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A very strange disjuncture has opened up in Washington between the serene mood and the alarming developments that are under way. The surface is calm because the Republican presidential candidate won the election, and Democrats, the only one of the two major parties committed on principle to upholding the legitimacy of election results, conceded defeat and are cooperating in the peaceful transition of power. Whatever energy the chastened Democrats can muster at the moment is aimed inward, at factional struggles over their future direction.
Meanwhile, what is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing. Donald Trump is filling his administration with “loyalists,” a prerogative that his opponents have grudgingly accepted as his due. Yet he is defining loyalist in maximal terms, including the belief that Trump legitimately won the 2020 election and was justified in his attempt to seize power. The winners are rewriting the history of the insurrection, and their version of history is about to acquire the force of law.
Consider three developments just from the past weekend.
On Saturday, The New York Times reported that the Trump transition team is asking applicants for high-level positions in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies three questions: which candidate they supported in the past three elections, what they thought about January 6, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. Among the “wrong” answers, applicants say, are conceding that Trump lost the election or that his supporters should not have tried to overturn the result.
The purpose of these issue screens is not merely to ensure that Trump benefits from advisers who are committed to his success and wished for it all along. After all, plenty of Republicans voted for Trump multiple times without endorsing his attempted autogolpe. The purpose, rather, is to weed out anybody who dissents from Trump’s conviction that he is entitled to rule regardless of what the Constitution says. Trump believes, not without reason, that his first term was undermined by the insufficient devotion of his underlings, most famously Mike Pence (of “Hang Mike Pence!” fame).
Then, yesterday, in an interview with NBC, Trump reiterated his promise to free the January 6 insurrectionists. He justified this promise on the supposed grounds that the J6 criminals are being confined in a “hellhole” (better known as the D.C. jail) and that their guilty pleas were coerced with the threat of even longer prison sentences had they gone to trial. (These are, of course, routine features of a criminal-justice system Trump normally depicts as too soft.) He denied the well-documented fact that some rioters assaulted police officers, even claiming that the cops invited the rioters into the Capitol before unfairly arresting them. And he proceeded to say that members of the congressional committee investigating January 6 were themselves criminals who should be in prison, alleging without any basis that the committee “deleted and destroyed” evidence that Nancy Pelosi was responsible for the insurrection.
It remains exceedingly unlikely that this rhetoric will lead to any members of the January 6 committee facing prison time. What Trump’s comments signify is the complete political turnabout that he has wrought since January 2021. In the aftermath of the insurrection, Trump was disgraced, the insurrectionists faced legal accountability for their attempt to seize power, and—this is a measure of how distant that period of post-J6 recriminations now feels—American corporations were withholding financial contributions from any Republicans who had endorsed it.
By next month, the insurrectionists may be free, and the opponents of the insurrection will be the hunted ones. Whether their punishment amounts to facing bogus criminal charges or mere political banishment (a price most that pro-democracy Republicans have already paid) remains to be seen.
Finally, last night, Trump announced that he will appoint Michael Anton as director of policy planning at the State Department. This announcement attracted little attention, and given that Anton already served during the first Trump term (in a communications role), it hardly moves the needle. But Anton’s appointment does highlight the banal ubiquity of authoritarian thinking in the Trumpified Republican Party.
Anton is best known for an essay published eight years ago called “The Flight 93 Election.” In it, he argued that conservatives should support Trump, despite their serious reservations about his character, because another Democratic term in office would amount to the death of the republic. (Hillary Clinton, like the 9/11 hijackers, would steer the country toward the equivalent of a fiery demise.) At the time, Anton’s argument stood out for its existential tone and hysterical life-and-death metaphor. Now his logic—that permitting Democrats to win a single national election is tantamount to national suicide, the prevention of which justifies any measures, legal or otherwise—is a required belief for service in the power ministries. Once an oddball, Anton is just another Trump bureaucrat who subscribes to the party’s rule-or-perish ideology.
Exactly how this belief system will play out over the next four years is a wide-open question, one that those of us who don’t subscribe to it would prefer not to contemplate. In the meantime, we are in the midst of an uneasy transfer of legitimate democratic power to a party whose leader, at least for the moment, does not need to seize it by force.
