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Sunday, April 7, 2024
On Our "Virtual Route 66" This Week: Perspectives on Our World
We frequently talk about the pursuit of knowledge. About Seneca’s advice to acquire one piece of new knowledge each day. About Epictetus’ famous line, inspired by his hero Socrates: “It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.” And about how the pretense of knowledge is the most dangerous vice.
But we’re not really talking about the pursuit of knowledge. We’re really talking about the pursuit of virtue. In the most highlighted passage in the Kindle edition of Robin Waterfield’s annotated edition of Meditations, Robin Waterfield writes:
“The Stoics held that virtue was knowledge. They recognized four primary virtues—prudential wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice—and analyzed each of them as a kind of knowledge. Wisdom is knowledge of good and bad; courage is knowledge of what to fear and what not to fear; moderation is knowledge of what to pursue and what to avoid; justice is knowledge of what to give or what not to give others.”
Seneca told his friend Lucilius, “You should keep learning…to the end of your life.” The same must be true for us. Let us never stop striving to not only know more, but to become better, wiser, and more virtuous individuals.
Today offered yet more evidence that Biden’s rejection of the Republicans’ supply-side economics in favor of investing in ordinary Americans is paying off with high growth, low unemployment, and strong wages.
Today’s jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor for the month of March showed higher job growth than analysts anticipated. Instead of the 214,000 jobs expected, the U.S. added 303,000. The government also revised its estimate of job growth in January and February upward by a combined number of 22,000. President Joe Biden noted that this report meant that the administration had created more than 15 million jobs since he took office.
The unemployment rate was also good, dropping slightly to 3.8% in March. According to economist Steven Rattner of Morning Joe, the United States has now had 26 consecutive months—more than two years—of unemployment under 4%, the longest stretch of unemployment that low since the late 1960s.
Rattner pointed out that immigrants have helped to push U.S. growth since the pandemic by adding millions of new workers to the labor market. As native-born workers have aged into retirement, immigrants have taken their places and “been essential to America’s post-COVID labor market recovery.”
Heather Long of the Washington Post added that wage growth has been 4.1% in the past year, which is well above the 3.2% inflation rate.
“My plan is growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, investing in all Americans, and giving the middle class a fair shot,” Biden said in response to the new jobs report. That system, which resurrects the economy the United States enjoyed between 1933 and 1981, has been a roaring success.
Biden was in Baltimore, Maryland, today, where he flew over the remains of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, spoke with the response teams there, and met with the families of those who died when the bridge fell. Apparently trying to demonstrate that government can be both efficient and effective, the administration has emphasized speed and competence in its response to the bridge collapse of March 26, 2024.
Kayla Tausche of CNN reported today that the U.S. Coast Guard was onsite within minutes of the collapse, and that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was working the phone as soon as he heard. He had spoken with Maryland governor Wes Moore, Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott, and White House chief of staff Jeff Zients by 5:00 a.m. Biden was briefed early that morning, before he began to reach out to state and local leaders.
Baltimore County executive Johnny Olszewski told Tausche: “[Biden] demonstrated a clear understanding of the importance of the port, had a real empathy for myself and all the individuals impacted…. And he was unequivocal that he was going to do whatever he can, legally and within his power to expedite a response.”
The collapse of the bridge not only affected traffic around Baltimore, but also shut the Port of Baltimore. For 13 years, that port has led the nation in carrying cars and light trucks, as well as tractors and cranes, handling more than 847,000 vehicles in 2023. In that same year, the port handled more than 444,000 passengers and $80 billion worth of foreign cargo. The damage to the port is of national significance.
Less than four hours after it received an official request for funding for repairs on March 29, the Department of Transportation authorized funds to begin to address immediate needs, which officials say is a record. The Army Corps of Engineers says it expects to restore a narrow navigation channel for use by the end of April and to have the port reopened fully by the end of May. Until then, the federal government is improving the infrastructure at nearby Sparrows Point to enable it to handle more ships.
But the Republican Party remains committed to the idea that the government must be kept small and that private enterprise must be privileged over public investments. Today, the far-right House Freedom Caucus announced that it would not consider funding the bridge repairs until foreign shipping companies had paid in all they owe (Biden has called for funding the bridge immediately rather than waiting for insurance funds, which will come much later).
They also say that they want the repairs to come out of money Congress has appropriated for other initiatives they dislike, that any new funds must be fully offset by other cuts, and that “burdensome regulations” such as labor agreements must be waived “to avoid all unnecessary delays and costs.”
They are also demanding that Biden reverse the administration’s “pause on approvals of liquified natural gas export terminals” before Congress will consider any funding for the bridge reconstruction. In January, under pressure from climate activists, Biden paused the construction of such terminals. Liquid natural gas is a valuable export, but it is also made up primarily of methane, a greenhouse gas significantly worse for the planet than carbon dioxide. Oil and gas interests are strongly in favor of developing the liquid natural gas industry while ignoring its effects on climate change.
One of the proposed plants affected by the pause would have been the largest in the U.S. It is planned for Louisiana, the home state of House speaker Mike Johnson. Johnson has already tried to tie funding for Ukraine to lifting the pause on liquid natural gas export terminals, and the White House refused. Now, apparently, extremist Republicans are trying the same gambit with repairs to the Francis Scott Key Bridge and access to one of the nation’s most important ports, although slowing repairs at that key juncture will directly affect many of their constituents.
Indeed, despite the solid demonstration that government support for ordinary Americans is the best way to build the economy, Republicans continue to maintain that the way to promote economic growth is to concentrate money among a few men at the top of the economic ladder. The idea is that those few people will invest their money more efficiently than the government can, and that the businesses they create will employ more and more workers. To that end, Republicans since 1981 have focused on tax cuts and deregulation in order to give those they see as job creators a free hand.
That system, so-called “supply-side economics,” has never actually worked, but it has become an article of faith for Republicans. It is a system that is popular with the very wealthy, and Biden called that out today in a video he recorded with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
In the video, the two men comment on a video clip in which former president Trump, speaking at a private event, promises wealthy donors another tax cut. Biden says: “That’s everything you need to know about Donald Trump. When he thinks the cameras aren’t on, he tells his rich friends, ‘We’re gonna give you tax cuts.’”
Sanders chimes in: “Can anybody in America imagine that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality—billionaires are doing phenomenally well—that he’s going to give them huge tax breaks? And then at the same time, he’s going to cut Social Security, Medicare, and programs that our kids need….”
“That makes me mad as hell, quite frankly,” Biden says. “There are 1,000 billionaires in…this country. They pay an average of 8.2% [in] federal taxes. So…we have a plan: Asking his good buddies to begin to pay their fair share.”
More third party action from sitting senators in 2024?
Last week, Joe Lieberman, one of the more idiosyncratic political characters of the last few decades, died at 82. In 2006, Lieberman, then a sitting senator, was defeated for renomination but won reelection as an independent—over the past few weeks, a few sitting senators have at least toyed with going a similar route.
Lieberman got a mention in a Crystal Balledition from a little over a month ago when we looked at the history of split-ticket outcomes between presidential and Senate races. In 1988, as George H. W. Bush became the last Republican to carry Connecticut at the presidential level, Lieberman ousted three-term Sen. Lowell Weicker, who also died within the past year. In that race, Lieberman was a Democrat with a conservative reputation while Weicker was one of the most liberal Republican members of the Senate—both would eventually stage successful independent runs for state office. For Weicker, the opportunity came in 1990, when he created “A Connecticut Party” and won the gubernatorial race that year under its banner.
Lieberman’s departure from his original party label was not as voluntary. Though he was the Democrats’ nominee for vice president in 2000, he became known as a strident defender of the Iraq War—his hawkishness on foreign policy was also one reason why he was reportedly considered for the same slot on the GOP’s ticket eight years later. In any case, his support for the war hurt him in 2004, when he sought the presidency himself, and later in 2006, when he was up for renomination. Now-Gov. Ned Lamont (D), who launched what was seen initially as an uphill primary campaign, made the Iraq War a central issue—he ultimately defeated Lieberman 52%-48%.
Because Connecticut lacks a sore loser law, Lieberman was able to turn around and run under the “Connecticut for Lieberman” Party. In the general election, state and national Republicans did not actively support their own nominee. In this blue-leaning state, Lieberman, who had some conservative credibility, won majorities of independents and Republicans and defeated Lamont 50%-40%. Though Lieberman’s third-party run made for one of the cycle’s quirkiest Senate races, it was not unprecedented. In 1970, then-Sen. Thomas Dodd (D-CT) was denied renomination—he ran as an independent in the general election and helped Weicker win with a plurality.
In the next Congress, despite the primary result and his own friendships across the aisle, Lieberman opted to continue caucusing with Democrats, giving them a 51-49 majority in the chamber. Though he was a vote that Democratic leadership could count on most of the time, he continued to take some stands that irritated progressives—namely, when the Affordable Care Act was being negotiated, he was instrumental in sinking the public option. By the time his reelection was on the horizon, he was among the most unpopular senators in the nation and lacked a base. While Republicans gave him the highest job approval marks, they seemed to prefer to actually run a candidate of their own. With that, he opted to retire, although he stayed active in politics—most recently, he was involved with the centrist group No Labels.
Lieberman’s position going into 2012 elections, and how he responded to it, was why we were not especially surprised last month when Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, another independent-caucusing Democrat, announced her plans to retire. She was in essentially the same boat as Lieberman: while her approval numbers were sometimes positive with Republicans, she placed a clear third in most three-way trial heats. In October 2023 polling from Noble Predictive Insights, for example, Sinema took less than 20% against the likely major party nominees, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D, AZ-3) and pro-Trump election denier Kari Lake (R).
In West Virginia, Sen. Joe Manchin (D) announced his retirement plans in November. Still, one gets the impression that Manchin, who has been making appearances in locations far outside of his state in recent months, would not be retiring if he was not up for reelection in what should be, again, one of Donald Trump’s best states this year. In a more recent interview, Manchin did not completely rule out the possibility of running for his current seat as an independent, although he maintains that his intention is to leave the Senate next year.
The result of West Virginia’s May 14 primary may have some impact on Manchin’s thinking. By now, the Democratic bench in the Mountain State is so thin that his party could conceivably nominate a former Republican. Specifically, former coal executive Don Blankenship, who was imprisoned for a time and then sought the GOP nomination against Manchin in 2018. Blankenship has switched parties to run in the Democratic primary, although he does face a couple of seemingly more bona fide Democrats in the primary: Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott and Marine veteran Zach Shrewsbury.
If Blankenship gets through the primary, it would be easier to see Manchin taking the plunge—the filing deadline for independents in West Virginia is not until August, which would theoretically give Manchin some time to contemplate the state of the race. But whether a three-way race would actually be winnable for Democrats may be another story. Gov. Jim Justice (R), one of Manchin’s successors in Charleston and the likely GOP nominee, is generally more popular than Manchin and will, again, have the benefit of running in a state that Trump should carry by 40 points. Justice does still face a credible primary opponent who is running to his right, Rep. Alex Mooney (R, WV-2).
While it would stand to reason that Manchin may be better-positioned if he were free of a party label that has become toxic in much of the state, it would seem that Justice starts out with too high of a floor. In 2020, a very straight-ticket year across the board, the best-performing statewide Democrat in West Virginia was then-state Treasurer John Perdue. Perdue first won the office in 1996, when the state was blue at most levels, but was bounced in 2020 by then-state Rep. Riley Moore (R). Moore won 56%-44%, which, before he announced his retirement, was basically our prior for a two-way race that featured Manchin. Would Blankenship, running under the Democratic label, take enough votes from Justice to give Manchin a path to a plurality in the mid-40s? We have our doubts, although if Manchin did run as an independent, this at least would not be a Safe Republican-rated race anymore (but it also wouldn’t be a Toss-up).
And then there is New Jersey. Rep. Andy Kim (D, NJ-3) appears to have an easy path to winning the Democratic nomination—and, with that, the general election—in the Garden State. Kim’s current position, though, was hardly inevitable, and he may still have some resistance from the man he’s running to replace.
As a refresher, it was reported last year that a raid of Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-NJ) home turned up several gold bars and other extravagant items that the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office maintained were bribes in exchange for helping the Egyptian government. Faced with federal corruption charges, Menendez refused to resign, although many of his colleagues—most notably home state Sen. Cory Booker (D)—called on him to do so. Kim, the first major New Jersey Democrat to call on Menendez to step aside, vowed to run for Menendez’s seat if the senator did not resign. Kim made good on his word, and launched a campaign for Senate.
Though Menendez eventually decided against seeking the Democratic nomination, Kim’s most prominent opponent ended up being New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy (D). Historically, the ballot “line” has reigned supreme in state primaries. Essentially, in partisan primaries, the candidates that the county-level parties favor are given a preferential spot on the ballot. Though Murphy secured lines in counties that represented a majority of the electorate, Kim seemed to outhustle his opposition, and beat expectations in most counties where the lines were awarded through open party conventions.
Over the past few weeks, two major developments pushed the race decidedly in Kim’s favor. First, in late March, Murphy, citing the need for partisan unity, announced she was suspending her campaign. Then, just days later, a federal judge sided with Kim in a lawsuit where he aimed to overturn the line system altogether. Although the ruling only applies to this year’s Democratic primary, federal Judge Zahid Quraishi’s opinion is critical of the line as an institution—state politicos now see the line’s larger demise as a question of when, not if.
Around the time the trajectory of the primary was truly breaking towards Kim, Menendez seemed to seriously entertain the idea of running of an independent. In the months since the news of his penchant for collecting gold bars was revealed, Menendez’s approval ratings have slid precipitously—in some polls, his approval number has been in the single-digits. So we don’t really see a scenario in which Menendez makes it back to the Senate as an independent. But, importantly, an active campaign would enable Menendez to raise funds to cover his mounting legal expenses.
Even if Menendez follows through, we are keeping New Jersey in the Safe Democratic column. A poll out earlier this week from Emerson College did not name nominees but showed a generic Democrat leading a generic Republican 49%-42%, while Menendez would take 9%. As we’ve seen in many other races, independent candidates tend to underperform their poll numbers on Election Day. So it would be a shock if Menendez, especially given his image, would actually take a significant-enough share of the vote to truly put the seat in play. Similarly, we would not be surprised if Kim ends up outpolling what a “generic Democrat” would get, or at least runs ahead of Biden. During his first two terms in the House, he represented a marginal Trump district and, in this year’s general election, he’ll have the aura of someone who took on the machine and won.
While Manchin and Menendez would face steep odds in these scenarios, independent Sens. Angus King (I-ME) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) remain heavy favorites for reelection, although the latter has not formally announced his plans. Also, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was recently in the news for both declining to endorse Donald Trump for president and declining to rule out becoming an independent. Just as Republicans unsuccessfully courted Manchin to hop over to their caucus, we could imagine Democrats trying to court Murkowski down the road, particularly if, for instance, they are on the wrong end of a 51-49 GOP majority but retain the vice presidential tiebreaker after 2024. So even though Murkowski is not on the ballot again until 2028, the status of her party affiliation—or eventual non-affiliation—merits watching, too.
The election of 2000 was back in the news this week, when Nate Cohn of the New York Times reminded readers of his newsletter, using a map by data strategist and consultant Matthew C. Isbell, that the unusual butterfly ballot design in Palm Beach County that year siphoned off at least 2,000 votes intended for Democratic candidate Al Gore to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.
Those 2,000 votes were enough to decide the election, “all things being equal,” Cohn wrote. But of course, they weren’t equal: in 1998 a purge of the Florida voter rolls had disproportionately disenfranchised Black voters, making them ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected.
That ballot and that purge gave Republican candidate George W. Bush the electoral votes from Florida, putting him into the White House although he had lost the popular vote by more than half a million votes.
Revisiting the 2000 election reminds us that manipulating the vote through voter suppression or the mechanics of an election in even small ways can undermine the will of the people.
A poll out today from the Associated Press/NORC showed that the vast majority of Americans agree about the importance of the fundamental principles of our democracy. Ninety-eight percent of Americans think the right to vote is extremely important, very important, or somewhat important. Only 2% think it is “not too important.” The split was similar with regard to “the right of everyone to equal protection under the law”: 98% of those polled thought it was extremely, very, or somewhat important, while only 2% thought it was not too important.
Recent election results suggest that voters don’t support the extremism of the current Republican Party. In local elections in the St. Louis, Missouri, area on Tuesday, voters rejected all 13 right-wing candidates for school boards, and in Enid, Oklahoma, voters recalled a city council member who participated in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and had ties to white supremacist groups.
Seemingly aware of the growing backlash to their policies, MAGA Republicans are backing away from them, at least in public. Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for making it harder to ban books after a few activists systematically challenged dozens of books in districts where they had no children in the schools—although he blamed teachers, administrators, and “the news media” for creating a “hoax.”
Today, lawyers for the state of Texas told a federal appeals court that state legislators might have gone “too far” with their immigration law that made it a state crime to enter Texas illegally and allowed state judges to order immigrants to be deported. (Mexico had flatly refused to accept deported immigrants from other countries under this new law.) Nonetheless, Arizona legislators have passed a similar bill—that Democratic governor Katie Hobbs refuses to sign into law—and are considering another measure that would allow landowners to threaten or shoot people who cross their property to get into the U.S.
Indeed, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party seem less inclined to moderate their stances than either to pollute popular opinion or to prevent their opponents from voting.
While Trump is hedging about his stance on abortion—after bragging repeatedly that he was the person responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade—MAGA Republicans have made their unpopular abortion stance even stronger.
Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported today that the hospital at the center of the decision by the Alabama state supreme court that embryos used for in vitro fertilization have the same rights and protections as children has ended its IVF services. And on Monday, Florida’s supreme court, which Florida governor Ron DeSantis packed with extremists, upheld a ban on abortion after 15 weeks and allowed a new six-week abortion ban—before most women know they’re pregnant—to go into effect in 30 days.
In the past, people seeking abortions had gravitated to Florida because its constitution upheld the right to privacy, which protected abortion. But now the Florida Supreme Court has decided the constitution does not protect the right to abortion. Caroline Kitchener explained in the Washington Post that in the past, more than 80,000 women a year accessed abortion services in Florida. This ban will make it nearly impossible to get an abortion in the American South.
Anya Cook, who in 2022 nearly died after she was denied an abortion under Florida’s 15-week ban, gave Kitchener a message for Florida women experiencing pregnancy complications: “Run,” she said. “Run, because you have no help here.”
Extremist Republicans have managed to put their policies into place not by winning a majority and passing laws through Congress, but by creating cases that they then take to sympathetic judges. This system, known as “judge shopping,” has so perverted lawmaking that on March 12 the Judicial Conference, the body that makes policy for federal courts, announced a new rule that any lawsuit seeking to overturn statewide or national policies would be randomly assigned among a larger pool of judges.
On March 29, the chief judge of the Northern District of Texas, where many such cases are filed, told Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would not adhere to the new rules.
Rather than moderating their stances, extremist Republicans are doubling down on their attempt to create dirt on the president. With their impeachment effort against President Joe Biden in embarrassing ruins, House Republicans are casting around for another issue to hurt the Democrats before the 2024 election.
Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that in the last month, House Republican Committee chairs have sent almost 50 oversight requests to a variety of departments and agencies. Haberkorn noted that there is “significant political pressure on the party to produce results after months of promising it would uncover evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors involving Biden.”
But it is Trump, not Biden, who is in the news for questionable behavior. In The Guardian today, Hugo Lowell reported that Trump’s social media company was kept afloat in 2022 “by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.”
There is more trouble for the social media company in the news today, as two of its investors pleaded guilty to being part of an insider-trading scheme involving the company’s stock. They admitted they had secret, inside information about the merger between Trump Media and Digital World Acquisition Corporation and had used that insider information to make profitable trades.
Meanwhile, Trump is suing Truth Social’s founders to force them out of leadership and make them give up their shares in the company. His is a countersuit to their lawsuit accusing him of trying to dilute the company’s stock.
Of more immediate concern for Trump, Judge Juan Merchan denied yet another attempt by Trump—his eighth, according to prosecutors—to delay his election interference trial. The trial is scheduled to begin April 15.
Finally, in an illustration of extremists aiming not to moderate their stances but to impose the will of the minority on the majority, Republicans are putting in place rules to make it easier for individuals to challenge voters, removing them from the voter rolls before the 2024 election.
Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted today that states and local governments have regular programs to keep voter registration accurate, while right-wing activists are operating on a different agenda. In one 70,000-person town in Michigan, a single activist challenged more than a thousand voters, Elias reported, and in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, right-wing activists have already challenged 16,000 voters and intend to challenge another 10,000.
One group boasted that their system “can and will change elections in America forever.”
Nowadays when Donald Trump is not on the stage thundering about the “bloodbath” being committed by maniacal immigrants ferried into the US by the current president, Trump is pounding the table in defense of the January 6 convicts who he now claims are “hostages.” This is just one part of a joint Trump-MAGA effort to rewrite American history and to sanitize, and actually celebrate the violent attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. An attack that was not only incited directly by the then-president but that was also supposed to be a culminating act in a Trump-led conspiracy that stretched over two months in an attempt to keep him illegally in power.
As of these first days in April the Trump campaign has now boiled down to these two main talking points: 1) that Joe Biden has opened the border to murderous immigrants and when they are not raping our daughters and wives to poison our bloodline, they are killing our brothers and sisters. Trump has now contradicted some of his supporters, many analysts and several journalists who said the heated reaction two weeks ago to Trump referring to a “bloodbath” was over the top as he was just talking about a possible cut off in the sales of foreign cars…and not about actual blood.
Well…NO! There was Trump earlier this week behind a podium and behind him, inexplicably and certainly against all agency policy, was a row of dour looking uniformed cops. On the podium was a professionally printed Trump campaign placard reading “Biden’s Border Bloodbath.” The bloodbath, then, that Trump was referring to was the supposed massive wave of killings by immigrants (that does not exist). So the term “bloodbath” is now central to Trump’s campaign.
Then there are the Jan6 “hostages.” These are the Trumpanzees currently behind bars because they either plead guilty to crimes, were properly convicted of crimes, or are being held in pre-trial detention awaiting trial on charges that include violence, primarily against police (which did not seem to faze the row of pudgy coppers who stood as campaign props behind the Orange Jesus). These are the convicted and often violent criminals that Trump now brands as “great people” and with whom he collaborated to record a version of the national anthem that now opens every Trump rally.
Thanks to important work by one of the under-appreciated great beltway reporters, Ryan Reilly of NBC News, who did a deep dive on just who these “hostages” are, the findings are hair raising. Trump’s celebration of this motley crew should be reason enough by itself to disqualify him for office.
Let’s review the actual facts.
The number of those charged for January 6 now tops 1350. More than 500 have already been convicted. Many were given probation or short jail sentences. Only the most violent were given serious jail time…and all of the violence was directed against uniformed police for 187 long minutes with the whole world watching it on live TV.
The overwhelming majority of those sentenced to incarceration have already been released. Almost all of the remaining prisoners have been convicted of crimes that mostly include violent felonies. I don’t think I need to waste any of our time making the distinction between a duly convicted criminal completing his or her sentence and a “hostage.” We get that, right?
But among those Jan6 arrestees still in jail there are a grand total of 15 who are in pre-trial detention and have not yet been convicted or exonerated of any crime (though there is also a presumption of innocence). Judges can also presume which defendants awaiting trial are either a flight risk or a threat to public safety and therefore cannot be bailed out before trial. These folks, I imagine, are those that anybody wanting to “free” the hostages would be focusing on. Reporter Reilly presents us with a mini profile of these defendants deemed too dangerous to receive bail and it certainly looks like they should, indeed, be kept locked up until trial.
You can click the link at the beginning of this essay to see all the details that Reilly has exposed about these people. I suggest you open the piece. But I will highlight a few of the key findings here.
One defendants has two previous convictions of violence against police. He’s accused on Jan6 of helping to lead the invasion of the Capitol and is accused of throwing a flash grenade into a tunnel filled with police, impairing their hearing in some cases for days.
Another jailed defendant stabbed a 19 year old to death in a park six months after January 6 and though he was not charged on grounds of self-defense he told police he had participated in the Jan6 assault and that he carried a firearm to the event. The FBI had been looking at him but lacked evidence for any arrest until last month when investigators found video tape of this guy firing off two live rounds during the riot at the Capitol whereupon he was arrested and denied bail.
Another heroic American patriot now behind bars and awaiting trial was charged with using a chemical spray in an attempt to blind Capitol Police. He’s facing three criminal charges and he gleefully admitted to them on an exuberant Facebook posting he put up on January 6 reading: “I grabbed a can from them and started spraying. I got it on video lol,” he wrote in a post on Facebook on Jan. 6 cited by the FBI. “F---ed those cops up.” Earlier this year, good old Judge Chudkun found him to be incompetent and a recent report found he suffered from “delusional thoughts” and refused to take appropriate medication. He’s awaiting a psych evaluation and a possible trial.
An anti-abortion activist also being held was identified as the fourth person to penetrate the Capitol on January 6, using a stump of wood to smash open a window allowing him to crawl into the building, open a door and allow the entrance of hundreds of others rioters where he then went to chase officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs which was caught on TV. After his arrest and initial release, he was arrested again in December 2022 and charged with plotting with a friend to murder FBI agents investigating him. His crime partner has admitted this was their plan.
And the list goes on of those still being held pending trial: One rioter charged with repeatedly assaulting law enforcement officers, another charged with swinging a lead pipe at police, a former special forces veteran charged with attacking police with a flagpole that he used to stab a cop in the face, a woman who is yet another to have been found mentally incompetent, another “great” hero who has been dishonorably discharged from the US Army after shooting a handcuffed Iraqi cow herder in the head, showed up on Jan6 in full military tactical gear and stood on the front line for two hours furiously beating cops and throwing furniture at them.
I will let you read the details of the other reprobates still being held in Reilly’s original and detailed reporting.
This is extremely dangerous stuff. I am sorry if you are put off by my progressive comparing of Trump with the rise of the Hitler, but tough taters, I am going to continue. The excoriation of migrants as perpetrators of a bloodbath and as spoiler of our bloodline can be lifted almost directly from the pages of Mein Kampf. And the celebration and glorification of these January6 criminals in no way, shape or manner departs from Hitler’s embrace of his SA Brown Shirts who comported themselves precisely in the same manner as the dregs of the January 6 criminals.
Trump has become so extreme so fascist-adjacent that it seems he has now lost none other than Karl Rove, the great mastermind of the Republican Right earlier in the century. Appearing on no less than MSNBC earlier this week Rove denounced Trump’s hostage gambit in scathing terms:
“And what those people did when they violently attacked the Capitol, in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the Electoral College, is a stain on our history,” Rove said. “And every one of those sons a bitches who did that, we oughta find them, try them, and send them to jail.”
“And one of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon those people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not. They’re thugs. There were people—some of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping to be able to be called up… And so, why Trump has done this is beyond me. If he had said, ‘You know what? I trust our jury system, I trust law enforcement, anybody who assaulted the Capitol oughta be’—I mean, he said it once or twice, but now he’s appearing in a video with people who assaulted police officers with an intent to take the Capitol by force.
Rove also said Democrats would be foolish to not make this endorsement of anti-police anti-democratic violence a center of their campaign for Joe Biden. “If they were smart, they’d take the January 6 and go hard at it,” Rove told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “And they would say, ‘He wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’ I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the great examples of the strength of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution.”
I snapped this photo of Jose Andres during a small press conference on the sidelines of the 2019 Social Good Summit at the 92Y in New York
I’m one of the least cynical people you’ll meet, but when I first encountered Jose Andres after he founded World Central Kitchen I was skeptical. It was 2019 and I was sitting across from him in a small press gathering at the 92Y in New York to discuss his new NGO. He promised World Central Kitchen would streamline the way food got to hungry people in crises. And it would mostly serve hot meals, not just ready-to-eat rations.
He came across as well meaning but amateur. He seemed to believe that by dint of his celebrity and exuberance, he could innovate humanitarian relief in ways that established and impactful aid agencies could not.
Don’t get me wrong. At that point, I was a big Jose Andres fan! One of my oldest friends got his start at a chef at one of his restaurants, my wife had taken me to MiniBar for my birthday a few years prior, and I even once met Bruce Springsteen at Zaytinya. But his presentation in that press conference rang all my alarm bells. I kept thinking of Sean Penn and Wyclef Jean, whose amateur relief efforts after the Haiti Earthquake potentially did more harm than good. Also, seemingly every actor who ever appeared alongside George Clooney adopted a cause, or even half a country, to little effect.
This looked to be yet another doomed attempt by a well meaning celebrity to insert himself in a crisis. And anyway, just because you are an excellent chef and restaurateur does not mean you know how to do humanitarian relief.
That was my view at the time. But I was wrong. Very wrong.
World Central Kitchen really was different.
Yes, Jose Andres was a celebrity. But his operations were professional. Furthermore, they were way ahead of the curve on key trends in humanitarianism, particularly on “localization” — a buzzword in global development that implies that operations should be directed not by people who helicopter in, but the community impacted by the disaster. World Central Kitchen practiced that far before it was as in vogue as it is today.
World Central Kitchen was not some vanity project of a celebrity chef, but an NGO that punched way above its weight. It has proven itself time and time again.
And then, the tragedy in Gaza.
Ever innovating, World Central Kitchen seemed to have solved one of the key challenges of getting volumes of food to starving Gazans: they would establish a maritime corridor in which aid could be shipped directly from Cyprus to the shores of Gaza. First, they secured the agreement of the Israeli government to inspect the aid in Cyprus. And because there’s no usable port in Gaza, they built a jetty from rubble. A vital sea-route had been opened and nearly 500,000 meals were offloaded last week.
It was in the process of managing this aid that seven staff were killed in Israeli strikes. World Central Kitchen has suspended its Gaza operations, as has its partner in this effort, a longstanding American NGO with deep roots in Gaza.
World Central Kitchen’s success in creating a maritime corridor for Gaza aid was humanitarianism at its finest. But this impromptu jetty should never have been built in the first place. There is a well-established port in Ashdod, Israel just 19 miles from the north of Gaza, where the UN warns that famine may have already set in. But that larger port has been mostly off limits for Gaza aid, despite repeated pleas from the United Nations. Denied the use of a real port just a few miles away, World Central Kitchen opted to build a makeshift jetty in a war zone.
This tragedy should never have happened, not only in the sense that Israel should not be killing aid workers. Rather, this tragedy was born from a perverse logic that has taken hold in recent weeks as famine conditions spread across Gaza: Getting aid to Gazans is seen as a logistical challenge to overcome, rather than a political problem to solve. ...
This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Study in Senate Cowardice.”
In late June of 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump-administration aide, provided testimony to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This testimony was unnerving, even compared with previous revelations concerning Donald Trump’s malignant behavior that day. Hutchinson testified that the president, when told that some of his supporters were carrying weapons, said, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.” He was referring to the metal detectors meant to screen protesters joining his rally on the Ellipse, near the White House.
Hutchinson also testified that Trump became so frantic in his desire to join the march to the Capitol that at one point he tried to grab the steering wheel of his SUV. This assertion has subsequently been disputed by Secret Service agents, but what has not been disputed is an exchange, reported by Hutchinson, between White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff. In this conversation, which took place as Trump supporters were breaching the Capitol, Cipollone told Meadows, “We need to do something more—they’re literally calling for [Vice President Mike Pence] to be fucking hung.” Hutchinson reported that Meadows answered: “You heard [Trump], Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
Hutchinson seemed like a credible witness, and she was obviously quite brave for testifying. This very young person—she was 25 at the time of her testimony—went against the interests of her political tribe, and her own career advancement, to make a stand for truth and for the norms of democratic behavior. Washington is not overpopulated with such people, and so the discovery of a new one is always reassuring.
As it happened, I watched the hearing while waiting to interview then-Senator Rob Portman, a grandee of the pre-Trump Republican establishment, before an audience of 2,000 or so at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The session would also feature Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, who was serving at the time as President Joe Biden’s infrastructure coordinator. Portman’s appearance was considered to be a coup for the festival (for which The Atlantic was once, but was by this time no longer, a sponsor).
If 10 additional Republican senators had voted for conviction, Trump would not today be the party’s presumptive nominee.
Republican elected officials in the age of Trump don’t often show up at these sorts of events, and I found out later that the leaders of the Aspen Institute, the convener of this festival, hoped that I would give Portman, a two-term senator from Ohio, a stress-free ride. The declared subject of our discussion was national infrastructure spending, so the chance of comity-disturbing outbursts was low. But I did believe it to be my professional responsibility to ask Portman about Hutchinson’s testimony, and, more broadly, about his current views of Donald Trump. In 2016, during Trump’s first campaign for president, Portman withdrew his support for him after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. But Portman endorsed Trump in 2020 and voted to acquit him in the second impeachment trial, and I wanted to ask him if Hutchinson’s testimony, or anything else he had heard in the 18 months since the violent attack on the Capitol, had made him regret his decision.
Portman was one of 43 Republican senators who voted against conviction. Sixty-seven votes were required to convict. If 10 additional Republican senators had joined the 50 Democrats and seven Republicans who voted for conviction, Trump would not today be the party’s presumptive nominee for president, and the country would not be one election away from a constitutional crisis and a possibly irreversible slide into authoritarianism. (Technically, a second vote after conviction would have been required to ban Trump from holding public office, but presumably this second vote would have followed naturally from the first.)
It would be unfair to blame Portman disproportionately for the devastating reality that Donald Trump, who is currently free on bail but could be a convicted felon by November, is once again a candidate for president. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, denounced Trump for his actions on January 6, and yet still voted to acquit him. Trump’s continued political viability is as much McConnell’s fault as anyone’s.
But I was interested in pressing Portman because, unlike some of his dimmer colleagues, he clearly understood the threat Trump posed to constitutional order, and he was clearly, by virtue of his sterling reputation, in a position to influence his colleagues. Some senators in the group of 43 are true believers, men like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who, in the words of Mitt Romney (as reported by the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins), never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t believe. But Portman wasn’t a know-nothing. He was one of the most accomplished and respected members of the Senate. He had been a high-ranking official in the White House of George H. W. Bush, then a hardworking member of the House of Representatives. In George W. Bush’s administration, he served as the U.S. trade representative and later as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was well known for his cerebral qualities and his mastery of the federal budget. He was also known to loathe Donald Trump. In other words, Portman knew better.
“I do want to ask you directly,” I said, when we sat onstage, “given what you know now about what happened on January 6, do you regret your vote to acquit in impeachment?”
Indeed he had. This is what Portman said on the Senate floor once the Capitol had been secured: “I want the American people, particularly my constituents in Ohio, to see that we will not be intimidated, that we will not be disrupted from our work, that here in the citadel of democracy, we will continue to do the work of the people. Mob rule is not going to prevail here.”
Onstage, Portman reminded me of his comments. “On the night it happened, I took to the Senate floor and gave an impassioned speech about democracy and the need to protect it. So that’s who I am.”
But this is incorrect. This is not who he is. Portman showed the people of Ohio who he is five weeks later, on February 13, when he voted to acquit Trump, the man he knew to have fomented a violent, antidemocratic insurrection meant to overturn the results of a fair election.
His argument during impeachment, and later, onstage with me, was that voting to convict an ex-president would have violated constitutional norms, and would have further politicized the impeachment process. “Do you think it would be a good idea for President Obama to be impeached by the new Republican Congress?” he asked. He went on, “Well, he’s a former president, and I think he should be out of reach. And Donald Trump was a former president. If you start that precedent, trust me, Republicans will do the same thing. They will.”
It was an interesting, and also pathetic, point to make: Portman was arguing that his Republican colleagues are so corrupt that they would impeach a president who had committed no impeachable offenses simply out of spite.
I eventually pivoted the discussion to the topic of bridges in Ohio, but Portman remained upset, rushing offstage at the end of the conversation to confront the leaders of the festival, who tried to placate him.
Initially, I found his defensive behavior odd. A senator should not be so flustered by a straightforward question about one of his most consequential and historic votes. But I surmised, from subsequent conversations with members of the Republican Senate caucus, that he, like others, felt a certain degree of shame about his continued excuse-making for the authoritarian hijacker of his beloved party.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, one of the world’s leading experts on authoritarianism, wrote in 2020 that complicity, rather than dissent, is the norm for humans, and especially for status-and-relevance-seeking politicians. There are many explanations for complicity, Applebaum argued. A potent one is fear. Many Republican elected officials, she wrote, “don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.”
None of the 43 senators who allowed Donald Trump to escape conviction made fear their argument, of course. Not publicly anyway. The excuses ranged widely. Here are the stirring and angry words of Dan Sullivan, the junior senator from Alaska, explaining his vote to acquit: “Make no mistake: I condemn the horrific violence that engulfed the Capitol on January 6. I also condemn former President Trump’s poor judgment in calling a rally on that day, and his actions and inactions when it turned into a riot. His blatant disregard for his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was fulfilling his constitutional duty at the Capitol, infuriates me.”
Sullivan voted to acquit, he said, because he didn’t think it right to impeach a former president. Kevin Cramer, of North Dakota, argued that “the January 6 attacks on the Capitol were appalling, and President Trump’s remarks were reckless.” But Cramer went on to say that, “based on the evidence presented in the trial, he did not commit an impeachable offense.” Chuck Grassley of Iowa said, in explaining his vote, “Undoubtedly, then-President Trump displayed poor leadership in his words and actions. I do not defend those actions, and my vote should not be read as a defense of those actions.” He continued, “Just because President Trump did not meet the definition of inciting insurrection does not mean that I think he behaved well.”
Now contrast this run of greasy and sad excuse-making with Mitt Romney’s explanation for his vote to convict: “The president’s conduct represented an unprecedented violation of his oath of office and of the public trust. There is a thin line that separates our democratic republic from an autocracy: It is a free and fair election and the peaceful transfer of power that follows it. President Trump attempted to breach that line, again. What he attempted is what was most feared by the Founders. It is the reason they invested Congress with the power to impeach. Accordingly, I voted to convict President Trump.”
On February 13, 2021, Romney was joined by six other Republicans—North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey—in voting to convict. If the United States and its Constitution survive the coming challenge from Trump and Trumpism, statues will one day be raised to these seven. As for Rob Portman and his colleagues, they should hope that they will merely be forgotten.
A response from Iran to the assassination of a senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria seems almost inevitable, yet Israel's decision to exact a toll from Iran stands as a judicious move. A direct confrontation between Israel and Iran appears to be only a matter of time, unavoidable in light of the Iranian subversive approach. Even if Tehran did not plot the October 7 assault, Israel’s strategic conundrum unmistakably signals Iranian fingerprints in ideation and orchestration. The Iranian proxy network enables significant harm to Israel, far from Iranian frontiers, all while incurring negligible repercussions for Iran. Nonetheless, Israel might have approached this juncture more advantageously.
Israel's Harsh Dilemma
Ultimately, Israel cannot evade the harsh strategic dilemma it faces in the conflict with Iran. To effectively counter Iran over the long run, Israel must strive to forge regional alliances, aiming to establish a counterbalance to the Iranian axis, with paramount importance placed on sustaining strategic coordination with the US and NATO. However, the formation of such alliances necessitates Israeli concessions in the Palestinian domain. Conversely, these concessions may also pose a considerable security threat to Israel. Any territory under Palestinian control could become a launchpad for attacks against Israel, as evidenced on October 7. While permanent military control over the Gaza Strip might yield a more secure environment for Israel, it would concurrently isolate the country in its struggle against Iran and its allies.
The Discord with America is a Threat
Regardless, the events of the past week serve as a poignant reminder of the critical and irreplaceable nature of U.S. support for Israel. Since President Biden issued his stern “don’t” warning to Iran and Hezbollah, the relationship between Israel and the U.S. has seen increasing tension. The images coming out from Gaza further diminishes Israel's international standing.
It must be candidly acknowledged that any Israeli government would face intense international scrutiny at this war juncture. The conduct of the conflict with Hamas could hardly be envisioned differently, given the strategic snare Hamas has set. The ensuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, strategically beneficial for Hamas, was by design. The fraught relations with the current administration are also understandable under these war conditions.
Nevertheless, the Israeli government might have navigated the political pressures more adeptly. Through its actions, inactions, or a notable absence of diplomatic acumen, the present government has escalated tensions with the U.S. to an unnecessary zenith. This escalation is further exacerbated by the government's current composition. The fact that Ben Gvir is a member of the Cabinet, for instance, confirms Kissinger’s assertion that “Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics.”. This is particularly problematic in dealing with Iran, where the obliteration of the State of Israel is pursued with an existential fervor, to the detriment of the Iranian populace's welfare. This suggests that in matters concerning Israel, Tehran has no domestic policy, but only a foreign one, at the expense of domestic welfare.
In such an existential confrontation, where Iran deprioritizes domestic challenges, and Israel seemingly eschews foreign policy considerations, the strategic advantage tilts towards Iran.
![In late June of 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump-administration aide, provided testimony to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This testimony was unnerving, even compared with previous revelations concerning Donald Trump’s malignant behavior that day. Hutchinson testified that the president, when told that some of his supporters were carrying weapons, said, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.” He was referring to the metal detectors meant to screen protesters joining his rally on the Ellipse, near the White House. Hutchinson also testified that Trump became so frantic in his desire to join the march to the Capitol that at one point he tried to grab the steering wheel of his SUV. This assertion has subsequently been disputed by Secret Service agents, but what has not been disputed is an exchange, reported by Hutchinson, between White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff. In this conversation, which took place as Trump supporters were breaching the Capitol, Cipollone told Meadows, “We need to do something more—they’re literally calling for [Vice President Mike Pence] to be fucking hung.” Hutchinson reported that Meadows answered: “You heard [Trump], Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.” Hutchinson seemed like a credible witness, and she was obviously quite brave for testifying. This very young person—she was 25 at the time of her testimony—went against the interests of her political tribe, and her own career advancement, to make a stand for truth and for the norms of democratic behavior. Washington is not overpopulated with such people, and so the discovery of a new one is always reassuring. As it happened, I watched the hearing while waiting to interview then-Senator Rob Portman, a grandee of the pre-Trump Republican establishment, before an audience of 2,000 or so at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The session would also feature Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, who was serving at the time as President Joe Biden’s infrastructure coordinator. Portman’s appearance was considered to be a coup for the festival (for which The Atlantic was once, but was by this time no longer, a sponsor). If 10 additional Republican senators had voted for conviction, Trump would not today be the party’s presumptive nominee. Republican elected officials in the age of Trump don’t often show up at these sorts of events, and I found out later that the leaders of the Aspen Institute, the convener of this festival, hoped that I would give Portman, a two-term senator from Ohio, a stress-free ride. The declared subject of our discussion was national infrastructure spending, so the chance of comity-disturbing outbursts was low. But I did believe it to be my professional responsibility to ask Portman about Hutchinson’s testimony, and, more broadly, about his current views of Donald Trump. In 2016, during Trump’s first campaign for president, Portman withdrew his support for him after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. But Portman endorsed Trump in 2020 and voted to acquit him in the second impeachment trial, and I wanted to ask him if Hutchinson’s testimony, or anything else he had heard in the 18 months since the violent attack on the Capitol, had made him regret his decision. Portman was one of 43 Republican senators who voted against conviction. Sixty-seven votes were required to convict. If 10 additional Republican senators had joined the 50 Democrats and seven Republicans who voted for conviction, Trump would not today be the party’s presumptive nominee for president, and the country would not be one election away from a constitutional crisis and a possibly irreversible slide into authoritarianism. (Technically, a second vote after conviction would have been required to ban Trump from holding public office, but presumably this second vote would have followed naturally from the first.) It would be unfair to blame Portman disproportionately for the devastating reality that Donald Trump, who is currently free on bail but could be a convicted felon by November, is once again a candidate for president. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, denounced Trump for his actions on January 6, and yet still voted to acquit him. Trump’s continued political viability is as much McConnell’s fault as anyone’s. But I was interested in pressing Portman because, unlike some of his dimmer colleagues, he clearly understood the threat Trump posed to constitutional order, and he was clearly, by virtue of his sterling reputation, in a position to influence his colleagues. Some senators in the group of 43 are true believers, men like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who, in the words of Mitt Romney (as reported by the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins), never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t believe. But Portman wasn’t a know-nothing. He was one of the most accomplished and respected members of the Senate. He had been a high-ranking official in the White House of George H. W. Bush, then a hardworking member of the House of Representatives. In George W. Bush’s administration, he served as the U.S. trade representative and later as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was well known for his cerebral qualities and his mastery of the federal budget. He was also known to loathe Donald Trump. In other words, Portman knew better. “I do want to ask you directly,” I said, when we sat onstage, “given what you know now about what happened on January 6, do you regret your vote to acquit in impeachment?” Portman immediately expressed his unhappiness with what he took to be an outré question. “You have just surprised me,” he said, complaining that I hadn’t told him beforehand that I would ask him about Trump. (American journalists generally do not warn government officials of their questions ahead of time.) He went on to say, “You know that I spoke out in the strongest possible terms on January 6.” Indeed he had. This is what Portman said on the Senate floor once the Capitol had been secured: “I want the American people, particularly my constituents in Ohio, to see that we will not be intimidated, that we will not be disrupted from our work, that here in the citadel of democracy, we will continue to do the work of the people. Mob rule is not going to prevail here.” Onstage, Portman reminded me of his comments. “On the night it happened, I took to the Senate floor and gave an impassioned speech about democracy and the need to protect it. So that’s who I am.” But this is incorrect. This is not who he is. Portman showed the people of Ohio who he is five weeks later, on February 13, when he voted to acquit Trump, the man he knew to have fomented a violent, antidemocratic insurrection meant to overturn the results of a fair election. His argument during impeachment, and later, onstage with me, was that voting to convict an ex-president would have violated constitutional norms, and would have further politicized the impeachment process. “Do you think it would be a good idea for President Obama to be impeached by the new Republican Congress?” he asked. He went on, “Well, he’s a former president, and I think he should be out of reach. And Donald Trump was a former president. If you start that precedent, trust me, Republicans will do the same thing. They will.” It was an interesting, and also pathetic, point to make: Portman was arguing that his Republican colleagues are so corrupt that they would impeach a president who had committed no impeachable offenses simply out of spite. I eventually pivoted the discussion to the topic of bridges in Ohio, but Portman remained upset, rushing offstage at the end of the conversation to confront the leaders of the festival, who tried to placate him. Initially, I found his defensive behavior odd. A senator should not be so flustered by a straightforward question about one of his most consequential and historic votes. But I surmised, from subsequent conversations with members of the Republican Senate caucus, that he, like others, felt a certain degree of shame about his continued excuse-making for the authoritarian hijacker of his beloved party. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, one of the world’s leading experts on authoritarianism, wrote in 2020 that complicity, rather than dissent, is the norm for humans, and especially for status-and-relevance-seeking politicians. There are many explanations for complicity, Applebaum argued. A potent one is fear. Many Republican elected officials, she wrote, “don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.” None of the 43 senators who allowed Donald Trump to escape conviction made fear their argument, of course. Not publicly anyway. The excuses ranged widely. Here are the stirring and angry words of Dan Sullivan, the junior senator from Alaska, explaining his vote to acquit: “Make no mistake: I condemn the horrific violence that engulfed the Capitol on January 6. I also condemn former President Trump’s poor judgment in calling a rally on that day, and his actions and inactions when it turned into a riot. His blatant disregard for his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was fulfilling his constitutional duty at the Capitol, infuriates me.” Sullivan voted to acquit, he said, because he didn’t think it right to impeach a former president. Kevin Cramer, of North Dakota, argued that “the January 6 attacks on the Capitol were appalling, and President Trump’s remarks were reckless.” But Cramer went on to say that, “based on the evidence presented in the trial, he did not commit an impeachable offense.” Chuck Grassley of Iowa said, in explaining his vote, “Undoubtedly, then-President Trump displayed poor leadership in his words and actions. I do not defend those actions, and my vote should not be read as a defense of those actions.” He continued, “Just because President Trump did not meet the definition of inciting insurrection does not mean that I think he behaved well.” Now contrast this run of greasy and sad excuse-making with Mitt Romney’s explanation for his vote to convict: “The president’s conduct represented an unprecedented violation of his oath of office and of the public trust. There is a thin line that separates our democratic republic from an autocracy: It is a free and fair election and the peaceful transfer of power that follows it. President Trump attempted to breach that line, again. What he attempted is what was most feared by the Founders. It is the reason they invested Congress with the power to impeach. Accordingly, I voted to convict President Trump.” On February 13, 2021, Romney was joined by six other Republicans—North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey—in voting to convict. If the United States and its Constitution survive the coming challenge from Trump and Trumpism, statues will one day be raised to these seven. As for Rob Portman and his colleagues, they should hope that they will merely be forgotten. This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Study in Senate Cowardice.”](https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/meips/ADKq_NaEFEzaJlyiov6CwiisheGp3VQREK_9FVR2dSPmgKjW1mtr3O4gAb8t71iucbPT_TCpryVYHLIA-N_auqtESBMFmrIhsyLbHzglYQgc9rXfg6fWdj8NK3Punc88YleAPYzTZ8F59CS1LkoOryjJbx_iozhOua8GsIlsSYzFxSk20rYK-eNZ46uEDo-xFz5_nnZwfk7n_GI=s0-d-e1-ft#https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/tRe5lFsdzVaK9nMpJmUnjnEElNU=/0x0:1100x620/550x310/media/newsletters/2024/04/EIC/original.png)
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