Contra Trump
— Spectres & Souls

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

— Hunter S. Thompson

On Monday 6 January 2025 a joint session of the US Congress certified Donald J. Trump as the incoming, forty-seventh president of America. Four years to the day after a failed autogolpe on 6 January 2021, an ‘electoral coup’ had secured Trump’s second presidential term.

Until the mid-term congressional elections in 2027, Trump will be the most powerful political figure in the United States. There is already speculation that, at that time, the president’s already narrow margin of rulership will be whittled down and possibly even dramatically diminished. Regardless, by January 2027, Donald Trump will have enjoyed ten years of power, even if four of those years were during the Biden interregnum.

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The first day of January 2025 marked eight years since China Heritage went online with the publication of A Monkey King’s Journey to the East a few short weeks before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. In it we offered some thoughts on the similarities between Trump and Mao Zedong, starting with the observation that

The 13 January 1967 issue of Time magazine featured Mao Zedong on its cover with the headline ‘China in Chaos’. Fifty years later, Time made US president-elect Donald Trump its Person of The Year. With a ground-swell of mass support, both men rebelled against the established order in their respective countries and set about throwing the world into confusion. Both share an autocratic mind set, Mao Zedong as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Donald Trump as Chairman of the Board. As Jiayang Fan noted in May 2016, both also share a taste for ‘polemical excess and xenophobic paranoia’. For his part, Mao’s rebellion led to national catastrophe and untold human misery.

During his four-year term in office, Donald Trump created a version of American carnage that reached a violent and murderous crescendo with the attack on the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Shortly after his subsequent victory in the 2024 US presidential election, Trump made the cover of Time magazine again as Person of the Year. ‘Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history’, wrote Eric Cortellessa:

His first term ended in disgrace, with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results culminating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was shunned by most party officials when he announced his candidacy in late 2022 amid multiple criminal investigations. Little more than a year later, Trump cleared the Republican field, clinching one of the fastest contested presidential primaries in history. He spent six weeks during the general election in a New York City courtroom, the first former President to be convicted of a crime—a fact that did little to dampen his support. An assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July. Over the next four months, he beat not one but two Democratic opponents, swept all seven swing states, and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. He has realigned American politics, remaking the GOP and leaving Democrats reckoning with what went awry.

Trump has a ready explanation for his improbable resurrection. He even has a name for its climactic final act. “I called it 72 Days of Fury. … We hit the nerve of the country. The country was angry.” It wasn’t just the MAGA faithful. Trump harnessed deep national discontent about the immigration, and cultural issues. His grievances resonated with suburban moms and retirees, Latino and Black men, young voters and tech edgelords. While Democrats estimated that most of the country wanted a President who would uphold the norms of liberal democracy, Trump saw a nation ready to smash them, tapping into a growing sense that the system was rigged.

If America was craving change, it is about to see how much Trump can deliver. He ran on a strongman vision, proposing to deport migrants by the millions, dismantle parts of the federal government, seek revenge against his political adversaries, and dismantle institutions that millions of people see as censorious and corrupt. “He understands the cultural zeitgeists,” says his 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who remains a close adviser.

Even in 2025 a not inconsiderable swathe of America, including 157 members of the new 119th Congress, are election deniers and according to Trump himself 6 January was actually a ‘day of love’. To return for a moment to our Mao-Trump comparison, we would note that during a banquet held in Zhongnanhai on 26 December 1966, Mao Zedong reportedly raised a glass in celebration of the all-out civil war 全面內戰 that he and his comrades had engineered.

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On the fourth anniversary of Donald Trump’s initially unsuccessful autogolpe, and ahead of his second inauguration in Washington, we publish a selection of essays, videos and images as part of Contra Trump, a mini series on the 2024 presidential election and its aftermath. It is part of Spectres & Souls — Vignettes, moments and meditations on China and America which was in China Heritage launched shortly after the event of 6 January 2021.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
7 January 2025

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How to Navigate by the Stars

Jill Lepore

A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquillity. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.

And still the waters rose. Trump’s election started a tidal wave. Not a few political commentators announced the end of the Republic. Trump’s rhetoric was apocalyptic and absolute; the theme of his inaugural address was “American carnage.” The rhetoric of his critics was no less dystopian—angry, wounded, and without hope.

As Trump began his term in office, Americans fought over immigration and guns, sex and religion. They fought, too, over statues and monuments, plaques and names. The ghosts of American history rattled their chains. In Frederick, Maryland, a Chevy pickup truck carted a bronze bust of Roger Taney, the judge who’d made the decision in Dred Scott, from the city hall to a cemetery outside of town. In St. Louis, cranes pulled up two Confederate memorials—their plinths spray-painted “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “END RACISM”—and put them into storage. New Orleans planned to take down statues of four Confederate leaders, which led to mayhem, seepage from what secessionists once described as a “sea of blood,” the bursting of a dam. In Charlottesville, Virginia, where a statue of Robert E. Lee had been slated to come down, armed white supremacists marched through the city; one ran down a counter-protester and killed her, as if the Civil War had never ended, she the last of the Union dead.

The truths on which the nation was founded—equality, sovereignty, and consent—had been retold after the Civil War. Modern liberalism came out of that political settlement, and the United States, abandoning isolationism, had carried that vision to the world: the rule of law, individual rights, democratic government, open borders, and free markets. The fight to make good on the promise of the nation’s founding truths held the country together for a century, during the long struggle for civil rights. And yet the nation came apart all the same, all over again.

Conservatives based their claim to power on liberalism’s failure, which began in the 1960s, when the idea of identity replaced the idea of equality. Liberals won gains in the courts while losing state houses, governors’ offices, and congressional seats. By the 1990s, conservative Robert Bork insisted, “Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will.” But the problem wasn’t that liberals did not succeed in winning popular support; the problem was that liberals did not try, spurning electoral politics in favor of judicial remedies, political theater, and purity crusades.

Conservatives rested their claim to political power on winning elections and winning history. The National Review, William F. Buckley had written in 1955, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” From wanting it to stop, conservatives began wanting history to turn back, not least by making a fetish of the nation’s founding, in the form of originalism.

“From the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965,” Newt Gingrich wrote in 1996, “from the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims, through de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, up to Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was one continuous civilization built around commonly accepted legal and cultural principles.”

Since 1965, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration Act, Gingrich argued, that civilization had come undone. Gingrich’s account of America’s past was a fantasy, useful to his politics, but useless as history—heedless of difference and violence and the struggle for justice. It also undermined and belittled the American experiment, making it less bold, less daring, less interesting, less violent, a daffy, reassuring bedtime story instead of a stirring, terrifying, inspiring, troubling, earth-shaking epic. And yet that fairy tale spoke to the earnest yearnings and political despair of Americans who joined the Tea Party, and who rallied behind Donald Trump’s promise to “make American great again.” Nor was the nostalgia limited to America alone. All over the world, populists seeking solace from a troubled present sought refuge in imagined histories. The fate of the nation-state itself appearing uncertain; nationalists, who had few proposals for the future, gained power by telling fables about the greatness of the past.

Barack Obama had urged Americans “to choose our better history,” a longer, more demanding, messier, and, finally, more uplifting story. But a nation cannot choose its past; it can only choose its future. And in the twenty-first century, it was no longer clear that choice, in the sense that Alexander Hamilton meant, had much to do with the decisions made by an electorate that had been cast adrift on the ocean of the Internet. Can a people govern themselves by reflection and choice? Hamilton had wanted to know, or are they fated to be ruled, forever, by accident and force, lashed by the violence of each wave of a surging sea?

The ship of state lurched and reeled. Liberals, blown down by the slightest breeze, had neglected to trim the ship’s sails, leaving the canvas to flap and tear in a rising wind, the rigging flailing. Huddled belowdecks, they had failed to plot a course, having lost sight of the horizon and their grasp on any compass. On deck, conservatives had pulled up the ship’s planking to make bonfires of rage: they had courted the popular will by demolishing the idea of truth itself, smashing the ship’s very mast.

It would fall to a new generation of Americans, reckoning what their forebears had wrought, to fathom the depths of the doom-black sea. If they meant to repair the tattered ship, they would need to fell the most majestic pine in a deer-haunted forest and raise a new mast that could pierce the clouded sky. With sharpened adzes, they would have to hew timbers of cedar and oak into planks, straight and true. They would need to drive home nails with the untiring swing of mighty arms and, with needles held tenderly in nimble fingers, stitch new sails out of the rugged canvas of their goodwill. Knowing that heat and sparks and hammers and anvils are not enough, they would have to forge an anchor in the glowing fire of their ideals. And to steer that ship through wind and wave, they would need to learn an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars.

— Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp.580-581, links added by the Editor

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Sedition!

[Note: For other song parodies by Randy Rainbow in Contra Trump, see:

• MAGADU — Kubla Khan, Xanadu & the 2024 American presidential election; and,
• ‘I Think I’m Gonna Hate It Here’ — Randy Rainbow introduces the clown-car cabinet of MAGADU]

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What should we call the Sixth of January?

Jill Lepore

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Donald Trump tweeted before Christmas. “Be there, will be wild!” On New Year’s Day, he tweeted again: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th.” On January 5th: “I will be speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11AM Eastern. Arrive early—doors open at 7AM Eastern. BIG CROWDS!” The posters called it the “Save America March.” What happened that day was big, and it was wild. If it began as a protest and a rally and a march, it ended as something altogether different. But what? Sedition, treason, a failed revolution, an attempted coup? And what will it be called, looking back? A day of anarchy? The end of America?

Trump called the people who violently attacked and briefly seized the U.S. Capitol building in order to overturn a Presidential election “patriots”; President-elect Joe Biden called them “terrorists.” In a section of “Leviathan” called “Inconstant Names,” Thomas Hobbes, in 1651, remarked that the names of things are variable, “For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one Cruelty, what another Justice.” On the other hand, sometimes one man is right (those people were terrorists). And, sometimes, what to call a thing seems plain. “This is what the President has caused today, this insurrection,” Mitt Romney, fleeing the Senate chamber, told a Times reporter.

By any reasonable definition of the word (including the Oxford English Dictionary’s: “The action of rising in arms or open resistance against established authority”), what happened on January 6th was an insurrection. An insurrection is, generally, damnable: calling a political action an insurrection is a way of denouncing what its participants mean to be a revolution. “There hath been in Rome strange insurrections,” Shakespeare wrote, in “Coriolanus.” “The people against the senators, patricians, and nobles.” Insurrection, in Shakespeare, is “foul,” “base and bloody.” In the United States, the language of insurrection has a vexed racial history. “Insurrection” was the term favored by slaveowners for the political actions taken by people held in human bondage seeking their freedom. Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, charged the king with having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” The English lexicographer Samuel Johnson, an opponent of slavery, once offered a toast “To the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” And Benjamin Franklin, wryly objecting to Southern politicians’ conception of human beings as animals, offered this rule to tell the difference between them: “sheep will never make any insurrections.”

The term’s racial inflection lasted well beyond the end of slavery. In the nineteen-sixties, law-and-order Republicans used that language to demean civil-rights protests, to describe a political movement as rampant criminality. “We have seen the gathering hate, we have heard the threats to burn and bomb and destroy,” Richard Nixon said, in 1968. “In Watts and Harlem and Detroit and Newark, we have had a foretaste of what the organizations of insurrection are planning for the summer ahead.” In that era, though, “riot” replaced “insurrection” as the go-to racial code word: “riots” were Black, “protests” were white, as Elizabeth Hinton argues in an essential, forthcoming book, “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.” “Yet historically,” Hinton observes, “most instances of mass criminality have been perpetrated by white vigilantes hostile to integration and who joined together into roving mobs that took ‘justice’ in their own hands.” This remains an apt description of what happened on January 6th.

One possibility, then, is to call the Sixth of January a “race riot.” Its participants were overwhelmingly white; many were avowedly white supremacists. A lot of journalists described the attack on the legislature as a “storming” of the Capitol, language that white-supremacist groups must have found thrilling. Hitler’s paramilitary called itself the Sturmabteilung, the Storm detachment; Nazis published a newspaper called Der Stürmer, the stormer. QAnon awaits a “Storm” in which the satanic cabal that controls the United States will be finally defeated. So one good idea would be never, ever to call the Sixth of January “the Storming of the Capitol.”

What words will historians use in textbooks? Any formulation is a non-starter if it diminishes the culpability of people in positions of power who perpetrated the lie that the election was stolen. It’s not a coup d’etat because it didn’t succeed. It’s not even a failed coup, because a coup involves the military. And, as Naunihal Singh, the author of “Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups,” told Foreign Policy, the word “coup” lets too many people off the hook. “The people who you want to point fingers at are the president, the party leaders, and the street thugs,” Singh said. “And we lose that if we start talking about a coup; it gives a pass to all of the Republican politicians who have been endorsing what Trump’s saying.”

In truth, the language of the coop seems more appropriate than the language of the coup. I mean chickens. “Coming home to roost” quite aptly describes the arrival of armed terrorists in the hall where, moments before, Senator Ted Cruz had summoned that very flock as he stood on the floor and urged the legislature to overturn the election. Derrick Evans, the West Virginia Republican lawmaker who joined the mob and, as he breached the doors of the Capitol, cried out, “We’re in! We’re in!” acted with more honesty and consistency than the hundred and forty-seven members of the House and Senate who, later that night, voted to overturn the results of the election after having hidden, for hours, from the very people they’d been inciting for months and even years.

“Sedition” is too weak. Noah Webster, in his American Dictionary of the English Language, from 1828, offered this handy way to distinguish “sedition” from “insurrection”: “sedition expresses a less extensive rising of citizens.” In any case, sedition in the sense of a political rebellion, is obsolete. “Treason,” an attempt to overthrow the government, seems fair, though it almost risks elevating what looked to be a shambles: a shabby, clownish, idiotic, and aimless act of mass vandalism. If I were picking the words, I’d want to steer very clear of ennobling it, so I’d be inclined to call it something blandly descriptive, like “The Attack on the U.S. Capitol,” or “The Sixth of January.”

“Remember this day forever!” Trump tweeted at one minute past six on Wednesday night. There’s no danger that anyone will forget it, by whatever name. The harder question is not what to call the events of that day, but what to make of the maddening four years and more that led up to it: the long, slow rot of the Republican Party; the perfidy of Republicans in the House and Senate since January, 2017; the wantonness of a conservative media willing to incite violence; the fecklessness of Twitter and Facebook; and, not least, the venality, criminality, and derangement of the President. Whether that story belongs under a chapter titled “The Rise and Fall of Donald J. Trump” or “The End of America” awaits the outcome of events.

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Source:

• Jill Lepore, What Should We Call the Sixth of January?, The New Yorker, 9 January 2021

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January 5, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

 

Investigators found two letters on a phone inside the remains of the rented Tesla Cybertruck that active-duty Green Beret Master Sergeant Matthew Alan Livelsberger exploded outside the Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump hotel on New Year’s Day. It appears that Livelsberger wrote them to explain why he was performing what he called “a stunt with fireworks and explosives.” Aside from his personal need to forget about the violence of his military career, he wrote, he wanted to “WAKE UP” servicemembers, veterans, and all Americans.

He wrote that the U.S. is “headed toward collapse,” and he listed as reasons Americans’ moral failings and boredom, diversity programs, an economy that has permitted the top 1% to leave everyone else behind, and a weak and corrupt government.

His solution was to “[f]ocus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders,” he wrote. “Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He called for “[w]eed[ing] out those in our government and military who do not idealize” that masculinity and strength, and urged military personnel, veterans, and militias to “move on DC starting now.”

“Occupy every major road along fed[eral] buildings and the campus of fed[eral] buildings by the hundreds of thousands. Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete. Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dem[ocrat]s out of the fed[eral] government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.”

The vision of the U.S. as a hellscape that can only be fixed by purging the government of Democrats does not reflect reality. As Peter Baker recorded in the New York Times today, the country that President Joe Biden and his Democratic administration will leave behind when they leave office is in the best shape it’s been in since at least 2000.

No U.S. troops are fighting in foreign wars, murders have plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses have dropped sharply, undocumented immigration is below where it was when Trump left office, stocks have just had their best two years since the last century. The economy is growing, real wages are rising, inflation has fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment is at near-historic lows, and energy production is at historic highs. The economy has added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.

Baker quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”

Livelsberger’s notes reflect not reality but rather the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s: the idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends.

Ronald Reagan made that argument central to American political debate in the 1980s. Joining those who claimed that the modern American state was creeping toward communism, he warned that the federal government was the current problem in the nation. He championed a mythological American cowboy who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone.

That cowboy myth arose after the Civil War, when former Confederates complained that federal protection of Black rights cost white tax dollars. They contrasted the “socialism” in Washington, D.C., with the western cowboys in the cattle industry, portraying the cowboys as hardworking white men who dominated the land and the peoples of the West and enforced the law themselves with principles and guns.

The cowboy image of the post–World War II years served a similar function: to undermine a government that, in the process of regulating business and providing a social safety net, defended the rights of minorities and women. After 1980, Republicans increasingly insisted that regulations, taxation, and a social safety net were socialism, and they attracted white male voters by warning that the real beneficiaries of the government were racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities and women.

In 1972 the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980 the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the National Rifle Association endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time.

As cuts to regulation, taxation, and the social safety net began to hollow out the middle class, Republicans pushed the idea that the country’s problems came from grasping minorities and women who wanted to work outside the home. More and more, they insisted that the federal government was stealing tax dollars and destroying society, and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country.

What in the 1980s was a rhetorical image of individuals destroying the federal government was turning into action by the 1990s. “Taxes are a joke,” a former Army gunner, Timothy McVeigh, wrote to a newspaper in 1992. “Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might.” On April 19, 1995, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children younger than six, and wounded more than 800.

When the police captured McVeigh, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” the same words John Wilkes Booth shouted after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. They mean “thus always to tyrants” and are the words attributed to Brutus after he and his supporters murdered Julius Caesar.

As wealth continued to move upward, the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must “reclaim” America from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars became embedded in the Republican Party. By 2014, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “patriots” when they showed up armed to meet officials from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy’s cattle because he owed more than $1 million in grazing fees for running cattle on public land. Democrat Harry Reid, also of Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader at the time, warned, “We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it.”

But the idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew stronger. In 2016, Trump insisted that his Democratic opponent belonged in jail and that he alone could save the country from the Washington, D.C., “swamp.” Winning the election through the electoral college, he first attacked the government over the FBI’s investigation of the ties between his campaign and Russian operatives, and then, after his first impeachment, went after any official who tried to hold him accountable to the law. Although many of his critics were Republicans, including his own appointees, he called anyone who crossed him a Democrat.

Republican lawmakers began to pose their families for Christmas cards with everyone holding a semi-automatic weapon. As Joshua Kaplan reported in ProPublica yesterday in a deep dive into the world of a mole who embedded himself in the world of today’s right-wing paramilitaries, leaders in that system now include “doctors, career cops and government attorneys.” “Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling,” Kaplan wrote, but “always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.”

But voters kept protesting cuts to the social safety net, and in November 2020 they elected a Democratic president, Joe Biden, by a popular majority of more than 7 million votes and an electoral college win of 306 votes to 232. Trump supporters believed that Democrats could not possibly have won fairly and that if they had won, it simply meant the vote was illegitimate.

Trump told his supporters that “emboldened radical-left Democrats” had stolen the election and that Democratic policies “chipped away our jobs, weakened our military, threw open our borders, and put America last.” Biden would be an “illegitimate president,” “voted on by a bunch of stupid people.” “[Y]ou’ll never take back our country with weakness,” Trump told them. “You have to show strength and you have to be strong…. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Radicalized individuals fantasized that they were imitating the American Founders, about to start a new nation. Newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6 she wrote: “Today is 1776.”

In fact, it was not 1776 but 1861, when insurrectionists tried to overthrow the government in order to establish minority rule. They wanted to take away the right at the center of American democracy—our right to determine our own destiny—in order to make sure the power of elite white men could not be challenged. It was no accident that the rioters carried a Confederate battle flag.

And now voters have reelected Trump, who last night held a party at Mar-a-Lago to celebrate those who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He has called the January 6 rioters “patriots” and promised to pardon those who have been convicted of crimes in relation to the event as soon as he takes office.

But this would be a deeply unpopular move. More than 60% of Americans oppose such pardons.

In the late nineteenth century, former Confederates regained control of their states as Americans across the country accepted the argument that a government that protected civil rights would usher in socialism. Today’s Americans have heard the same argument since at least the 1980s, but rather than a redistribution of wealth downward, between 1981 and 2021 $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Now the incoming president has openly tied himself to billionaires

Trump continues to vow that he will dismantle the federal government, but the four years from 2021 to 2025 challenged Reagan’s claim that the government is the problem. Those years demonstrated that the federal government could work for all Americans, although not quickly enough to undo damage of the previous forty years and satisfy those left behind, many of whom voted for Trump and some of whom have resorted to violence.

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Source:

• Heather Cox Richardson, January 5, 2025, Letters from an American, 5 January 2025

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Boy, do I feel like an idiot.

John Pavlovitz

I honestly thought January 6th, 2021 was going to be a catalytic moment for our nation.

Watching a vicious, snarling cosplay army emblazoned with his name breaking through the barricades around the Capitol, I thought for sure the almost unthinkable horrors of that day would be a dealbreaker for even the most devoted of his sycophantic rank-and-file.

I believed that witnessing law enforcement members being beaten on the steps of Congress with flags bearing his likeness, would have fully sickened even his most-ardent supporters to the point of defection.

I was absolutely certain that as the photos and the videos and the testimonies streamed in of officers being crushed by wild-eyed MAGA loyalists; of unhinged men and women prowling the very seat of our government with tear gas and zip ties and nooses, seeking members of Congress—that for perhaps only once in the four years since he had arrived, we would finally all be of one mind and that they would declare this all fully unacceptable.

Four years ago, I would have bet my house that Republican voters’ patriotism, faith convictions, and simple humanity would have surfaced and they would reject this violent lawlessness once-and-for-all.

As night turned to morning and as the scale and severity of what we’d witnessed and how close we all came to losing our Democracy, I remember thinking to myself, “There is no way they will double-down on this or on him now. or ever again.”

I was spectacularly wrong.

As we reach another January 6th, this one in the shadows of yet another election, what’s now impossible to deny, is that the insurrection we thought was defeated four years ago was simply postponed.

Its victory is now all-but complete, because 77 million of our family members, friends neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens decided that overturning an election and installing a dictator was not only not a dealbreaker, but something they consented to.

77 million Americans have passionately placed a lawless mobster on the throne of this nation.

That is perhaps the most sobering, heartbreaking realization of many that have come since the election: we are as divided a people as we can be, not just along lines of politics but of legality and human decency.

January 6th should have been, for any patriotic American (let alone any human being with a fully functioning soul), a chilling ice water bath of reality, shocking even the most partisan soul awake from the slumber of their fierce tribalism.

It should have been the decisive pivot point for our nation, away from this cancerous, craven cult of personality and its collective bloodlust for power—and into a compassionate, collaborative expression of our interdependence.

January 6th should have been America’s second chance at life; this past election, a moment for us to speak unequivocally that no one is above the law and no individual greater than the whole.

That it became instead, a place for our fellow Americans to once again declare their undying allegiance to this man, and to an ugly, lumbering, violent march toward an ever-deepening bottom—is one of the absolute most tragic realities of my lifetime.

In the coming weeks, the engineer of this delayed but now completed insurrection will take a farcical oath to protect and defend a Constitution that he has repeatedly shown complete contempt for it. His Congressional coconspirators will have carte blanche and unchecked power in the very Capitol chambers they helped violate four years ago.

Their criminal civilian foot-soldiers who figuratively and literally urinated on the halls of Congress will likely be pardoned and lionized, rewarded for behavior that in any other iteration of America would have declared them traitors and criminals.

And we will have to witness these perverse travesties and be subject to all that they will bring, knowing that those we live with and around willfully made it all happen.

Four years ago, a few thousand insurrectionists attempted to disregard the laws of this nation for a single career criminal.

And what they could not accomplish then in the Capitol rotunda then, 77 million Americans now have at the voting booth: the voices of our forebears have been rendered silent, the protections of our Constitution have been destroyed, and a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and wannabe dictator has been given the keys to the kingdom.

Where we go from here is anyone’s guess.

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Source:

• John Pavlovitz, Grieving 77 Million Insurrectionists on January 6th, The Beautiful Mess, 6 January 2025

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Don’t Mention the Coup!

David Frum

January 6, 2025, 7 AM ET

The president of the United States is the country’s chief law-enforcement officer and the symbol of national authority and unity.

This incoming president faces a battery of criminal charges relating to his abuse of office and to personal frauds. He’s been convicted of somealready; more are pending. He is also the author of a conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election and seize power by violence. More than 1,000 of his followers have been convicted and sentenced for their roles in his attempted coup d’état.

These two sets of facts are obviously in considerable tension. How will they be resolved?

A strong desire exists—not only among pro–Donald Trump partisans—to wish away the contradiction. Trump will be president again. Every domestic interest group, every faction in Congress, every foreign government will need to do business with him. It’s unavoidable; the system cannot operate around him as if he were not there.

What cannot be avoided will not be avoided. And because most of us need to believe in what we are doing, almost every institution in American society and the great majority of its wealthiest and most influential citizens will find some way to make peace with Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. Nobody wants to say aloud, “The Constitution is all very well up to a point, but the needs of the National Association of Birdhouse Manufacturers must come first.” Inevitably, though, our words come into alignment with our interests, and our thoughts then come into alignment with our words.

On the ever rarer occasions when the January 6 insurrection is discussed, the excuses will flow more and more readily. Trump didn’t conspire. It was just a protest that got out of hand. Only a tiny minority broke any important laws. Surely, they have already been punished enough. Anyway, the George Floyd protests were worse.

Even Trump’s opponents will fall more or less in line. As Democrats try to make sense of their 2024 defeat, some are already arguing that the party paid too much attention to procedural issues: too much talk about democracy, not enough about the price of eggs. Many will argue that the best way to win in 2028 is to attack Trump and his administration as servants of the ultrarich—in other words, by dusting off the playbook that Democrats have traditionally run against Republicans. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all campaigned against Trump as a kind of aberration; all welcomed the support of non-Trump Republicans. Next time, things are likely to be different. Trump will be lumped together with all of his Republican predecessors, and the way to succeed in the lumping together is by jettisoning the topics on which Trump is unique (violent coups d’état) and focusing on the topics where he is not unique (tax cuts for the rich and regulatory favors to corporations). The attempted coup of 2021 will be unhelpful old news in a 2028 cycle defined by performative populism.

These imperatives will apply even to that supposed incubator of anti-Trump feeling, the sad dying remnants of what used to be called the mainstream media. (Today, of course, anti-Semitic and anti-vax cranks on YouTube draw much bigger audiences than any program on CNN or MSNBC, so what counts as “mainstream” or “fringe” is a very open question.) If you’re a normal journalist trying to report on inauguration plans or the staffing of the Cabinet or the administration’s first budget, your job depends on access, and access depends on playing ball to a greater or lesser degree. If you keep banging on about an attempted coup that happened four years ago, you are just making yourself irrelevant. And when you encounter somebody else who bangs on about it, you will be tempted to dismiss them as irrelevant, too.

The coup makers won. The coup resisters lost. Washington is not a city that spares much sympathy for losers.

“This never happened,” advises Don Draper on the television series Mad Men. “It will shock you how much it never happened.” So it will be with the first attempt by a serving president to overthrow the government he was sworn to protect.

Not all of us, however, have to live in the world of Washington transactions. Some of us need to volunteer to keep talking about the inconvenient things.

Trump really did try by violence to violate the first rule of constitutional democracy: Respect elections.Constitutional democracy matters, whether or not the theme helps Democratic candidates for federal office, whether or not it energizes media consumers, whether or not it advances the lobbying agenda of the National Association of Birdhouse Manufacturers. Those volunteers don’t need to blame those other Washington players for doing what they feel they need to do. The volunteers have only to remain faithful to their purpose: to push back against the Draper doctrine that the unwanted past can be made to disappear. It did happen. It should still shock us how much it did.

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Source:

• David Frum, The Coup That Never Was, The Atlantic, 6 January 2025

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It Happened

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Contra Trump

& America’s Empire of Tedium

• MAGADU — Kubla Khan, Xanadu & the 2024 American presidential election
• Waiting for the Barbarians in a Garbage Time of History
• Unless we ourselves are The Barbarians …
• What seeds can I plant in this muck?
• If you elect a cretin once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect him twice, you’re the cretin.
• The Great Red Wall — A Remarkable Coalition of the Disgruntled
• A Political Monster Straight Out of Grendel
• Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now.
• Trump Redux — Who Goes Nazi Now?
• An Elegiac Eulogy from Unf*cking The Republic
• The American Green Zone in Our Consciousness
• Those 107 Days
• ‘I Think I’m Gonna Hate It Here’ — Randy Rainbow introduces the clown-car cabinet of MAGADU
• 6 January 2021 to 6 January 2025: America’s Slow-burn Autogolpe
• Rogue States — a Mao-Trump Ludibrium

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