Originally published in Hankyoreh.
An elected leader who tries to seize absolute power through a military coup commits the most serious political transgression that can take place in a democracy.
In December 2024, Yoon Suk Yeol attempted just such a coup to overcome opposition in the National Assembly that he called “anti-state” and blamed for the country’s political paralysis. In the face of Yoon’s declaration of martial law, that same opposition was not at all paralyzed when it mobilized in defense of Korea’s democratic state. Once they made it past police barricades and into the parliament building, Korean legislators repealed the martial law declaration.
Yoon was impeached, removed from office, and arrested. A court in Korea recently sentenced him to life in prison.
Yoon is not the only elected leader who is sitting in jail after a failed coup attempt. In November, Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro began the 27-year-year prison sentence he received for launching a coup attempt to remain in office after his term ended. Since he is 70 years old, he is effectively serving a life sentence.
Some leaders, initially elected to office, have stayed in power through more gradual consolidations of authority. Vladimir Putin has been Russia’s top leader for more than a quarter century, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ruled Turkey since 2003. Nayib Bukele has been Salvadoran president only since 2019, but the 44-year-old changed the constitution so that he can be leader for life.
In contrast to Korea and Brazil, there is currently no accountability in Russia, Turkey, or El Salvador. The leaders there can act with impunity. They do not fear electoral recall or any penalties for wrongdoing. These countries are no longer fully functioning democracies.
Hungary has long been heading in the same direction. Since taking office (for a second time) in 2010, Viktor Orban has similarly amassed extraordinary power as the country’s prime minister. But his party is 20 percentage points down in the polls with an election coming up in April. It’s never too late for citizens to demand and achieve accountability.
And then there’s the United States.
Donald Trump also attempted to stay in office by overturning the 2020 elections. He didn’t call out the military—it wouldn’t likely have supported him—but he did try tamper with the election results and rally his supporters to disrupt the official confirmation of the election on January 6, 2021. In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, Trump was impeached a second time. He was not convicted.
However, he was convicted of another felony in 2024 (for trying illegally to influence the 2016 election). At that time, he was also under indictment and investigation for multiple other crimes, including his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. But then, in an extraordinary misfunctioning of democracy, American voters returned Trump to the White House in 2024.
America’s accountability problem didn’t begin with Trump. Confederate leaders were generally not punished after the Civil War—even Confederate president Jefferson Davis was never tried for treason. Over a century later, former president Richard Nixon never served time for his Watergate crimes. And only a single banker went to prison for the massive fraud that culminated in the financial meltdown of 2008.
Trump is just the latest in a series of rich men who have gotten off scot-free. Back in office, he is doing everything he can to further disrupt the mechanism of accountability and safeguard his own immunity from future prosecution.
Trump pardoned all of the January 6 rioters, even the ones convicted of serious crimes. He, his family, and his friends have profited enormously from their political positions, which in any other country would constitute criminal corruption. He has lavished funds on border protection forces that have acted above the law—killing three U.S. citizens and a number of undocumented immigrants—and that have functioned like a paramilitary answerable only to the president. Trump has also proposed changes in the election laws to make it more difficult for Americans to vote and less likely for the opposition Democratic Party to win in the mid-term election this November.
Trump has not yet overturned U.S. democracy. But he aspires to do so.
One issue above all has sown dissension among the ranks of his supporters: the Jeffrey Epstein files.
These files contain information about Epstein’s extensive network of friends and contacts. Many prominent people have lost their jobs because of their various associations with the convicted pedophile, who committed suicide in his jail cell in 2019. These include: former UK ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson, former French culture minister Jack Lang, and former Norwegian premier Thorbjorn Jagland. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been stripped of his royal titles and arrested.
This is what accountability looks like. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has not followed suit. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, despite having longstanding business ties with Epstein and lying about them, has not resigned.
Trump supporters—and many others—are upset that the administration hasn’t released all the Epstein files as the president had promised as a candidate. The unreleased materials might implicate more members of the administration, including perhaps Trump himself. Recently, a journalist discovered that information related to an accusation that Trump abused an underage girl has simply disappeared from the files.
Accountability is the life blood of democracy. It regulates the circulatory system by expelling poisons from the body politic. Political systems that lack such mechanisms become toxic: corrupt, violent, stagnant.
Having established a system of accountability after it left authoritarianism behind, Koreans were not eager to see Yoon resurrect the bad old days. Brazilians, too, had experienced dictatorship and thus worked hard to apply the accountability mechanisms to the renegade Bolsonaro.
Americans have never known dictatorship during the 250-year history of the country. This second Trump term is a test of just how durable American democracy really is. Beginning with the friends and facilitators of Jeffrey Epstein and then all of those have aided the criminal acts of the Trump administration, Americans can break with history and finally put accountability into practice. If these deeds go unpunished, American democracy cannot possibly survive.
The choice is stark. Either the United States goes the way of Korea and Brazil by expelling the toxins from its body politic. Or it will become as sterile and authoritarian as Russia under Vladimir Putin.