down a
toilet, this person would almost certainly be
facing an array of criminal charges. More than
a year after he left office, Trump isn’t facing any
such thing yet.
The stakes are enormous. The rule of law, the
notion that we are all equal under our criminal
justice system, is among the noblest of princi-
ples but also the ugliest of myths. The question
of putting Trump on trial before a jury of his
peers is a test for a principle of democracy that
has often proved out of reach for most Ameri-
cans.
Historically, White and wealthy citizens
have sometimes managed to avoid the conse-
quences of their criminality. For decades,
White mobs lynched and terrorized African
Americans with impunity, and this legacy of a
racist justice system, separate and unequal,
looms over the debate about charging Trump.
The system remains deeply unfair, biased
against Black people and favoring the wealthy
who are able to afford the best lawyers. Nonvio-
lent drug offenses for the poor have resulted in
decades-long prison sentences, while hardly
any bankers stood trial for reckless and prob-
ably illegal activities that helped trigger the
2008 financial crisis.
With Trump in the White House, his friends
and allies already had their own system of
justice: Trump-loving Dinesh D’Souza (cam-
paign finance violations), Trump-whisperer
Roger Stone (witness tampering), Trump’s first
national security adviser Michael Flynn (lying
to the FBI), Trump campaign chairman Paul
Manafort (tax fraud) and Trump son-in-law’s
father Charles Kushner (tax evasion and wit-
ness tampering) are all convicted felons who
received pardons from Trump or had their
sentences commuted by him. Three of those
convictions occurred during Trump’s presi-
dency.N
ow this unequal system of justice faces a
crossroads. Any decision about prosecu-
ting the former president centers on two
conflicting fears: Inaction mocks the nation’s
professed ideal that no one sits above the law —
and Americans might wonder whether our
democracy can survive what amounts to theCHARGES FROM B1Will the decision whether to prosecute Trump be based on facts — or fear?MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POSTTwitter: @MattDallekMatthew Dallek is a professor at George
Washington University’s Graduate School of
Political Management. His book “Birchers: How the
John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right”
will be published next year.