Jan. 6 Has Taken On a Whole New Meaning
The failures of the past four years are crystal clear, yet hard to fathom.
Trump’s return is on wildly different terms.
slate.com
"...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.
...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.
... 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."
