Americans cannot keep up with Donald Trump's destructive campaign against American democracy: Let's review MAGA cult behaviors

Trump cult MAGA’s Foundational Lie

Echo essay by Jeffrey Goldberg published The Atlantic

Trump's evil cult movement claims to stand with the police. Trump’s decision to pardon the cop-beaters of January 6 exposed his movement for what it is.  By Jeffrey Goldberg

At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020, Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound cult affection for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers, he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows. The gallows had been erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”

“Them worthless fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said. “They don’t need a jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers while everybody videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”

Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him.” All told, more than 140 police officers were injured in the riot, many seriously.

I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” 

Then I walked with the crowd to the Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.”

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys—believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection. (Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)

Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

A day after the pardons were announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Trump had something else to say during that first press conference of his new term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” This would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.

I understand that a review—even a short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive. But, repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew.

So, in brief: Trump dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he has encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. 

By pardoning these convicted criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is exactly the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. 

“It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”

The subject of Trump’s indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of indecency. 

At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.

Obama, a model of dignified presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,” Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”

We are in a long Lord of the Flies moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded followers—these days can seem infernal. Trump’s term is one-quarter over; a piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going through hell, keep going.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans want Americans tax money to create a slush fund to support convicted criminals!

Trump’s 💲1.8 Billion Slush Fund Is Worse Than Stealing

Definition: an unofficial, loosely regulated pool of money set aside for unspecified, discretionary, or illicit purposes

Recasting the January 6 insurrection as the work of heroic patriots remains the president’s highest priority. Published in The Atlantic, by Jonathan Chait

Among the very first things Donald Trump did upon assuming the powers of the presidency for the second time was commute the sentences of, and grant pardons to, everybody involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020, election. 😡😠 Republican allies expressed moderate disappointment but vowed to move past this ugly blemish. Senator Susan Collins called it a “terrible day for our Justice Department.” Senator Tommy Tuberville admitted, “It’s a hard one, because we work with them up here,” referring to Capitol Police who were viciously beaten by Trump’s allies. Tuberville concluded, “At the end of the day, we’ve got to get January 6, behind us.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that Republicans were “not looking backwards; we’re looking forward.”

It was not, however, just one terrible day. Trump’s loyalty to his most violent and criminal supporters was a signal of his highest priority and has been a reliable guide to his decisions ever since. The impulse to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021, appears to be the inspiration even for the establishment of a 💲1.8 billion Treasury Department slush fund ❗for victims of so-called weaponization of government.

Last week, when the administration floated the notion of disbursing payments to alleged victims of government weaponization, cynics assumed that Trump meant to divert the money to himself. But this assessment may have turned out to be too naïve. Trump already has ample ways to profit from office, including from stock trading with the benefit of inside knowledge and by accepting gifts from client states. The Justice Department told reporters yesterday that Trump, his sons, and his family business would not receive payments from the fund. The recipients will almost surely be insurrectionists and other Trumpzi allies.

How, exactly, can Trump hand out taxpayer dollars at his whim❓ The putative mechanism is a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. In 2020, an IRS contractor leaked a few years of Trump’s tax records. (Before Trump, major presidential candidates had for decades voluntarily released their returns, an essential step in demonstrating that they had no conflicts of interest.)

The contractor was caught and sent to prison. Trump, nevertheless, sued for the offense of being subjected to a portion of the scrutiny his fellow candidates have voluntarily undergone. 

Because Trump runs the IRS, it is no longer in a position to place any limits on his demands. He has already exploited the loophole of suing his own government to pay a series of allies investigated for or convicted of committing crimes out of loyalty to him. The recipients include the family of Ashli Babbitt, an insurrectionist who was shot and killed on January 6, while smashing her way into a corridor behind which members of Congress had taken shelter from the mob.

Trump’s Justice Department describes the forthcoming payouts as a “systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” The process is, in fact, the opposite of systemic. It is designed to be controlled personally by Trump and sheltered from any judicial scrutiny.

If the government were actually compensating victims of lawfare, it would direct payments to James Comey, Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, and other targets of Trump’s vindictive prosecutions. 

Trump has described his actions as turnabout—“I was hunted by some very bad people. Now I’m the hunter.”—which, given that he has called his own prosecutions political targeting, is tantamount to confessing that he is targeting his enemies.

But, of course, nobody entertains for a moment the thought that the fund could conceivably reward an actual victim of weaponization. To ensure that it will never be used for a deserving victim, the fund is scheduled for termination on December 15, 2028.

Asked by a reporter yesterday whether people who committed violence against police officers should receive payments, Trump replied, “It’ll all be dependent on a committee. A committee’s being set up of very talented people, very highly respected people.” The committee is being selected entirely by Trump, who retains the power to replace any member who displeases him, and who in any case has argued in multiple contexts that he is entitled to exert full control over any decision by the executive branch.

The most dystopian explanation for this scheme comes from sources who sketched it out to ABC News last week. As ABC’s reporters characterized it, the sources described the fund as “a hybrid between a victim compensation fund—similar to the civil claims process that followed the 2010, Deepwater Horizon oil spill—and a truth-and-reconciliation-style commission.”

Trump’s commission is deviously inverting the original and most famous truth-and-reconciliation commission. South Africa established its commission to document the crimes committed under its apartheid regime. Rather than uncovering the truth to facilitate the state’s transformation from authoritarianism into democracy, Trump is doing the reverse, inscribing his lies into the historical record in an effort to undermine democracy.

It is common to describe Trump’s steps as vengeance, but he has more in mind than merely settling old scores. This obsession drove Trump to support a successful primary challenge to Senator Bill Cassidy, whose offense was casting a symbolic vote to impeach him after January 6. Cassidy had long since surrendered any independent impulses, to the point of violating his own pro-vaccine convictions to cast a humiliating, decisive vote to confirm (the idiot❗) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. Yet Cassidy’s penitence did not satisfy Trump.

Trump considers it essential both to intimidate anybody who would stop him from carrying out illegal orders—hence his attempts to imprison Democrats who truthfully advised military members that they should not obey illegal orders—and to reward anybody who does follow them. He has reportedly promised mass pardons before he leaves office. Trump could have waited until after the 2028, elections to set up his slush fund, but he is doing it now in a high-profile way, presumably to communicate directly that loyal allies can expect lavish rewards.

The government’s operating ethos during Trump’s second term has followed the dictum that the president and his allies are immune from the law, while his enemies can expect to be hounded. As his party watches silently and cowers, his intentions grow only more naked.💢😡😱

Donald Trump gave a failed April Fool's speech. It was no joke. Obviously Trump is lost and cannot find a way out of the mess he created,

Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech. His messed up "speech" raised more questions than it answered about the war in Iran. By Tom Nichols. Americans have been waiting for Donald Trump to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. 

Echo opinion about Donald Trump's failed April Fool's Day stupidity speech about Iran. 

Published by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic magazine. 

For weeks, Donald Trump offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his prime-time address on April 1, 2026, might as well have been a sick April Fool's joke, His (so called) speech was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. (IOW, Trump was a "Fool", for trying when he is not capable of explaining anything, much less trying to describe a reason to go to war.)

Trump’s critics (including me) castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation about the war to the American people. But, given his April Fool's performance  his address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

A speech that should have been a clear explanation about why the United States is fighting a nation of 92 million people began, instead, in shambolic style. He discussed the operation that captured the president of Venezuela, perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation. 

Trump then said that Iran has taken losses never seen “in the history of warfare”—as if the destruction of, say, the Axis in World War II had never happened.

Trump offered little that was new, instead repeating the same lines from a short video presentation the night that he ordered attacks on the Islamic Republic, more than one month ago. He listed—rightly and correctly—the various offenses that the fanatical Iranian regime has perpetrated against the United States and other countries for nearly a half century. 

Nevertheless, he couldn’t help himself: He patted himself on the back for killing the Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for canceling the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. (“Barack Hussein Obama,” of course.) The United States, Trump claimed in a strange moment, had emptied out all the banks in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as part of that deal—“all the cash they had”—to send that “green, green” currency to Iran.

But, back to the war Trump illegally launched: What is America fighting for❓ Trump insisted that Iran must never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Almost no one would disagree with this general point—certainly I don’t—but Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. 

Instead, Trump simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day.

Trump, however, then undercut his own point by assuring the country that Iran’s “nuclear dust” was buried under mountains of rubble, inaccessible since the great success of last June’s joint Israeli-American strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranians would never be allowed to excavate any of it, he said.

So, then, perhaps the war was about regime change, which would be the surest way to stop every evil plan gestating in Tehran, including nuclear weapons and terrorist plots. Well, no, it turns out, the war is not about that either. 🙄Trump explicitly denied that the goal was to bring down the Iranian theocracy—a staggering claim given his exhortations to the Iranian people on the first night of the war that their hour of liberation was at hand. 

After denying that the U.S. goal was regime change, he then claimed that regime change had now already happened because so many Iranian leaders have been killed.

In addition to ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump laid out three other goals that he said were now within reach: neutralizing Iran’s ability to project power anywhere through terrorism, destroying the Iranian navy, and eliminating Iran’s missile stocks and production capabilities. As with so many other Trump promises, he said that  these goals would be accomplished in two to three weeks. 

How he will do all of this was left unclear, other than that he will hit Iran “extremely hard.”

Meanwhile, Tehran still controls the important Strait of Hormuz. Trump said only that other nations should go in, clear the strait, and take Iran’s oil. He chided Americans for their impatience; the two world wars, and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq took longer than the current war, he said. (BTW, the outcomes of all three of those wars were disasters. Korea war is still not settled, Vietnam collapsed, Iraq was based on a lie, to destroy "weapons of mass destruction" that did not exist.)

Trump He also lied when he waved away any economic concerns. Everything will get better, he promised, telling viewers that only a year ago America was a “dead and crippled country” that he personally rescued. 

Oddly, Trump claimed that the United States has never been more economically prepared for a conflict—the “little journey,” as he called it—like the one he has led against Iran.

Trump also said things that might come back to haunt him. He vowed not to let Israel or America’s friends in the Persian Gulf “get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form,” as if Iran were not already inflicting damage on them. 

And, Trump assured Americans that gas prices would come down. (They might, but not anytime soon.) He threatened, yet again, to bomb all of Iran’s electrical plants, a likely war crime if carried out with the completeness that Trump promised, should Iran refuse to … well, do whatever it is he thinks they should do. “We are unstoppable,” he said, noting that U.S. forces were in combat against “one of the most powerful countries.” (This, too, is nonsense: It takes nothing away from U.S.-military valor to admit that Iran was at best a second-tier power even before the war.) 

America might be unstoppable, but Donald Trump is obviously at loose ends now that the Iranians have a chokehold on a major part of the world’s energy supply.

Maybe the only bright spots in the speech were in the things the president did not say. He did not, as many observers expected, prepare Americans for the introduction of ground forces into Iran. (If he now goes ahead with such an operation, he will have betrayed the public by misleading them about the course of the war.) And he did not eviscerate

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and threaten to pull out of the alliance, as some expected him to do because of his ongoing anger at major European powers’ unwillingness to join a war they did not start.

If Donald Trump meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or (the failed) Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)

Donald Trump is looking like he is lost and downtrodden. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world.

Donald Trump and evil maga Republicans openly using NAZI symbolism to promote fascism: The GOP is Nazism 2026

How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich❓

An echo essay published in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols.

Over the past few months, during his (evil) ICE agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol (aka evil 💢ICE❗) chief Greg Bovino wore an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. 

Printed in Nazi font

His coat looked like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

Bovino as an evil ICE Nazi re-enactor

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. 

A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. 

Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Then, J. D. Vance (aka former Marine corporal- the same rank, by the way, as Adolf Hitler in World War One) shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. 

More Nazi symbolism at the Labor Department where a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face was hung from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich

documents. December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X/ account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man❓” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978, book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome,” a DHS spokesperson told Politico. But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem❗

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush repudiated the former Klan leader David Duke, who was running as a Republican to be Louisiana’s governor. Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such fascist people❓

When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. 

In fact, a liberal Black Republican, Edward Brooke, had just finished two terms as our junior senator from Massachusetts; the liberal Republicans Lowell Weicker and John Chafee represented Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively. In college, I worked in the Massachusetts state House for our hometown representative, a young and principled working-class Democrat (my GOP membership was not a disqualifier; imagine that). I got to know Republican legislators on Beacon Hill because they were close friends with my Democratic boss. Party affiliations were about political disagreements among Americans, not markers of antithetical worldviews.

I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants (something I objected to at the time).

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. 

In turn, Bush (wrongly❗) gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, (who later converted to Roman Catholicism.....believe it or not....) politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. 

As both men stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

Soon after McCain’s election loss to Obama, the Tea Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party❓ To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump.

So, I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But, they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. 

When I told Stevens how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. 🙄 “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

But, Reagan’s dominance over the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. 

Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried
Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership.

For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.



Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.Soon after McCain’s electio loss to Obama, the Tea

Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party? To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. When I told him how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

But, Reagan’s dominance of the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. 

The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. 

And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Some of these trolls are merely pasting swastikas on their nihilism, but their ideological sincerity is irrelevant. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, his 1961 novel about a man posing as a Nazi: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”


Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But, their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. 

If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “That 1930s Feeling.” 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans asking for 200Billion $ to fund the Iran war but America's health care system is imploding

An excellent heartfelt personal essay about access to health care and affordability, by Jenisha Watts published in The Atlantic.

In "The Impossible Predicament of the Uninsured" (April 2026), *The Atlantic* staff writer Jenisha Watts highlights the extreme risks of lacking health insurance through her aunt's emergency hospitalization for a burst aneurysm. Her personal story emphasizes how high costs force uninsured, often lower-income Americans, to delay care, ultimately leading to higher, unpayable, and life-threatening medical situations.

The Impossible Predicament of the Uninsured:  

My aunt couldn’t afford to go to the hospital. She ended up there anyway. By Jenisha Watts

The day after Thanksgiving, I got a voicemail. A woman identified herself as a doctor at the University of Louisville hospital: “I believe I may have one of your family members here.”

The message was hard to understand. Most of my family lives in Kentucky, so I didn’t know whom the doctor was referring to. I called the hospital, but kept getting put on hold. Then I tried my aunt—if someone was in trouble, she’d be the one to know. But, she didn’t answer.

A few hours later, her son got in touch with me. My aunt was the one in the hospital. She’d had an aneurysm on the right side of her brain, and it had burst. The drainage tube the doctors used to stop the bleeding kept slipping loose; after three tries, they finally got it to stick. Only then could they do surgery. My cousin Face-Timed me afterward, from the ICU. “Are you ready?” he asked. He angled the camera down to my aunt’s face, and I started sobbing like a sudden rainstorm.

A few days later, I got on a plane from Washington, D.C., to Kentucky and went straight to join my family at the hospital. 

We had always called my aunt “The Glamourina.” She wore feathered hats with sparkly shirts and experimented with different hairstyles: a butterscotch-blond cropped cut, an afro, a bob streaked with highlights. She paid for my first real manicure, when I was in high school. We wore matching striped shirts to the salon, and used an eyeliner pencil to draw fake moles above our lips, like Marilyn Monroe.

She is 58 now, and raised two kids as a single mother. She always treated me like one of her children, and I grew up to look more like her than like my own mom. When I’d talked with her the week before she ended up in the hospital, she’d asked me to play our favorite song, “I’m So Proud of You,” by Julie Anne Vargas. Now the top half of her head was shaved and staples ran in a ladder across it. IVs were taped to each arm, and a machine next to her bed was helping her breathe. She couldn’t speak. When she opened her eyes, they rolled.

Her older son was especially alarmed by how quickly she’d declined. He wanted the doctors to come into her room so they could explain what had happened. But one of our older relatives stopped him, saying that we couldn’t afford to make demands, let alone trouble, because “she don’t have a lick of health insurance.”

We knew that the hospital couldn’t deny her care, but we understood the tightrope you walk when you don’t have money. All she could afford to be was grateful.

We don’t know what caused my aunt’s aneurysm, but she’d had persistent headaches for months, and she’d been worried. Once, when she was driving, the left side of her body turned numb and her toes curled up. She pulled over but didn’t go to the hospital; she couldn’t afford it.

My aunt worked as a hair stylist at a salon for years. Most recently, she was the overnight caregiver for an elderly woman, but she had opted out of her employer-sponsored health insurance because she couldn’t afford the premium. 

Occasionally, she had coverage in the past, but it never guaranteed that she’d actually be able to afford health care. She called me once, defeated, because she was trying to fill a prescription at Walgreens and the pharmacy had flagged an issue with her insurance. She would need to pay out of pocket, and she didn’t have the $134.89. She was often frustrated by spending long spells on hold with insurance agents, and was overwhelmed by the complexity of the plans.

My aunt’s experience with the health-care system is familiar to many Americans. In a 2023 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly a quarter of adults said signing up for a plan was simply too confusing. Even those who have coverage may decide to delay or skip treatment because they can’t afford the out-of-pocket costs, resulting in emergency-room visits and hospitalizations that could have been prevented.

Some years, my aunt made so little money that she might have qualified for Medicaid, but not recently—the income cutoff, if you’re single in Kentucky, is $1,835 a month. Some years, she bought coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges, but eventually she decided it was too expensive.

Many more people are now making that same decision. In 2025, the Republican-controlled Congress voted to let Biden-era subsidies in the ACA, which had helped some 22 million people afford their coverage, expire. Within just two weeks of the cutoff, at the end of December, enrollment had dropped by 1 million people. According to one group’s estimate, families are paying $200, $300, or $1,000 more a month; many have seen their premiums double.

In January, 2026,  Donald Trump released his proposal for a “Great Healthcare Plan,” which suggests that savings from the former subsidies could be sent directly to “eligible” Americans. 

But, who would be eligible❓ The proposal makes no mention of the many people who don’t have coverage. Then, in February, the Trump administration released a list of 43 prescription drugs that Americans can buy for reduced prices. But some of these were already available at those prices or in generic forms, and they make up a tiny fraction of the drugs Americans need; the prescription my aunt couldn’t afford, for instance, is not listed.

Nothing about Trump’s pronouncements changes the fact that millions more Americans will soon be stuck where my aunt was: in the middle—sometimes insured, sometimes uninsured, but always too poor to get the care they need.

As I stared at my aunt in the ICU, I noticed that her eyebrows were freshly waxed, and her nails had bleach-white French tips. Only the week before, she’d texted me about getting her nails done. It was an indulgence she rarely allowed herself: “Woo this pedi feels good. I haven’t had one since last year.” When I rubbed Vaseline on her chapped feet, I discovered her ruby-red toenails.

She could not have known that the decision to finally splurge a little on herself would be a conversation starter with the nurses, who complimented her on her nails and eyebrows. Her grooming signaled to them that she was someone who took care of herself, someone who deserved their attention and respect.

I drove to her house later that week to meet her younger son. We’d planned to check on her bills—to see if we could find her bank PIN or account information to make sure that her finances stayed on track. I found notebooks coated with her handwriting, a list of numbers down each page that looked like an unsolved equation. These, I realized, were her monthly expenses, along with details such as the confirmation codes for bills she’d paid. Stuffed inside one notebook was a pawn-shop notice, announcing its full ownership over an item she’d traded in.

For years, not having enough money nibbled at my aunt’s health. 

She texted me about having severe pain in her back and breasts. She wrote that she had a “knot” in one breast—“I’m thinking just polyps.” She lost a lot of weight and said she was feeling depressed. I suggested reaching out to a psychiatrist to ask for antidepressants. She wrote back: “That cost. That’s why I need insurance.” 

She was tired of pretending to be okay. After paying for her mortgage, water bill, Wi‑Fi, car insurance, and other necessities each month, she’d usually be out of money. She was always transparent with me about her struggles, and sent photos of bills with disconnect notices: a letter from the energy company; an available checking balance of –$59.70; a past-due payment, with the amount owed in bold. Shutoffs have resumed. Make a $172.75 payment today to get your account back on track. She had small wins, such as finally paying off her car. But she still went back and forth to the payday-loan store.

As I sat next to her in the hospital, I couldn’t help but feel guilty. For years, I had been sending her money when she asked, but sometimes I didn’t. I would listen to her struggles and then go on with my life. I was grateful to be financially stable, but frustrated by being the financial rescuer for family members. I wanted to create boundaries, and to escape from the transactional, lopsided part of these relationships.

But I had not thought enough about how much she gave me—in every way she could. She posted about my accomplishments on Facebook no matter how small I considered them. She filled voids for me: self-esteem booster, cheerleader, second mother. In 2014, she used all the money she had to fly to New York to see me graduate from Columbia. She was the only member of my family there. When my name was called and I walked across the stage, she cried so much that someone had to hand her a tissue.

A few months ago, my son turned 4, and my aunt was determined to send him a gift. A manila envelope arrived at my apartment: She had mailed him five individually wrapped Hot Wheels cars and a Spider-Man birthday card. I recorded a video as my son stuffed his hand inside the envelope, pulling out each toy, saying, “Oh, wow. This is awesome.” That night, I sent the video to my aunt. She wrote back at 2 a.m.: “Up looking at videos over n over. He was so excited.” 

She was always trying to give to others, even though she never had enough for herself.

As individuals, and as a country, we tend to pay attention only when it’s too late. Americans who want to cut health-care spending don’t seem to understand that access to preventive care saves not just lives, but also money. Perhaps my aunt’s hospital stay could have been avoided if she’d been able to call a doctor and make an appointment, an option that so many of us take for granted. 

What is a life like my aunt’s worth in America❓ 😢Unfortunately, that determination has been made.

My aunt hasn’t sat up or spoken since the aneurysm, and no one knows if she will again. In January, she was transferred from the hospital to a nursing home. She’s supposed to go home soon, to be cared for by the family, who can’t possibly give her the round-the-clock care she needs. She’s not capable of worrying about health insurance at this point, but if she were, she wouldn’t have to: Now that she’s completely disabled, she qualifies for Medicaid.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must be reminded about how January 6th 2020 was treason

Echo essay reported in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg

Donald Trump's Indecency: At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound affection for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers, he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows. 

The gallows was erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”

Them worthless fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said. “They don’t need a jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers while everybody videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”

Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him.” 

All told, more than 140 police officers were injured in the riot, many seriously.

I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then I walked with the crowd to the Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.”

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House, to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. 

Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys —believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection. (Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys🤢 movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)

Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

A day after the pardons were announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Trump had something else to say during that first press conference of his new term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” This would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.

I understand that a review—even a short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive (Oh no, no is not at all repetitive, it is first person reporting from the scene and must be told again). But repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew. 😢

So, in brief: Trump dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats the party of “evil.”

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. 

By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. “It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”

The subject of Trump’s indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of indecency. At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.

President Barack Obama, a model of dignified presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,” Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”

We are in a long Lord of the Flies moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded followers—these days can seem infernal. 

Trump’s term is one-quarter over; a piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going through hell, keep going❗