Our National Day of Shame

Four years later, the shock of that day is replaced by the shock of how that day has become accepted.

The Bulwark grows! The Bulwark will swallow the world!

Semafor let the cat out of the bag this morning on our first expansion of the new year. We’re bringing on reporter Adrian Carrasquillo for a new twice-weekly newsletter, Huddled Masses, that will go deep on what may end up being the biggest story of 2025: Trump’s sprawling mass-deportation agenda.

We get to keep growing because you keep reading. Thanks for being here. Happy Monday.

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(Photo by Selcuk Acar / NurPhoto via Getty Images.)

It’s January 6th. Trump Won.

by William Kristol

George Orwell wrote that in our day “restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

So let me restate the obvious: January 6, 2021 is a day that should live in infamy.

But for the next four years January 6th won’t live in infamy. Because in two weeks the man who incited January 6th, the man who now excuses it—no, celebrates it—will be sworn in as our next president.

So the obvious if unpleasant fact is that today we as a nation are in a worse condition, facing a more ominous future, than we faced four years ago.

The mob violence of January 6th was awful. That it was incited by the president of the United States made it worse. That it was the capstone of a more comprehensive effort by President Trump and his apparatchiks to overturn the election results and to stay in power made the date even more deserving of infamy.

But the attempted auto-coup failed. We made it through the dangerous period from November 3, 2020, to January 20, 2021. The guardrails held. President Trump left office. President Biden succeeded him, and tried to restore normalcy.

To his credit, he’s still trying. The outgoing president has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post lamenting that “an unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite—even erase—the history” of January 6th, and urging us not to forget what happened.

But the fact is that the unrelenting effort of Trump and his supporters has, as of now, succeeded. It’s telling that nowhere in his article does President Biden mention the name of the person who has been behind the effort to “rewrite—even erase” the history of January 6th. Presumably he thought it uncivil or inappropriate to attack his successor by name two weeks before he takes over.

But Biden’s silence about Trump merely brings home the extent of Trump’s success. The January 6th truther-in-chief will be our next commander-in-chief. And his administration will be staffed by individuals who range from January 6th apologists to January 6th celebrators.

Meanwhile, the ranks of Trump’s party are full of such people, as is suggested by the fact that the leadership of the Republican House has refused to install a plaque honoring Capitol Police officers for their brave actions on January 6th, as required by a federal law signed in March 2023.

It is in a way fitting that one of the first acts of the new Trump administration will be presidential pardons or commutations for many of the January 6th felons. Why not? Their leader will be president. Why should they languish in prison?

Some of the more respectable supporters of the new administration are aware of how distasteful this will be. The Wall Street Journal editorial page frets that “pardoning such crimes would send an awful message about [Trump’s] view of the acceptability of political violence done on his behalf.”

But that is Trump’s view. Indeed, it’s his oft-expressed view. Indeed, he ran for office on this view—and won. The fact that some establishment types have chosen to close their eyes to this isn’t his fault.

What can be done? Here in the United States, there are thankfully many sources of possible resistance, ranging from others in government—at both the federal and state level—to institutions in the private sector and civil society. They all have a role to play in the fight against the whitewashing of history and the erasure of truth.

But in the near term, it is the Senate of the United States that can do the most to help. It is the Senate that has to choose whether to confirm Trump’s cabinet and sub-cabinet nominees. It is Senate committees that can hold hearings and get those nominees on the record on January 6th.

All senators have to do is to ask the nominees whether they agree with what President Trump said on January 7, 2021—that what happened on January 6th was a “heinous attack” and that “the demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy.”

Senators can ask this of all nominees. And Senators can refuse to confirm at least some of the January 6th deniers, especially those nominated to important positions in law enforcement and national security.

One nominee particularly deserving of decisive rejection is Kash Patel, selected to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In an important article this morning, Tom Joscelyn and Norm Eisen lay out evidence that clearly shows why Patel is unfit to serve as FBI director. They show in great detail that Patel has embraced and promulgated false conspiracy theories not just about January 6th in general, but about the very organization he’s been nominated to lead.

The authors conclude, “That is not only an insult to the memory of that day; it should be disqualifying for him to helm the bureau.”

Will it be? Will the United States Senate permit Trump to install a full-on January 6th truther as head of the FBI? Or will some Republican senators put country before party, enabling the Senate to set up some roadblocks to our steep descent on a path towards an Orwellian and authoritarian future?

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How ‘My Kevin’ Helped

by Andrew Egger

As Bill notes, Trump’s successful retcon of January 6th was the long, slow work of a lot of willing contributors. But it’s worth taking a moment today to look back on one of the most crucial links in that chain: then-GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s 2021 decision not to cooperate with establishing an independent commission to investigate the ransacking of the Capitol by Trump’s mob.

In the months immediately following the attack, Republicans were still having trouble letting go of the horror they’d felt as they watched that day unfold. There was considerable talk of a bipartisan commission, modeled on the one empaneled after 9/11. As leader, McCarthy blessed Rep. John Katko, the GOP ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, to strike a deal with committee chair Bennie Thompson on forming just such a committee.

Katko, a moderate New York Republican with a prosecutorial background and a national security focus, had been among the handful of House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in the aftermath of the attack. The deal he and Thompson struck spoke to a desire to present a united front against the lawlessness of that day. It also contained significant incentives for Republicans. Democrats were then in power in the House, but the commission would not have made the GOP junior partners: Pelosi and McCarthy would appoint an equal number of members, and Republicans would have equal access to investigative tools like subpoenas.

“We must do everything we can to ensure nothing like this can ever happen again,” Katko said in a statement at the time. “An independent, bipartisan commission will remove politicization of the conversation and focus solely on the facts and circumstances surrounding the security breach at the Capitol as well as other instances of violence relevant to such a review.”

But while Katko and Thompson were negotiating, McCarthy’s spine was bending. Just a few months after the attack, it was already becoming plain to him that the Republican base’s devotion to Trump was going to outlast their momentary horror over the attempted insurrection. Rep. Liz Cheney, previously his third-in-command in House leadership, had already been ousted over her refusal to stop clearly and loudly prosecuting the case against Trump; after initially supporting her, McCarthy ultimately played along as Republicans kicked her to the curb.

So McCarthy spiked the plan he’d asked Katko to hammer out. His pretext was hilarious: He was steamed, he insisted, that Democrats wouldn’t agree to also let the committee investigate other “interrelated forms of political violence,” like the riots that accompanied Black Lives Matter protests the previous summer.

McCarthy’s calculation was obvious: Republicans would gain nothing from genuine participation in a full account of January 6th. It was far better, from their perspective, to try to ensure that any attempt to perform that investigation be spun as a smear campaign by Democrats. And that would be a lot easier if Republicans weren’t involved in the process.

Ultimately, McCarthy refused to appoint any Republicans to the body that would become the House January 6th Committee. The Republicans who served on it, then-Reps. Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, were appointed to it by Pelosi.

McCarthy could have chosen the path of the truth. Instead, he opted for naked, cynical opportunism. And it worked. The January 6th Committee did urgently needed work, but Trump and his allies succeeded in convincing half the country it was just another set of partisan smears. They couldn’t have done it without Kevin.

McCarthy dropped by Mar-a-Lago over the weekend. We hope Trump gave him something nice.

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Quick Hits

MAKING THE KIDS PLAY NICE: Benedict Arnold himself Our old buddy Marc Caputo, now over at Axios, has a new interview up this morning with Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles, who says she hopes to implement a much less chaotic and dramatic West Wing environment than the one we saw during Trump’s first term: “I don’t welcome people who want to work solo or be a star,” Wiles told Caputo via email (couldn’t get her on the phone, Marc?). “My team and I will not tolerate backbiting, second-guessing inappropriately, or drama. These are counterproductive to the mission.”

Wiles, of course, is far from the first person to try to impose order on the world of chaos that surrounds Trump. The four chiefs of staff he employed during his first term all tried their hand. Yet much of the credit for dramatically improving the organization and discipline of Trump’s 2024 campaign, which was far from the bonanza of damaging leaks Trump’s outfit has typically been in the past, goes to Wiles. We’ll see!

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END OF THE LINE: It’s all over but the crying for Justin Trudeau, who multiple outlets report is set to resign as leader of Canada’s ruling but weakened Liberal Party this week, perhaps as early as today. Here’s CNN:

Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party for 11 years and prime minister for nine, is facing a mounting set of crises, from Donald Trump’s tariff threats to the resignation of key allies and disastrous opinion polls. His resignation would be seen as the PM choosing to jump before he is pushed.

The move would leave the Liberal Party without a permanent leader before the general election, where polls show it is set to badly lose to the opposition Conservative Party, led by the firebrand Pierre Poilievre. The election must be held on or before October 20, but could be brought forward.

A decade ago, the United States and Canada seemed to be moving in starkly opposite political directions: While America slid into reactionary populism, progressive-flavored technocratic neoliberalism remained a winning recipe in Canada. But it’s Trumpism, not Trudeauism, that looks like the surviving political movement of the 2010s.

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NOT GOING QUIETLY: House Republicans may have come together at the last minute to reelect Speaker Mike Johnson, but the hardliners in the House Freedom Caucus want Johnson to know they’re not about to start making his life easy or anything.

“Today, we voted for Mike Johnson for Speaker of the House because of our steadfast support for President Trump and to ensure the timely certification of his electors,” a group of eleven Freedom Caucus members wrote in an open letter to their colleagues Friday. “We did this despite our sincere reservations regarding the Speaker’s track record over the past 15 months. . . . Now, Speaker Johnson must prove he will not fail to enact President Trump’s bold agenda.”

The Freedom Caucus was once a gang of equal-opportunity insurgents who delighted in tweaking any Republican leaders. But early in Trump’s first term, its members realized to their horror that trying to stymie Trump’s policy priorities on the grounds that they were insufficiently conservative wasn’t going to fly with their voters, who cared less about some abstract definition of “conservative principles” than they did about backing Trump. Ultimately, they worked out an uneasy compromise: They’d devote themselves slavishly to Trump, but still try to preserve their reputation for prickly independence by making themselves doubly impossible to work with for every other Republican leader. Johnson’s prize for survival is that he gets to deal with them for a little while longer.

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