One of the first and potentially most delicate challenges for the President-elect Joe Biden is deciding what to do with the Trump administration’s legacy of corruption, incompetence, and abuse of power. An obvious approach is to let bygones be bygones, which is the norm in American politics. It is what the Ford administration did in the wake of Watergate, including issuing a pardon to former President Richard Nixon. It is also the approach that President Barack Obama adopted when it confronted the George W. Bush administration’s policies in Iraq. Some of them, including the use of torture on suspected terrorists, are internationally recognized as war crimes.
Biden shouldn’t be so quick to forget and move on. A compelling case can be made that the Trump administration’s political misdeeds, especially those that stand in direct violation of universal human-rights norms, are deserving of a different approach: a truth commission, a quintessential practice of the international human-rights movement for holding former leaders and political regimes accountable for their human rights abuses.
