Four years later

The unapologetic nature of Trump's political renaissance is an ongoing menace

Photo by Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The scariest thing about contemporary American politics is that on January 7, 2021, it was widely acknowledged among American conservatives that Donald Trump’s behavior on January 6th was completely unacceptable.

No one, at the time, was emotionally or intellectually invested in debating whether it was “really” a coup or whether a political movement that did something like that was “really” fascist. Mitch McConnell said Trump was morally responsible for the crimes committed. Steve Schwarzman called it “appalling and an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans.” Kevin Williamson of National Review rightly called the riot at the Capitol “just the tip of a very dangerous spear.”

I’m not surprised or even particularly upset that so many people who acknowledged the gravity of the offense at the time ended up voting for and supporting Trump.

Electoral politics in a two-party system is hard. So much is at stake at the ballot box — tax policy, abortion rights, immigration, and a million other things, all of which are incredibly important. I deeply respect and admire the decision made by Liz Cheney and a handful of others to take a fully principled stand on the January 6 question, but I also respect (or at least understand) the decision of those who’ve decided they care more about other things than about Trump’s low character and basic unfitness for office. But what disturbs me is the extent to which the entire conservative movement has retconned not just the events of four years ago, but their own reactions to those events, such that these days, to be disturbed by them is considered some form of lib hysteria.

The reality is quite the opposite.

At the time, I felt relatively calm. Trump’s actions were pregnant with malign potential, but at the end of the day, he’d failed. Power was transferred smoothly, and a broad array of bipartisan elites acknowledged that what Trump had done was wrong.

Today, I am extremely alarmed, because Trump is back in power and no longer faces meaningful intra-party criticism for his actions four years ago. The whole constellation of pro-Trump influencers, from Elon Musk and Bill Ackman to Joe Rogan, refuses to acknowledge this as a legitimate criticism of Trump that they simply see as less important. They won’t acknowledge it, even while Trump continues to claim he did nothing wrong and promises to pardon the perpetrators. I don’t believe the odds of the worst-case scenario results of this are above 50 percent. But they’re not nearly low enough. And the fact that nobody in the Trump orbit feels any need to even try to reassure anyone is, itself, very non-reassuring.

The problem of pardons

Kurt Gödel, the great logician and philosopher, claimed that a loophole exists in the US constitution that would allow the president to establish himself as dictator. The story goes that he was about to expound on this theory at his hearing to obtain US citizenship but was cut off by Albert Einstein, lest his speculations ruin what should have been a routine proceeding.

I’ve been interested in this question since I first heard the story in college.

And to me it seems that Gödel must have been thinking of the pardon power. This has frequently been abused, mostly in banal ways, by lame-duck presidents to pull selfish stunts with no grounding in the public interest. Nothing particularly terrible has ever occurred due to presidential pardons. And yet, it is an extraordinarily broad power with no real checks or limiting principles.

Suppose Kash Patel shows up at FBI headquarters and says he wants to identify the most hardcore MAGA special agents and recruit them to a small elite team. What’s their job? To do illegal wiretaps against Trump’s political enemies in order to blackmail them. Someone on the team says, “Director that’s illegal! I’m all for egregious abuses of power, but I also don’t want to get in trouble.” And he says,” don’t worry, POTUS has you covered with pardons.”

Meanwhile, DC is not a state, which means that we technically don’t have any state laws or state court system. Of course, in practice, we do have a local criminal code and local courts that enforce it. But constitutionally speaking, these are federal laws and federal courts, and all our local prosecutions are handled by a US attorney rather than an elected district attorney. And this means the president could pardon people for random muggings or assaults or murders in DC. Which is to say that if one of the president’s aides were to shoot an opposition member of Congress (or just an intra-party critic) on the street, the president could pardon him. It’s not just that the country could become a dictatorship in this way (any country can become a dictatorship), but it would be perfectly within the bounds of the constitution.

Needless to say, I would be extremely surprised if Trump has Hakeem Jeffries assassinated later this month. But bad actors (as Republicans know better than Democrats when talking about “normal” crime) probe boundaries to see what they can get away with. Trump got in hot water after 1/6, but ultimately he got away with it. He won the nomination, and he won the general election. He’s stated his intention to pardon the perpetrators, and by all accounts, he’s going to do it. If he gets away with that with minimal intra-party pushback or criticism, he’ll try more stuff. And we’ll see what happens.

Normal politics in abnormal times

The vibes in 2025 are strikingly different from the vibes in 2017.

In some ways, I think this has been over-explained. We don’t really need grand theories to account for why so many business executives and people who control huge pools of investment capital are excited about a Republican administration. What’s notable, though, is that many of these people remained aloof toward Trump in 2017, and back in 2021, they were professing to be appalled by his post-election conduct and hoping to use that as a lever to get a more conventional Republican in office. But Marc Andreessen, Bill Ackman, and Elon Musk led an opinion cascade in the business community, in which it became socially acceptable to just brush past Trump’s various crimes and enthusiastically support him. He has been, to use a term of art from eight years ago, “normalized” by the rightward segments of the business community and by the American establishment.

I’ve always thought the most appropriate way to engage in anti-Trump political opposition was through normal politics, so on some level I accept this change with equanimity.

But here’s what worries me. Nobody agrees with the presidential candidate that they prefer about everything. It is completely normal and appropriate to vote for someone with some reservations or points of criticism. If, all things considered, you preferred Trump to Harris, notwithstanding Trump’s election lies, encouragement of violence, and promises to let the perpetrators off the hook, then that’s your right. There were plenty of other issues in the mix in 2020 as well. What I see, though, from the billionaires who disavowed Trump only to come back to his side, isn’t people saying, “That really was an awful day and I hope he doesn’t follow through on the pardons, but I decided that taxes and energy are more important.” Instead, they’ve gone totally silent on the points of criticism.

And there’s an alarming doublethink about this.

If I were to say, “It’s irresponsible to back Trump regardless of your views on taxes and energy because he’s an authoritarian menace,” these people would say I’m being a hysterical lib.

But if I were to say, “It’s fine to vote for Trump while still strongly disagreeing with what he did around 1/6, I’d just like to hear you say that in public,” the response would be that everyone knows it’s best to avoid Trump’s bad side.

If you’re not willing to voice criticism of the president, even while generally supporting him, because you’re afraid of retaliation, that seems at least a little bit like Trump is an authoritarian menace. I have concerns! And what I would love more than anything is for Trump supporters in the business world or at conservative nonprofits to set my mind at ease, not by arguing with me about whether Trump is an authoritarian menace, but by showing me that they don’t fear him and can offer pointed, vocal criticism of his conduct and strong condemnation of these potential pardons.

That’s how pluralistic politics works: You agree with people when you agree with them, but you don’t shy away from disagreeing when you disagree. And to a considerable extent, the fate of the country hinges more on what right-of-center people choose to say and do if and when Trump abuses his powers than on what anyone in the opposition does.

An anniversary I hope to forget

With luck, the idea of doing a fifth or sixth anniversary post commemorating the events of January 6, 2021 will feel pointless.

It was a bad day for the country, but bad primarily because of what it signified, and because of what might have happened, than for anything that actually did occur. Members of Congress were not injured. The mob was largely unarmed. The election results were not overturned. To put the country in that position was an egregious failing on Trump’s part. To have expressed so little remorse and borne so little consequence for it is an egregious failing on the part of the country as a whole and the conservative movement in particular.

At the same time, I do acutely remember that in the winter of 2004-2005, the American political circles in which I traveled were infused with a foreboding sense of doom. Books like Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power and Painting The Map Red: The Fight To Create a Permanent Republican Majority suggested that between gerrymandering, the GOP’s financial edge, the power of conservative media, and the natural advantages of a higher-turnout coalition, Democrats were doomed to be permanently marginalized. Many of my friends worried about more sinister things as well — the Bush regime was operating illegal surveillance operations and secret torture prisons. American liberty might well be cooked.

But, of course, it wasn’t. Not because Bush never engaged in abuses of power, and only partially because the opposition was hysterical and wrongheaded. Political life is just more complicated than straight-line projections. As Trump tries to govern, the most likely scenario is that he’ll face backlash to some of the stuff he does and he’ll provoke cracks and fissures within his own coalition. As a lame duck from day one, there will be some contestation between JD Vance and other ambitious players, like Marco Rubio, for control of the future. Democrats may start making smarter decisions and start doing better electorally. It will probably be okay.

Yet, there are no guarantees. Over the break, I read Karla’s Choice, a new addition to the George Smiley saga. It largely concerns Cold War era Hungarian emigrés, which led me to read a little about the Communist takeover there. The original postwar government was a coalition led by an agrarian centrist party that won the election. But Stalin, whose military occupied the country, insisted on the Communists controlling the Interior Ministry. And running the security services was enough to take the country over. In the economic policy domains that I know best, Trump has selected a reasonable team. But he’s got an unqualified drunk set to run the Pentagon, an FBI Director who openly brags about his plans to abuse power for partisan ends, a catspaw of authoritarian regimes as his DNI, and other troubling choices in the security agencies.

That plus pardons for people who commit political crimes equals danger. I’m looking forward to mostly covering policy debates as the new GOP trifecta tries to sort out its agenda and figures out how to legislate with a narrow and fractious House majority. And I hope that when we look back on this time, we’ll say that was the most important story. I think it probably will be. But I’m not nearly as certain as I’d like to be.