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It is wild that it has come to this: The fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection will pass with the architect of that day’s terrible events having his victorious electoral count overseen by the woman whose vice presidency he tried to extrajudicially subvert before it started.
A new Congress, now controlled by the insurrectionist’s allies but still full of people whose lives were threatened by the Donald Trump–instigated mob, will prepare to do his bidding when he is sworn in in two weeks. And with that, the remaining legal efforts to hold him accountable for the attempted coup will disappear. It’s not quite like observing 9/11 by inviting the surviving al-Qaida leaders to board ceremonial flights to New York and Washington, but it’s still pretty bad. The reality settling over the United States today is that the insurrectionists outmaneuvered both Democratic leaders and America’s antiquated laws and institutions, and now they will have an extended opportunity to show us all what we’ve won.
That this grim moment seemed unimaginable four years ago almost goes without saying. Even some Republicans leaders and commentators who had spent four years laundering Trump’s vile indecency and explaining away each new assault on the country’s norms and institutions were momentarily chastened. Inside the Capitol, the insurrection was violent and terrifying and could have resulted in multiple members of Congress getting killed or wounded. But while it was shocking to watch, it was also bumbling and rudderless and rather obviously doomed. From the outside, it mostly looked like angry fans storming and looting the field and the clubhouse after their favorite team lost the Super Bowl—bad, but also not likely to change the final score.
Think about how low the MAGA movement was on that day and how desperate the outgoing president and his allies were for any way to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Trump had already lost dozens of frivolous lawsuits in an effort to overturn the election; had fallen flat trying to enlist his own vice president, Mike Pence, in the effort to interfere with the counting of electoral votes; had tried and failed to install a loyalist willing to declare martial law atop the Department of Justice; and had become such a toxic force in his own party that he had helped cost Republicans the Senate in the double-barrel Georgia runoffs held just one day before.
The mad king, alone in the alabaster castle from which he would soon be evicted, was isolated and desperate. The House Select Committee to investigate Jan. 6 and the many indictments related to it then showed just how responsible Trump was for it all. And yet somehow, over the course of Biden’s four soporific years in the White House, Trump managed not only to get away with every last bit of it, but to in effect finish what he started on the Ellipse that day—with boosts from our collapsing legal system, an amnesia-riddled electorate, and contrarian broligarchs who saw in the declining, erratic Trump a unique opportunity to smash any remaining obstacles to their A.I. and cryptocurrency get-rich schemes.
Books will be written about how this transpired, but it’s not actually that complicated.
Virtually every person tasked with bringing Trump and his allies to justice for the effort to overturn the 2020 election trusted that some other institutions could get it done. In the Senate, GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said that “President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” made the fateful decision not to whip his caucus in favor of conviction after Trump’s second impeachment in the House, saying publicly that the criminal and civil justice systems should be responsible for holding him accountable. Maybe he thought Trump had spent the last of his nine political lives. So Trump skated, again.
President Biden believed that his disastrous pick for attorney general (the one he’s now leaking regrets to the press about picking), the timorous Merrick Garland, would take the lead on a fair-minded prosecution of the former president, but instead he inexplicably sat on his hands for almost two years and then dumped the job on special counsel Jack Smith following the 2022 midterms, displaying the same total lack of fighting spirit that he did when his Supreme Court seat was stolen from him by McConnell with hardly a single vocalized objection in 2016. By the time Smith got to work, voters were growing tired of Biden’s rote, mumbling invocations of the horrors of Jan. 6. They were far more interested in hearing someone promise to reduce the price of eggs than in listening to talk about the sanctity of a democracy that had been failing them for more than two decades.
The effort to rehabilitate and reinstall Trump in power got a generous assist from the GOP’s ill-gotten 6–3 supermajority on an off-the-rails Supreme Court, which not only rescued Trump from the legal consequences of his actions but declared American presidents to be all but immortal. Perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts, who was “shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision” in the Trump immunity case, according to CNN’s Joan Biskupic, may have thought that the electorate would reject Trump, allowing prosecutions to move forward on the much more narrow terms the Supreme Court appeared to allow. But that’s not the path that the voters chose.
The people tasked with eliminating the threat that Donald Trump poses to American constitutional democracy were ultimately more worried about the perception of procedural fairness than about getting the job done. McConnell thought it was unfair and perhaps unconstitutional to convict a former president. Biden and Garland worried that an overly aggressive approach from the White House and the Department of Justice would delegitimize the justice system. Roberts, ostensibly concerned with his legacy and the court’s legitimacy, worried that failing to grant broad immunity to presidents would open the door to tit-for-tat prosecutions of outgoing presidents. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies whined incessantly about “weaponization” of the Justice Department anyway and used by now standard and predictable Trump-era propaganda techniques to invert responsibility for Jan. 6—anointing the rioters political prisoners and convincing rank-and-file Republicans that the whole thing was a partisan farce.
The collective impact of all of this neurotic, overcautious hand-wringing was to communicate indifference to the voters. Sure, what Trump did was bad, their actions said, but not bad enough for a single institution of American national governance to officially declare him unfit for office or prohibit him from winning the presidency again.
The voters still could have done what their vaunted institutions and timid leaders could not—firmly and unambiguously rejected the pathogen of Trump-led authoritarianism even at a time of broad dissatisfaction with Democratic rule. Instead they shrugged and unlocked the door for him to walk right back through. Rarely in American history has one man been so incontrovertibly responsible for an effort to destroy constitutional democracy, and yet in two weeks he will be sworn into an office that has been precleared by the Supreme Court for virtually unlimited mayhem and lawbreaking. The lesson here is that restraint in the pursuit of Trumpism is no virtue; a man who considers himself unbound by laws, precedent, institutions, and norms cannot be contained by them.
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