Corporate leaders say they should be shielded from congressional inquiries because they had no alternative but to collaborate with the Trump administration. History says otherwise.

On October 5, Politico writers Jasper Goodman and Kahterine Hapgood reported on a growing battle among Democratic Party leaders over how deeply to investigate businesses that directly abetted a fascist regime, which is also the single most corrupt presidency in the history of the United States. Progressives like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), who are respectively poised to lead the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees, are eager to target the executives at major tech companies and cryptocurrency exchanges for their financial and in-kind contributions to Trump. But moderates feel that pointing too many fingers would be unfair.

“A lot of the companies did things because Trump had a gun on their head,” Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) told Politico. “We’re going to have to be a little bit wise about when companies simply did something they had to do to survive this unprecedented level of corruption, compared to companies that actually got on board and profited more by being a partner in his corruption.”

Dave Vorland of the Big Tech front group Chamber of Progress makes a similar case. In Silicon Valley’s generous funding of Trump’s second inauguration and his new White House ballroom project, Vorland writes that “what looks like ‘bending the knee’ may be better understood as risk management.… the company leaders were forced to make that choice by Trump.”Both Foster and Vorland appear to be arguing that it’s unfair to judge corporate leaders by their actions.

Foster claims that at least some “corporations, law firms, and universities that took steps to stay in Trump’s good graces” simply had no choice. It was a matter of survival. Similarly, Vorland appears to treat “risk management” not so much as a business strategy but as an all-purpose moral justification: If it maximizes shareholder value, it must be beyond judgment.

Whatever investigations congressional Democrats undertake in the next two years will be the nation’s first steps toward metabolizing this utterly dark chapter in our history. In other words, congressional oversight of private-sector collaboration with Trump will be a prequel to the truth commissions and criminal prosecutions that we desperately need.

Yet Foster and Vorland want to preemptively write certain actors out of the story of the Trump years, even before Democrats in Congress start wielding gavels. That would necessarily narrow the kinds of story America can tell itself about what the Trump years were to a narrative of coerced collaboration. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò writes, when a nation chooses to forget certain facts about a shameful chapter in its history, that keeps certain claims about the nation’s character open to future demagogues. The politics of memory are difficult, but they represent nonnegotiable terrain for any honest reckoning with the age of Trump.

Surely though, Foster, Vorland and others would respond, business and civic leaders who paid off or assisted the Trump regime aren’t as bad as Stephen Miller or Pete Hegseth. That’s absolutely correct. But to end the conversation there forecloses other questions about the inner workings of Trump collaboration Americans urgently need to ask ourselves. When an evil regime rises and flips public morality on its head, are you still responsible for your actions? Should one be judged for doing the wrong thing when, for a brief period, the gatekeepers of social power and prestige seemed to require it?

The philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt spent much of her later life thinking about such questions—and about what distinguishes the participants and resisters of fascist and totalitarian regimes from each other. She was particularly interested in the role of individual choice and culpability.

In 1962, The New Yorker sent Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi and key organizer of the Final Solution. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, her highly controversial book about the trial, Arendt argued that Eichmann was neither a fascist ideologue nor a hate-driven monster. Rather, he was a dull bureaucrat—a company man who committed genocide to avoid courting any conflicts in his working life so as to quietly climb the professional ladder.

Eichmann’s mundane suite of self-justifications, in stark contrast with the gravity of his actions, inspired Arendt’s best-known phrase: “the banality of evil.”Eichmann in Jerusalem set off furious criticism, to which Arendt responded in her 1964 essay and radio broadcast “Personal Responsibility Under A Dictatorship.”In her view, the controversy revealed “a widespread fear of judging” within high society, due to “the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.”

Educated people recognize that systemic forces and vast institutions influence our daily behavior at all levels. But to Arendt, this acknowledgment too often shaded off into an ethos of personal non-accountability—a readymade rationale for avoiding any responsibility for one’s actions.

Seen in this light, Vorland’s claim that tech leaders have “chosen access and risk management over public confrontation” because “they were forced to make that choice by Trump” begins to fall apart. By definition, one cannot be “forced” into a choice: The tech companies could have chosen the path of “public confrontation” if they wanted to. Meanwhile, Foster’s apologia takes this bid to sidestep public judgment of one’s actions to absurd new heights.

In his words, Trump “had a gun on their head.”But “they” are multibillion-dollar corporations—legal fictions without heads at all, who enjoy privilege and social deference on a scale unimaginable to ordinary Americans. The bosses of these entities weren’t facing imminent execution at the hands of the state, but only the prospect of diminished revenue.

Karp is “described by colleagues as the consummate people pleaser, sometimes to a fault,” according to a New York Times investigation. Shipman was once a cable news anchor who wrote airport self-help books for white-collar professional women. Both are regular Democratic donors who have publicly voiced broadly liberal commitments.

Then, for a few months, it looked like a demagogue might take away their prestige and public funding. At the same time, prominent pundits with views akin to theirs were heralding a “vibe shift;” respectable people had to consider fascists respectable now. And so Karp and Shipman became puppets of a warmongering regime that kidnaps and murders citizens in the street because they didn’t want to anger anyone important.

Arendt would not be surprised. When she described life as a Jewish intellectual in Nazi Germany in “Personal Responsibility,” Arendtt wrote that she was shocked and outraged by the regime’s actions, but not disturbed: The Nazis, after all, were doing exactly what they said they would do.

No, she wrote, “what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it.”Still, did Karp, Shipman, and the tech giants do anything that was really so wrong? These were extreme circumstances, unprecedented in any of our lives. To what standard can we hold people in these situations?