You might be forgiven for forgetting—ever so briefly—that Donald Trump is president of the United States. Sometimes it seems like he does, too.

In the middle of the night, as news about the plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was breaking, Trump posted on Truth Social:

The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!

He raises some valid points—ones that many people might be wondering about themselves. The difference between them and him is that he is the leader of the federal government, able to marshal unparalleled resources to get answers about a horror that happened just two and a half miles from his home. He’s the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, and the crash involved an Army helicopter. But Trump isn’t really interested in doing things. Like Chauncey Gardiner, the simple-minded protagonist of Being There, he likes to watch.

This morning, Trump held an astonishing briefing at the White House where he and his aides unspooled racist speculation, suggesting (without any evidence) that underqualified workers hired under DEI programs had caused the accident. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong ideas and opinions, and I think we’ll state those opinions now,” Trump said, and he did. Vice President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized diversity efforts from the lectern as well. (Trump also misrepresented Federal Aviation Administration programs.) Trump insisted that he wasn’t getting ahead of the investigation by speculating, and that he could tell diversity was to blame because of “common sense.”

Trump also paused to accuse former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of “bullshit,” and narrated videos and information he’d seen in the news, interspersing his personal observations as a helicopter owner and passenger. “The people in the helicopter should have seen where they were going,” Trump said. At times, he appeared to blame both the helicopter pilots and air-traffic control. Perhaps it would be better to actually gather some information, but Trump is more interested in pontificating.

The pilots, DEI, air-traffic controllers, Buttigieg—the only common thread appeared to be that everyone was to blame, except for Trump himself.

No one could reasonably hold Trump responsible for the crash, just 10 days into his term—though that is the bar he has often tried to set. “I alone can fix it,” he has assured Americans, telling them that he personally can master and control the government in a way no one else can. He promised to be a dictator, though only on day one. Yet even while discounting his bluster, it would be nice to see the president doing something more than watching cable news and posting about it.

If he’s not going to do that, he could offer some consolation. Almost exactly 39 years ago, after the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger, President Ronald Reagan memorably described how the astronauts aboard had “‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” Trump is giving us “NOT GOOD!!!”

Though exasperating, this passivity is no surprise. It was a running theme of Trump’s first administration and is already back in the second. In May 2016, Trump reportedly offered fellow Republican John Kasich a chance to be vice president, in charge of domestic and foreign policy; Trump would be in charge of “making America great again.” During Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, he struggled to show empathy for victims or do more than gawk at (and tweet about) the destruction. A few months later, he tried half-heartedly to do more after Hurricane Maria, producing the indelible visual of the president tossing paper towels to victims, like a giveaway at a minor-league baseball game.

[Read: That time Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans]

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump ally, has claimed that Trump wasn’t even running the government during his first term. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Yglesias notes, Trump was more interested in offering punditry on how the government was doing than acting like the head of the executive branch. And on January 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors, Trump sat at the White House watching the violent sacking of the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it.

This approach to governance—or refusal to approach it, rather—is inextricably tied to Trump’s Gardiner-like obsession with television. The president watches hours of news every day, and if reports from inside the White House didn’t bear witness to this, his all-hours social-media posts would. Because he has little grounding in the issues facing the government and little interest in reading, television frequently seems to set his agenda. Political allies learned that the best way to get a message to Trump was to appear on Fox News. (Trolls, similarly, learned that a good way to rankle him was to take out ads on the channel.) Trump has used the Fox roster as a hiring pool for his administration.

One vignette from the first Trump administration illustrates the dynamic. In April 2019, as the White House was juggling half a dozen serious controversies, Trump called into Fox & Friends and yakked at length about whatever happened to be on his mind until even the hosts couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, Brian Kilmeade cut in and brought things to a close. “We could talk all day, but looks like you have a million things to do,” he said. Trump didn’t appear concerned about it.

[Read: Donald Trump calls in to Fox & Friends]

What’s odd is that even as Trump acts so passively, his administration is moving quickly to seize unprecedented powers for the presidency. In part, that’s because of the ideological commitments of his aides, but Trump also has a curious view of presidential power as an à la carte thing. He’s very interested in acquiring and flexing power to control the justice system, punish his enemies, and crack down on immigration, but he’d just as soon get the federal government out of the emergency-management business.

The presidency is not a spectator sport, though. At the end of Being There (spoiler alert), a group of political advisers conspires to put Chauncey Gardiner forward as the next president. The movie’s central joke is that the childlike, TV-obsessed protagonist has inadvertently fooled the nation’s most powerful circles into believing that he is profound, simply by stating directly what little he sees and understands. Joke’s on us.

The American populism of the late 19th century was a rebellion of working people against financial elites; the American populism of this century is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable. This is why, just a few short days into his presidency, Donald Trump is already making good on his promise to persecute trans people zealously. On Monday, Trump issued an executive order purging trans service members from the military on the grounds that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” a statement belied by the thousands serving honorably until they were singled out for discrimination by their commander in chief. A day later, Trump issued a second executive order that could make gender-affirming care for young people unavailable in most of the country.

The damage wrought by legitimizing this form of discrimination will not be limited to the trans community. Laws and legal rulings that undermine trans rights may soon be used to restrict the rights of other, less marginal groups. Anyone naive enough to think that the government can deny fundamental rights to one group without putting another’s at risk is in for some nasty surprises. That much became clear during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in December over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

At issue in the case, United States v. Skrmetti, is whether Tennessee’s ban on medical treatments for gender dysphoria—the medical diagnosis for someone who believes their gender does not match their biological sex—unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of sex. The Tennessee bill declares that “this state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex,” and therefore in preventing medical treatments that “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” Implicit in this is the belief that if you don’t “appreciate your sex,” then the state should force you to. Beyond the legal jargon and pretext, the underlying conflict here is between conservatives who have concluded that trans identity is a social contagion to be eradicated and that using state power for this cause is legitimate, and their opponents, who believe that trans people are entitled to equal protection under the law.

[Read: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

Crucially, the law bans treatments—such as hormones and puberty blockers—only for the purpose of a minor’s gender transition; they remain legal to prescribe for any other reason. The law bans treatments that enable “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Because those same medications are available as long as they are not used for gender-affirming care, lawyers for the Biden administration argued that the ban constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex. The Biden administration’s position was that this kind of care can be regulated—then–Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar cited as a legitimate example a West Virginia law that requires two physicians to sign off—but that the regulation cannot be discriminatory. Not all measures that distinguish on the basis of sex are unconstitutional—see, for instance, sex-specific bathrooms—but they are subject to greater legal scrutiny; Tennessee is denying that it is engaging in discrimination, and thus not subject to that level of scrutiny.

One might question why this case matters if you are not yourself trans or do not have a loved one who is. The number of trans people is objectively small—less than a fraction of 1 percent of the population. A recent JAMA Pediatrics study found that fewer than 0.1 percent of young people with private insurance received hormone treatments or puberty blockers during a five-year period—a limited number of patients overall, but one for whom the stakes are very high. The outcome of this case has much broader implications than it might appear, because if a state can, as Prelogar put it, force people to “look and live like boys and girls,” subject to the government’s definition of what that means, then a lot more people might be affected. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument, for many years, some states prevented women from becoming butchers or lawyers. Women could not have their own credit cards or bank accounts until the 1970s. If it’s not unconstitutional sex discrimination for the government to say that people cannot behave “inconsistent with their sex,” well now you’re really talking about a lot of people—a lot more people than the rather tiny population included in the category of “they/them” that the Trump campaign was hoping you feel disgust and contempt for.

Much depends on the nature of the justices’ ultimate decision and how far-reaching it is. The conservative movement’s mobilization against trans rights, however, is just one step in a wider rolling-back of other antidiscrimination protections. Conservatives have consciously targeted a diminutive, politically powerless segment of the population, trying to strip them of their constitutional rights, and then used those legal precedents to undermine laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The trick was making Americans think that only the rights of trans people are on the chopping block, that “they/them” could be persecuted without consequences for “you.” As Frederick Douglass once said, “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people, who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down.”

“One of the things that’s worth emphasizing is that for the people who brought the case, the movement that’s behind this litigation, there have long been anxieties about sex-discrimination jurisprudence, period,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis School of Law, told me. “So if that’s the agenda that’s driving the litigation, and the Court is embracing the arguments behind that agenda, you have to wonder if this isn’t the end of the road.”

The harm to antidiscrimination law more broadly could be immense. Many of the rationales offered by the conservative justices during oral argument echo the reasoning of those opposed to bans on racial discrimination. If they regain legitimacy, they could later be used to weaken other laws that protect Americans from bigotry.

[Read: Anti-trans discrimination is sex discrimination]

For example, defenders of Tennessee’s ban have said that it does not discriminate based on sex, because it prohibits gender-affirming care to both boys and girls—a point Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett raised during oral argument. Similar assertions were made in defense of interracial-marriage bans, which prevented both Black and white people from marrying their chosen spouses. “If we’re reinstating the equal-application theory … that was a theory that was used historically to uphold and justify race-based distinctions,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “I don’t know how you can wall off sex discrimination from race discrimination if you’re reviving this equal-treatment claim.”

Kavanaugh suggested that because the case involved medical science, the Court should just leave it to the “democratic process,” an approach that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointedly observed would have prevented the Court from striking down bans on interracial marriage, because at the time, Virginia had argued that the “science” regarding interracial marriage “was substantially in doubt,” and therefore banning it should be up to the voters. The point of equal protection is to prevent fundamental rights from being subject to mere popularity contests—especially when, as Justice Sotomayor pointed out, the population at risk is so few as to be politically powerless.

The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others—including many of Trump’s own supporters—much worse. Among the first actions taken by the administration was the repeal of the Lyndon B. Johnson–era directive ordering federal contractors to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, as well as subsequent orders barring discrimination on the basis of gender. The administration has also frozen all new cases in the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. Trump has also ended all federal-government diversity efforts and intends to fire employees involved in them. The administration’s executive order on DEI also threatens to sue companies for having diversity programs, a threat that will encourage companies to resegregate to avoid being accused of anti-white discrimination. Trump has shut down the White House’s Spanish-language website, ended refugee- and humanitarian-parole programs, and unconstitutionally attempted to nullify birthright citizenship.   

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Even before Trump took office, Republican-controlled states passed laws that curtail women’s rights to free speech, privacy, and movement on the grounds that those restrictions are necessary to ban abortion—something that, as Justice Samuel Alito took pains to reiterate during oral argument in Skrmetti, neither he nor his colleagues in the conservative movement regard as sex-based discrimination.

This agenda has, by the Republicans’ own account, been partly enabled by their success at demonizing transgender people in the November election. Trans people are a group few in number and marginalized enough that there is little political cost at the moment to persecuting them as Republicans have, or blaming them for their political misfortunes and abandoning them as Democrats have following their electoral loss. One transgender congressional representative was enough for Republicans to demand that all of the Capitol’s bathrooms be restricted by “biological sex.” The tiny percentage of trans children receiving care is justification to ban them from accessing treatment they seek. A defense-funding bill passed with limited Democratic support and signed by President Joe Biden will ban gender-affirming care for the children of service members—for those with trans children, their reward for serving their country is that their children will be discriminated against. If they are stationed in states like Texas, which has no less than 15 military installations, they will have few options, if any, for care outside the military system.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

This is shameless bullying, but then, the president is himself a bully of the highest order, and presidents are moral exemplars, for better and worse. It is not necessary for one to approve of gender-affirming care in order to respect people’s right to make their own decisions about what medical care is best for them and their families, or to oppose this kind of outright, ideologically motivated state persecution.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.” To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.

The staff was still setting up dinner on Mar-a-Lago’s outdoor patio on a balmy early-January evening when Donald Trump sat down. He was surrounded by several top advisers who would soon join him in the West Wing and who wanted to get his input before his attention shifted to his wealthy guests and Palm Beach club members.

Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, led the conversation, listing some of the dozens of executive orders that had been teed up for Trump’s signature once he reclaimed the presidency. She wanted to talk about sequencing, according to a Trump adviser present at the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. How would he like to stagger the orders over the first few weeks back in office?

“No,” Trump replied, this person told me. “I want to sign as many as possible as soon as we show up.”

“Day one,” he said.

Trump has followed through on the promise of an onslaught, unleashing in his first week more than two dozen executive orders, holding a nearly hour-long news conference and other question-and-answer-filled public appearances, and posting several times a day on social media. Some of this, of course, is in Trump’s nature. He is an inveterate showman whose instincts are to seek attention and dominate the discussion.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

But this time around, Trump’s ubiquity is also a deliberate strategy, several of his aides and allies told me. Part of the point is to send a message to the American people that their self-declared “favorite” president is getting things done. The person at the Palm Beach meeting and another Trump adviser, who also requested anonymity to describe private conversations, told me that the White House’s flood of orders and news is also designed to disorient already despairing Democratic foes, leaving them so battered that they won’t be able to mount a cohesive opposition.

Trump’s actions in his first week have been a mix of signal and noise, of distraction and seriousness. He has taken some defeats. But Trump has succeeded, at least, in creating a stark contrast with the quiet of his predecessor, and in (yet again) shifting the nation’s political discourse back toward him. And compared with 2017, the resistance has been far more muted. The Democrats, without an obvious head of the party and still digging out from November’s election disappointment, have yet to make a focused counterargument to Trump, instead getting largely drowned out in the national discourse.

“This is four years in the making. It’s days of thunder. The scale and the depth of this has blown the Democrats out. It’s blown out the media,” Steve Bannon, a former senior White House aide who still informally advises Trump, told me. “He vowed to start fast and now knows what he’s doing. This is a totally different guy than in 2017.”

When Trump left office in disgrace after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, former administration officials, conservative lawyers, and think-tank researchers began drafting orders and legislation—most famously, the Heritage Foundation initiative known as Project 2025—that could act as the foundation of a Trump revival. And after he won, his inner circle made clear that this time the administration would be staffed with true loyalists.

Wiles, who also co-chaired Trump’s campaign, told a closed-door gathering of Republican donors in Las Vegas in the early days of the transition that the president’s first moves would be to reinstate some executive orders from his first term that President Joe Biden had revoked, according one of the Trump advisers and another person familiar with the meeting. Wiles told the private gathering, for a group called the Rockbridge Network, that Trump would begin by withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty and the World Health Organization. Trump, indeed, signed those orders on his first day back in office, but they were only two of the directives to which he affixed his signature—with a giant Sharpie—in ceremonies held at the Capitol; inside a sports arena in Washington, D.C.; and in the Oval Office during his inauguration festivities and in the days that followed.

His executive orders so far have covered immigration, trade, demographic diversity, civil rights, and the hiring of federal workers. Trump ordered DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs in the federal government to be eliminated. He curtailed the Department of Justice’s civil-rights investigations. Federal health agencies were ordered to halt public communications. And he moved to expand presidential power by eliminating protections for federal workers—so he could more easily staff agencies with supporters—and by refusing, without citing any legal authority, to uphold the U.S. ban on TikTok despite a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in the ban’s favor.

“The EOs are so much better-executed now,” Bannon told me. “Back in 2017, we were writing things on the back of envelopes. It was like a playground game, shirts and skins. Now they have good people working, real lawyers.”

Some of Trump’s moves have been symbolic, such as one order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and another to insist that, even in national times of mourning, flags be flown at full staff on Inauguration Day. Others ordered government reviews—to examine China’s compliance with trade deals, for example, or the feasibility of creating an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs—but might not have real heft. If it was hard to tell the difference between what was real and what was for show, that was by design, the two advisers told me—to make it difficult for Trump’s opponents to focus their outrage.

His aides debated for weeks about how to enact his campaign pledge to pardon the January 6 rioters, whom the incoming president had declared “hostages.” Days before Trump took office, many advisers, including Vice President J. D. Vance, expected that pardons would be issued for many of the offenders but not, at least immediately, for those convicted of violent crimes, including assaulting police officers. But Trump overruled them, issuing a blanket pardon, and he included commutations for the leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, each of whom had been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. The two Trump advisers said that Trump thought leaving anyone out would invalidate the underpinning of the Capitol riot—his insistence that he won the 2020 presidential election. Trump also decided that any blowback would be manageable.

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

Not everything has worked out for Trump in his first week. Even some staunch Trump allies recoiled from the pardons for violent January 6 offenders; Senator Lindsey Graham called them “a mistake” on Meet the Press. Perhaps most notable, Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship generated a wave of legal action and was blocked by a federal judge. On his first day in office, Trump took on the Fourteenth Amendment by issuing a directive to federal agencies to stop issuing citizenship documents to children born on U.S. soil to parents in the country illegally or under temporary visas. The U.S. government has long interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that those born on American soil are citizens at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The U.S. district court judge who blocked the order, John Coughenour, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” and told a Trump administration attorney, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order.”

Trump has also struggled to achieve his goal of fast-tracking Cabinet confirmations in the early days of his administration. His choice for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, became the first Pentagon nominee to require the tie-breaking vote of the vice president to be confirmed. And Trump’s team is even more concerned about his pick for director of national intelligence, former Representative Tulsi Gabbard. The president’s aides are not certain that she has the needed support, and Trump himself has expressed some doubt that she’ll be confirmed, the two Trump advisers told me.

Despite these stumbles, the White House has reveled in Trump’s bombastic, over-the-top style, believing that his message is breaking through. Immigration officers have conducted raids in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; and other cities. A dozen Guatemalan men in shackles were boarded onto a military aircraft in El Paso, Texas, for the deportation flight to their native country, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump threatened tariffs on Colombia in a tiff, now seemingly resolved, over deportation flights. His advisers have also aimed to keep the media off-balance. The White House press office has not sent out a daily schedule to reporters, and has given little notice for Trump’s events. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has yet to hold a formal briefing (though the first is tentatively slated for later today).

The speed and volume of Trump’s orders so far seem to be scrambling the left. Millions of protesters marched in cities across the nation on January 21, 2017. Democratic civic groups exploded in popularity, liberals organized voter-registration drives, and cable-TV ratings and newspaper subscriptions soared. Late-night comics made Trump their top punch line. Trump’s hastily written travel ban on Muslim-majority countries went into effect seven days into his term in 2017, sending lawyers and even ordinary citizens sprinting to airports to assist those who were suddenly subject to detainment. That moment, in many ways, was the early high-water mark of the resistance and set a template for the Democrats’ defiance going forward.

Yesterday marked the first week of Trump’s second term. No large-scale protests have taken place. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued during last week’s caucus meeting that Democrats cannot chase every outrage, because the Trump administration will “flood the zone” with maddening changes, one person in the room told me. In a Saturday Night Live sketch this past weekend, the show’s Trump character shut down a performance based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which became a liberal totem a decade ago. The mood among Democrats, at least in some quarters, feels more like resignation than resistance.

So far, the action on the left has been centered more in the courtrooms than in the streets. Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me that the organization has filed lawsuits to contest a variety of Trump’s immigration orders and has worked to train volunteers in dozens of states to help local officials in responding to the administration’s plans.

“We’re in a different moment. People are not as surprised as the first time. But I would not mistake that for a lack of willingness to fight,” Schifeling said. “It seems like this first week is one giant test balloon—seeing what will stick, seeing what they can get away with. It’s incumbent on all of us to stay calm and firmly push back on them. Don’t give them an inch.”

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as White House communications director for Barack Obama and worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s campaigns, told me that Democrats “can’t stay demoralized” and must recognize that Trump proposed “an agenda that people bought into”—that even gave him a popular-vote victory.

“Now [we need] to stay most focused on those issues—like prices—which he is the most vulnerable on,” Palmieri said. Inflation was a core campaign issue, and Trump himself noted during the transition that he “won on groceries,” telling Meet the Press in December, “We’re going to bring those prices way down.”

“It’s a tangible thing, and he needs to deliver,” Palmieri said.

That hasn’t started happening yet. For all the shock and awe of Trump’s first week, none of his initial actions directly took on inflation. But nor are Democrats making Trump look particularly vulnerable.

“I was okay with being a convict,” Jason Riddle told me this week, not long after learning that he was among the roughly 1,500 recipients of sweeping presidential pardons. Some Americans, including President Donald Trump, believe that Riddle and others who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were unjustly persecuted and thus deserving of clemency—if not celebration. Riddle, a 36-year-old New Hampshire resident, rejects this framing. “I’m not a patriot or a hero just because the guy who started the riot says it’s okay,” he told me.

On Thursday, after consulting with his public defender, Riddle sent a pithy email to the Department of Justice:

To whom it may concern,

I’d like to reject my pardon please.

Sincerely,
Jason Riddle

Sent from my iPhone

Declining the pardon falls within Riddle’s legal rights. Many other January 6ers are holding out their hands for the president’s gift. “I can’t look myself in the mirror and do that,” Riddle said. Rather than whitewash his unsavory past, he feels called to own his behavior, even his most shameful moments—a tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous, which he says has saved him.

Some insurrectionists stormed the Capitol as true ideological warriors. Enrique Tarrio, a former leader of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, for example, were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States (and both men are now free). But many others who participated in the violence and destruction that day were similar to Riddle—people with ordinary lives and ordinary problems who found community and catharsis in the MAGA movement.

None of the above is an excuse for taking part in one of the ugliest moments in American history. But actively planning to carry out violence is arguably different from getting swept up in a mob. Today, Riddle doesn’t shirk his complicity. But the path that led him to the Capitol sheds light on how someone without much direction suddenly found it in a day of rage and mayhem. His story also raises an intriguing possibility: A person who stumbled into the darker corners of Trumpism can also stumble out.

For Riddle, the road to January 6 began after he graduated from high school, years before Trump’s first campaign. He served in the Navy and, according to his sentencing memo, “was honorably released from active duty to the naval reserves in light of reocurring [sic] struggles with alcohol use.” In college, at Southern Connecticut State University, as an older student, he decided to major in political science. On campus, he recalls feeling surrounded by younger Bernie Sanders supporters, while he took a liking to Trump. He described himself and another early Trump-supporting buddy as “obnoxious,” noting that they’d frequently drink in class. During Trump’s first presidential campaign, Riddle drove to rallies all over the country. At first he told himself that, as a poli-sci major, he was making anthropological field trips. In truth, he was becoming swept up in MAGA world.

He liked the excitement and controversy that surrounded Trump. “There was this aggression. I think I really enjoyed it,” he said. He’d pregame before the rallies, then join the crowds listening to the future president rant. “You go, you know, bond with these strangers,” he said. At that time in his life, Riddle remembers having barely any other interests or hobbies. He didn’t watch sports or exercise. He’d sit at home, drinking and trolling. “I spent all my time in those comments [sections] on social media, arguing with strangers,” Riddle said. “It was all about proving someone wrong. That would make me feel good about myself.”

After college, he struggled to hold down a job. Eventually, he found work as a mail carrier for the Postal Service. On his route, he’d ruminate. He’d carry on long conversations with a drinking buddy. “I would just be on the phone with my Bluetooth in, talking to another maniac who thinks like me, while just slowly going crazy,” Riddle said.

Radicalization can be a gradual process. He described himself as more of a libertarian than a MAGA Republican. In Trumpism, though, Riddle found an always-there outlet for his pent-up dissatisfaction with how his life was unfolding. But Trump’s time in office was running out. As he plotted to cling to power by desperate means, the president and his allies were spreading conspiracy theories about alleged voter fraud, including lies about mail-in ballots. “So I’m, like, literally working at the mail, which is what I believed to be part of the problem with the election,” Riddle said. In the weeks before the insurrection, he told me, he was drinking more heavily than ever. Sometimes, he’d stash additional booze in the mailbag he carried for the day’s rounds.

One day, drunk on the job, he abruptly quit, leaving piles of mail in his truck. Soon, he and two friends were driving from New Hampshire to Washington, D.C. One was a Trump supporter; the other, Riddle now thinks, was just along for the ride. Riddle’s own commitment to the “Stop the Steal” narrative involved some doublethink. “I know I’m wrong,” Riddle recalls telling himself. “Fuck it; I’m going down anyways.”

He recalls very clearly when he stepped over a barrier and marched into the Capitol. His friends stopped following him. “I remember actually seeing politicians from where I was standing,” he told me. “I could tell they were scared. I do remember enjoying that.”

Images of some of the other Capitol invaders soon spread on social media: the Viking-helmeted QAnon Shaman, the man with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, the guy carrying the speaker’s lectern. Riddle, too, achieved a kind of immortality: He was the insurrectionist hoisting a bottle of wine. In the immediate aftermath of the event, Riddle felt no remorse, or shame, or need to hide. He bragged about his exploits on a local newscast, and briefly enjoyed his newfound virality. He soon received a visit from the FBI.

In addition to pilfering booze from the Senate parliamentarian’s office, Riddle had stolen a leather-bound book labeled Senate Procedure, and quickly hawked it to a fellow rioter for $40. On April 4, 2022, at federal court in Washington, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison. “Three months for trying to stop the steal, one sip of wine at a time?” Riddle bragged to a New Hampshire newspaper. “Totally worth it.”

Even in prison, he still had his fame—or infamy. He remembers a correctional officer muttering “Let’s go, Brandon” to him on his first day, he told me, and that his fellow inmates nicknamed him “Trump.” But unlike some January 6ers, Riddle wasn’t further radicalized in prison, where he spent the summer of 2022. But neither did his conviction immediately lead him to repudiate the cause that had taken him to the Capitol. Riddle talked about running for Congress, leveraging what remained of his fleeting celebrity. He once filed paperwork, but never got any campaign off the ground.

Riddle thought he’d be able to manage his drinking after his release. But he struggled, and soon began attending daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He has relapsed a few times, but thanks largely to what he calls the “forced intervention” of his encounter with the criminal-justice system, he’s been living his “new life” for a little more than two years. Although sobriety remains a daily project, he feels he has finally gained insight into the reckless and self-destructive behavior that led him to the January 6 insurrection.

These days, he’s working at a restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire. He told me he feels comfortable in chaotic environments, and he’s thinking about looking for a job at a hospital or in mental-health services. Sobriety has changed his political perspective, too. Whereas he once viewed Trump as a bold truth teller, raw and unvarnished, he now sees the president as self-serving. When Trump called for public protests around the time of his indictments, Riddle felt especially played. “And I remember thinking, like, why would he do that? People died at the Capitol riot,” Riddle said. “That was the ‘duh’ moment I had with myself: Well, obviously because he doesn’t care about anybody other than himself, and you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise.”

Last fall, he donated to the Kamala Harris campaign, and voted for her in the election. An irony for him, after Trump’s reelection, is that he could be reliving his 2021 viral popularity—if he were still willing to exchange his version of reality for Trump’s. “One common thing I always hear is, like, ‘Good for you for going down there and expressing your views,’” he told me. “People who say that obviously don’t understand what they’re saying.”

The frustration in his voice was audible. “If I accept this pardon, if I agree to this pardon,” Riddle told me, “that means I disagree with that forced intervention.” Truth has finally collided with the president’s lies. Riddle may be enjoying one last hit of attention over his refusal of a pardon, but after the experience this week of seeing the insurrection’s ringleaders walk free, unrepentant, he is choosing a different path.

In his inaugural address on Monday, Donald Trump declared himself God’s chosen instrument to rescue America. He recalled the assassination attempt he survived last year: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Just a few minutes earlier, a beaming Franklin Graham—minister, Trump acolyte, and sometime Vladimir Putin admirer—had driven home the same point during his prayer. “Father, when Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: If only people actually believed these Trump-as-Jesus memes]

One of the first acts of God’s newly anointed president was to issue pardons or commute the sentences of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump issued pardons to most of the defendants and commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militias, most of whom had been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Axios reported that the pardons were “a last-minute, rip-the-bandage-off decision to try to move past the issue quickly.” As Trump’s team wrestled with the issue, “Trump just said: ‘Fuck it! Release ’em all,’” an adviser familiar with the discussions told Axios’s Marc Caputo.

More than 150 police officers were injured during the assault on the Capitol. They were hit with baseball bats, flagpoles, and pipes. Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant who retired because of the injuries he suffered as a result of the assault, was infuriated by Trump’s pardons and commutations. “It’s a miscarriage of justice, a betrayal, a mockery, and a desecration of the men and women that risked their lives defending our democracy,” Gonell told The New York Times’s Luke Broadwater.  

Officer Brian Sicknick, who was attacked by the pro-Trump mob, suffered a stroke and died of natural causes the following day. “I think about my brother almost every day,” Craig Sicknick told Broadwater. “He spent his life trying to do the right thing. He did it while he was in the military. He did it as a police officer. He did it in his personal life.” Sicknick added that the lack of accountability for those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 had left him heartbroken.

“We almost lost democracy that day,” he said. “Today, I honestly think we did lose democracy.”

THE IRONY IS HARD TO MISS: The movement that for the past half century was loudest in warning about the dangers of cultural decadence is most responsible for electing a president who personifies cultural decadence. (Trump won more than 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2024.) Not a single area of Trump’s life is untouched by corruption.  

Although white evangelicals have been firmly in his corner since 2016, the nature of their support has changed. If you talked with many evangelical supporters of Trump then, they expressed a certain queasiness about backing him. They didn’t approve of his immoral conduct, they were quick to say. The reason they rallied behind him was that his policies, particularly on abortion, aligned with their values. It was a transactional relationship; the election against Hillary Clinton was a “binary choice,” they would say time and again. But they assured us that they held no real love or deep loyalty for Trump. If another Republican, without Trump’s baggage, could replace him, so much the better.

It’s different now. Other Republicans, such as Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, did step up, and they never stood a chance. Trump has a cultlike hold on great swaths of the evangelical movement. They will stick with him regardless of what he does. Initially, they reconciled themselves to what he said. Then to how he acted. And now they have made their peace with policies and appointments that would have once caused a revolt. To lead Health and Human Services—far and away the most important Cabinet department related to abortion—Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who just last year embraced the legality of on-demand late-term abortions. Kennedy said abortion should be legal “even if it’s full term.”

“My belief is that we should leave it to the woman, we shouldn’t have government involved,” Kennedy said, reflecting views he has held for a lifetime. (Under pressure, he walked back those comments, but only to a point, saying that there should be restrictions on abortions in the final months of pregnancy, when only a tiny fraction of abortions occur.) The Heritage Foundation, which portrays itself as a conservative, ardently pro-life organization, lavished praise on Kennedy when he was appointed.  

A staunch pro-life conservative, who requested anonymity in order to speak bluntly, put it to me this way a few weeks ago: “If the pro-life movement isn’t willing to speak out against a radical pro-choice HHS secretary, then what’s the point of having the movement?” he asked. “Why does it even exist?”

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Trump himself betrayed the pro-life cause during the campaign, as I wrote last August. Yet those in the pro-life movement have, with very few exceptions, gone silent. They remain devoted to him. No other president, including Ronald Reagan, could get away with such a thing. Evangelicals’ reverence for Trump is unlike anything Americans have ever seen.

Eric Metaxas, a popular figure on the Christian right, struggled to “process the import” of Trump’s victory and inauguration. “The significance of it is so huge,” Metaxas said, “we’d have to go back literally to 1776.”

“You cannot overstate the significance of where we are now,” Metaxas continued. “It is monumental.”

Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister who served as governor of Arkansas and has been selected by Trump to be the American ambassador to Israel, said of Trump’s victory, “This wasn’t a comeback. It was a resurrection, and it was a powerful one. He might be called President Lazarus after this.” Fealty has drifted toward idolatry.

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY INTRIGUING is how bracing and electrifying a figure Trump is to many evangelicals. It is as if his disinhibitions have become theirs. Parents who disapproved of their children saying “damn” are now enthralled by a man who says “motherfucker.” Those who championed modesty and purity culture celebrate a thrice-married serial adulterer who made hush-money payments to a porn star. Churchgoers who can recite parts of the Sermon on the Mount are inspired by a man who, on the day he announced his candidacy for reelection, promised vengeance against his perceived enemies. Christians who for decades warned about moral relativism are now moral relativists; those who said a decent society has to stand for truth have embraced countless lies and conspiracy theories. People who rage at “woke cancel culture” delight in threats to shut down those with whom they disagree. Men and women who once stood for law and order have given their allegiance to a felon who issues pardons to rioters who have assaulted police officers.

Trump is a kind of permission slip; he has unlocked the libertine side of some pretty tightly coiled people, many of whom tend to be legalistic in their thinking and eager to call out the sins, and especially the sexual sins, of others.  

But things get stranger still. A lot of evangelicals justify their embrace of Trump on biblical grounds. They insist that they are on God’s side, or perhaps that God is on their side. The more they are pulled into the MAGA movement, the more they tell themselves, and others, that they are being faithful disciples of Jesus, now more than ever, and the more furiously they attack those who don’t partake in the charade.

The cognitive dissonance caused by acting in ways that are fundamentally at odds with what they claimed to believe, and probably did believe, for most of their lives would simply be too painful to acknowledge. The mind has ways of minimizing such discomfort: We rationalize our conduct, justify ourselves, and trivialize the inconsistencies. The story that many evangelicals today tell one another is that they are devoted followers of Christ, fighting satanic forces that are determined to destroy everything they know and love, and willing to stand in the breach for the man called by God to make America great again. It isn’t going to end well.

NOT ALL EVANGELICALS ARE TRUMP SUPPORTERS. Not all evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump are MAGA zealots. And even those who are deserve to be treated with dignity. Politics does not define every aspect of their character.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

This needs to be said too: Many evangelical churches, the pastors who lead them, and the people who comprise them are doing enormously good work. I have witnessed this with my own eyes, and been the recipient of those who are dispensers of grace. Faith, not politics, is their priority, and many of them have tried in good conscience to align their politics with their faith. When it works, as it did with the abolitionist movement, the global AIDS initiative, refugee resettlement, and protecting religious liberty around the world, it has advanced justice and healing.

But something is amiss. Today the evangelical movement is an essential part of a much larger, and largely destructive, political and cultural movement. Evangelicalism has in many instances become more tribal, unforgiving, and cruel. The world is noticing.

“As a general rule,” the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor has said, “I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus. It’s a bad trade.

On Monday, Stewart Rhodes, the eye-patched founder of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was in prison, which is where he has been since he was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. By Tuesday afternoon, he was taking a nap at my neighbors’ house.

I learned this when I recently walked past that house, which I’ve gotten to know well. A couple of years ago, my partner and I discovered that it was a kind of refuge for January 6ers. The mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed during the riot, lives there, along with Nicole Reffitt, the wife of a Texas man who brought a gun to the Capitol grounds. Occasionally a young January 6 defendant named Brandon Fellows stays at the house too. We got used to seeing them around the neighborhood, which, like most of Washington, D.C., is heavily Democratic. Before the election, the house was decorated with Christmas lights and the lawn with Trump signs, and no one complained. But on day one of Donald Trump’s new presidency, something came loose.

Strangers in MAGA hats and scarves started showing up with suitcases. Someone egged the house, twice. Fellows’s motorcycle was stolen. Although it was freezing on Tuesday, lots of people were on the porch, people I didn’t recognize. I spotted Fellows outside, wearing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement jacket, his version of a sartorial troll. “We were at breakfast with Stewart,” he said. “He’s taking a nap real quick.”

[Listen: Even some J6ers don’t agree with Trump’s blanket pardon]

Rhodes is among the most infamous J6ers for a reason. For years, he recruited and cultivated a militant group to resist government tyranny. His estranged ex-wife recently said she fears that she and some of her kids are on his “kill list” (lawyers for Rhodes denied this). In 2023, he was sentenced to 18 years for plotting to thwart the peaceful transfer of power on January 6.

When I ran into Fellows, Rhodes had just been released from prison, after Trump had pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 defendants in his first hours back in office. Trump had repeatedly promised that the pardons were coming, but the fact that he included those charged with the most serious crimes came as a surprise. In effect, he chose not to distinguish between the mildly and the severely dangerous—people who demonstrated terrible judgment on one day, getting swept up in a mob, versus those who had planned to carry out violence, for example. (Rhodes, however, was one of 14 of individuals granted a commutation, meaning his sentence was erased, but he did not have all his rights restored.)

In the past year, I spoke with many January 6ers and their families as my partner, Lauren Ober, and I made a podcast about our neighbors’ house. I know how their lives have been upended by the prosecutions, and so I understand that, for many of them, day one was some kind of setting things right. Many of them absorbed Trump’s framing: They thought of their loved ones as actual hostages, held by the government. “Today, we are a free country,” I heard one tearful father of a January 6er say outside the D.C. jail on Monday night as he waited for his son to be released.

In an instant, thousands of families were living a day they’d feared would never come. But in Donald Trump’s America, one person’s order restored is another person’s lawless abandon.

In our podcast, my partner and I followed the story of Marie Johnatakis, whose husband, Taylor, had been serving a seven-year sentence in a federal prison in Springfield, Missouri. Three weeks ago, when her world was still in chaos, Marie bought a one-way ticket home for Taylor, back to Seattle. Her daughter kept cautioning her that politicians don’t keep their promises—that Trump wouldn’t follow through on the pardons he campaigned on—but Marie is an optimist. On Tuesday night, she sent me a picture of her and Taylor an hour after she had picked him up from prison. They sat side by side, smiling, like in a Christmas-card photo. I asked her if it would be hard to adjust to him being home but she said no; it would be seamless. Taylor has written each of their five children one letter a week from prison, and read them books over the phone. Family harmony will be restored, Marie believes, and so will the rightness of all things.

“I mean, this started with January 6, four years ago, and we were the scum of the Earth. We were ‘domestic terrorists.’ We were, you know, like, we were people that you were supposed to be afraid of. And then the January 6 committee and all of that, and every time Trump had anything with criminal charges,” she told me. “He’s not a savior,” she said of Trump. “But for a lot of us, this is a miracle. A lot of us feel like it was one miracle after another.”

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was ‘tragic’]

Before taking office for a second time, Trump sometimes said he would pardon defendants on a case-by-case basis. I spoke with Republican lawyers who mentioned the idea of a review board, a Justice Department committee that might evaluate cases such as Taylor’s. His was a middling case; he was not among the several hundred people convicted solely of misdemeanors, such as trespassing and disorderly conduct, but nor was he among the small group convicted of seditious conspiracy. His charges involved using a megaphone to yell “One, two, three, go!” and lead a crowd to push a barricade into a row of police officers. In an alternative version of reality in which Trump had smashed history with slightly more finesse, lawyers might have debated in a room about which degrees of “assault” qualified which people for pardons, and you can imagine how Taylor might have won his freedom. But instead Trump chose a blanket pardon. Now the QAnon Shaman is posting about how excited he is to “BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!”

When I walked by my neighbors’ house on Tuesday afternoon, Nicole Reffitt, the wife of the man who was sentenced for bringing a gun to the Capitol, was outside too, being interviewed by a Dutch news crew. Her husband, Guy, was about to get out of jail, and the family would move back to Texas. But unlike Marie Johnatakis, Nicole seemed unsettled. Not all January 6ers are happy about the pardons. One woman, known as “MAGA Granny,” has said she doesn’t deserve a pardon and plans to complete her probation.

Nicole can think of a few defendants she believes don’t deserve one. “ I’m a law-and-order gal, really,” she told me. “And so not all charges should be gone there. People did really bad things that day.” In many people’s minds, her husband was one of them, even though he didn’t enter the Capitol or use his gun. She told me she was thinking of someone like Jacob Lang, who was captured on video swinging a baseball bat at police officers and thrusting a riot shield in their direction, according to an affidavit. At that moment, Lang, whose case never went to trial, was at the D.C. jail still waiting for his release, growing impatient. “These tyrannical animals will not stop and we need President Trump to get these men released ASAP!!!!!” someone posted on Monday from Lang’s X account. He was released Tuesday night.

Outside the D.C. jail on Monday and Tuesday, the former inmates were not quite running the asylum, but they were enchanting the crowd outside. So far, the 22 January 6ers held at the D.C. jail have been released slowly, a handful each day, but it has become a gathering place for the recently released from all over the country. On Tuesday night, Robert Morss, known as “Lego Man” because authorities found a Lego replica of the Capitol at his house, was a crowd favorite. Camera crews from Sweden, Japan, and Norway broadcast from outside the jail. Whenever Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” came on the speakers, the crowd belted it out.

On Tuesday night, I caught a glimpse of Rhodes at the edge of the crowd, giving an interview to a right-wing YouTuber. “It’s a day of celebration,” he said. “When President Trump was inaugurated, it was awesome. You know, like he said himself, God saved him to save America, and I believe that’s true. And then he turned around and saved us last night.” Rhodes’s only complaint was that he’d been given a commutation; he told the interviewer he was applying for a pardon. “ I think everyone deserves a pardon, without any, without any exception,” he said. “It’s impossible to get a fair trial here if you’re a Trump supporter … So if you have no chance of a fair trial, then you should be presumed innocent. That’s put back in your natural state, which is an innocent and free human being.” (Rhodes declined to talk with me.)

That’s the view of January 6 that follows naturally from the pardons: They were sham trials. It was actually a day of peace. Trump and his allies are likely to push this revised version of history for the next four years. House Speaker Mike Johnson has already announced that he will form a select subcommittee on January 6, “to continue our efforts to uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people.”

[Read: Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message]

Here is the truth. Prosecuting January 6ers did not require delicate forensics. Tens of thousands of hours of video show rioters beating up police with whatever tools are at hand. Five people died during the insurrection and in its immediate aftermath, and four police officers later died by suicide. Some 140 officers were assaulted, and many could never work again. This week, a retired officer, Michael Fanone, told Rhodes to go fuck himself live on CNN, and said he was worried for his safety and that of his family. Fanone is surely not alone. I think of the hundreds of D.C. citizens who served as jurors in January 6 cases that are now overturned, and the judges who presided over them.

When he sentenced Taylor Johnatakis, Judge Royce Lamberth wrote: “Political violence rots republics. Therefore, January 6 must not become a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions.” Lamberth, who is 81 and whose wife died a few months ago, had a couple of new January 6 cases due to start this week, a father and son, but they have disappeared from the docket. In his sentencing letter for Johnatakis’s case, he wrote, “This is not normal.” I wanted to ask him about the pardons but did not get a response from his office.

In our conversation, Marie Johnatakis referred to Lamberth as one of the “sweet judges,” and she meant it earnestly. I’ve known her for more than a year, and she is a gentle person. But her critique of him, although kindly delivered, is a radical one. She compared Lamberth to Javert, the prosecutor in Les Miserables. In her view, the judge is so rigidly attached to the law that he can’t see the deeper truth, which is that a good man like her husband should not have gone to jail.

She and Taylor fly home today. The kids, she told me, will be making them dinner.

Just hours into his second term, Trump pardons about 1,500 people charged in the January 6, 2001, Capitol attack.

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This week, House Republicans created a select subcommittee to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and uncover the “full truth that is owed to the American people,” Speaker Mike Johnson said. Presumably this is a “truth” that somehow fell outside the frames of the thousands of videos taken that day that showed rioters storming the building and beating police officers with whatever weapons were at hand. Despite January 6 being an extraordinarily well-documented crime, many Republicans seem intent on whitewashing what many federal judges, jurors, and really any average American citizen can see with their own eyes.

In the past year, I’ve gotten to know many J6ers well. My partner, Lauren Ober, and I made the podcast We Live Here Now. The thing they had all been waiting for are the pardons that President Donald Trump delivered as promised “on day one.” Trump kept his promise. Hours after being sworn in, he gave clemency to more than 1,500 people convicted of involvement at the Capitol that day. Among them were some longtime militia leaders who carefully planned the riot. Now they’re free. For some, this is order restored; for so many other Americans, this is lawless abandon. And not everyone is reacting to the pardons the way you might expect.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Marie Johnatakis: Hello?

Hanna Rosin: Hey, this is actually Hanna Rosin. I’m calling on my son’s phone for various reasons.

Johnatakis: Hanna! How are you?

Rosin: You sound happy.

Johnatakis: I am. I just got done bawling.

Rosin: Bawling. As in crying. Hard.

Johnatakis:  I think everything just came out. I was just holding it in for the last how many years?

Rosin: That was Marie Johnatakis, whose husband, Taylor, was just pardoned by President Donald Trump. He’d been sentenced to over seven years for what he did at the Capitol on January 6. Now he’s coming home.

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

A few hours into his second term, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some had been charged with serious felonies, like assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. Others were charged with misdemeanors, like trespassing and disorderly conduct.

I’ve gotten to know a lot of January 6ers over the last couple of years, so I know how these prosecutions have upended their lives. And I know that for a lot of them, the pardons have restored their sense of justice. For them, this week feels like the world is set right again.

And as I checked in with them this week, and hung out outside the D.C. jail, mostly I just saw the chasm more clearly: how one person’s order restored is another person’s lawless abandon.

Johnatakis: I know this is going to sound crazy, but I have just really felt like Trump will do what he says he’s gonna do. And so, ever since that, I was like, “Well, if Taylor gets pardoned, it will be the first day.”

Rosin: Three weeks ago, when her world was still in chaos, Marie Johnatakis bought a one-way ticket home for Taylor. Trump had mentioned that he might pardon all the January 6ers, but you could never be sure. Politicians don’t usually do what they say, her daughter told her. And for a family whose only working parent had been in jail for more than a year, an airline ticket is a luxury.

But Marie had watched the video over and over of Trump telling an NBC reporter that he would pardon the J6ers on day one of taking office.

Donald Trump: We’re gonna look at everything. We’re gonna look at individual cases—

Kristen Welker: Everyone?

Trump: Yeah.

Welker: Okay.

Trump: But I’m going to be acting very quickly.

Welker: Within your first 100 days? First day?

Trump: First day.

Welker: First day?

Trump: Yeah. I’m looking first day.

Welker: You’ll issue these pardons.

Rosin: And then on day one, the world flipped.

Man: First we have a list of pardons and commutations relating to the events that occurred on January 6, 2021.

Trump: Okay. And how many people is this?

Man: I think this order will apply to approximately 1,500 people, sir.

Trump: So this is January 6. And these are the hostages, approximately 1,500 for a pardon. Full pardon.

Rosin: On Monday night, just before midnight, Marie finally picked Taylor up from prison, and she sent me a picture. They sat side by side, smiling, like a late Christmas-card photo. Marie hasn’t sat side by side with her husband since he was taken into custody just before Christmas 2023.

I asked her if she thought his transition home would be rocky, and she said no—it’llbe seamless. Taylor has written each of their five children a letter a week from prison, and he sometimes reads them books over the phone. In her mind, family harmony will be quickly restored, and so will the rightness of all things.

Johnatakis: I mean, this started with January 6, four years ago, and we were the scum of the Earth. We were domestic terrorists. We were people that you were supposed to be afraid of. Every time Trump had anything with criminal charges or anything like that, he has really been our hope for anything that would ever mean a pardon for us. And so a lot of us feel like it was one miracle after another.

And people don’t look to Trump—people in the movement on the chats that I’m on and stuff like that don’t look to him like a savior. But I think a lot of the people—almost everyone has faith, like a faith in God, a faith in Jesus. And I do hear a lot of like, for us, it’s a miracle.

Rosin: There is a whole other way that these pardons could have rolled out.

A little more than a week before inauguration, Vice President J. D. Vance made it clear to Fox News that he wasn’t expecting blanket pardons.

J. D. Vance: If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there, but we’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.

Rosin: During the transition, I spoke with Republican lawyers who imagined there might be some kind of review board, like maybe a Justice Department committee that would evaluate cases such as Taylor’s.

Taylor was not among the several hundred convicted solely of misdemeanors, such as trespassing or disorderly conduct. But also, he was not among the small handful convicted of seditious conspiracy. His assault charge hung on the fact that he was yelling into his bullhorn, urging a crowd to push a barricade into a row of cops. All captured on video.

Taylor Johnatakis: One foot! One, two, three, go!

Rosin: And under the J. D. Vance scenario, there would have been qualified lawyers debating in a room about degrees of “assault” and what length of sentence they merit. But instead, Trump chose to go with a blanket pardon, which sounds uncomplicated but actually brings maximum chaos.

Tuesday night, I was walking down my own street past a house that I know well. It’s a kind of safe house for January 6ers. Micki Witthoeft lives there. She’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed at the Capitol that day. So does Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy, was sentenced to over seven years for bringing a gun to the Capitol. Occasionally, a young January 6er named Brandon Fellows stays there too.

My partner, Lauren Ober, and I got to know the people in that house last year when we made an Atlantic podcast about it called We Live Here Now. I’ve walked by their house hundreds of times. But when I walked the dogs past the house on Tuesday in freezing weather, I saw Brandon outside, wearing an ICE jacket—as in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This is his version of a sartorial troll.

Rosin: So what’s going on? I guess I don’t even know the basics of what’s going on.

Fellows: Last I heard was from Jen. We were at lunch with Stewart Rhodes—breakfast with Stewart Rhodes today.

Rosin: He’s here?

Fellows: Yes. But we’ve all been up, and he’s taking a nap real quick. So we just got back, but—

Rosin: Is he staying here?

Rosin: I froze—and not from the cold. Stewart Rhodes, the guy with the eye patch, who founded the Oathkeepers. He for years recruited and cultivated an armed militia to resist government tyranny. His estranged ex-wife recently said she fears that she and their kids are on his quote “kill list.” Rhodes’s attorneys have said that the idea that his family’s in danger is unfounded.

Before Trump’s commutation he was serving an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, one of the longest of all the January 6ers. Now Stewart Rhodes was taking a nap down the block from my house.

[Music]

More on that after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: While Rhodes was napping in her house, Nicole Reffitt, was outside, being interviewed by a Dutch news crew. Her family is notorious, because her son, Jackson, turned in his father to the FBI. Someone adapted the trial transcript into an excellent play called Fatherland. Anyway, this week her husband, Guy, was about to get out of prison. But unlike Marie Johnatakis, she seemed unsettled about the pardons.

Rosin:  How do you guys feel about the blanket pardon?

Reffitt: You know, I was never a fan of that. I guess he thought it was the quickest way—pull the Band-Aid off. I was more in favor of commutations and then let’s look at everything, because not only did people do bad things that day, but there were some charges that were absolutely wielded like a weapon against people. And those things also need to be looked at because, you know, I don’t want anyone to have to go through this. And that’s my biggest concern.

Rosin: What do you mean “concern”? Like, I don’t know how to think about the blanket pardon either, Nicole. I’m trying to think what’s the difference between this and if it had gone a different way—what does it mean that it’s a blanket? Have you guys talked about that?

Reffitt: Well, because now all charges are gone.

Rosin: Yeah.

Reffitt: You know, and, uh, I’m a law-and-order gal, really. And so not all charges should be gone there. People did really bad things that day.

Rosin: In many people’s minds, Nicole’s husband, Guy, was one of the people who did really bad things that day, and he did get a fair sentence. Guy brought a gun to the Capitol, although he didn’t enter the building or use it.

Reffitt: Yeah, I never expected him not to have something, you know, like, I figured he’d be charged with something, because it was so significant, but it was just so over-the-top to me, all of the charges and that has always been my biggest issue.

[Crowd chanting]

Rosin: As of Wednesday only eight of the 22 people held at the D.C. jail had been released. But outside the jail had turned into a gathering place for people released from all over the country. Camera crews stood around from Sweden, Japan, Norway broadcasting interviews with the newly freed. And when Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” came on the speakers, the crowd belted it out together.

[Sound of “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley]

Rosin: On Tuesday night, I caught a glimpse of Stewart Rhodes at the edge of the crowd. He’s hard to miss, with the eye patch. He was giving an interview to a right-wing YouTuber.

Stewart Rhodes: It’s a day of celebration. I mean, yesterday it was too. When President Trump was inaugurated, it was awesome. You know, like he said himself, you know, God saved him to save America, and I believe that’s true. And then he turned around and saved us last night, I mean, and restored us to our freedom. I mean, I’m not 100 percent restored yet. I’m still waiting for a pardon, but it’s so, so wonderful to be out, be out of these bars.

Rosin: That’s Rhodes’s one big complaint—that he’d been given a commutation instead of a pardon. A commutation can erase a sentence, but it does not restore all your rights, such as the right to buy guns. He told the interviewer he was applying for a pardon. He said, “ I think everyone deserves a pardon, without any exception.”

Rhodes: No one got a fair trial. It’s impossible to get a fair trial here if you’re a Trump supporter. And so you don’t have an unbiased jury, an impartial jury; you don’t have an impartial judge; you don’t have a jury that’s going to hold the government to its standard beyond reasonable doubt.

It’s not going to happen. So if you have no chance of a fair trial, then you should be presumed innocent. That’s put back in your natural state, which is an innocent and free human being.

Rosin: So that’s Rhodes’s version of history. They were sham trials. It was actually a day of peace. It’s a revision of history that Trump and his allies are likely to try to push and push for the next four years. House Speaker Mike Johnson has already formed a select subcommittee on January 6, to quote “continue our efforts to uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people”

But for a whole crew of other people involved in January 6, these pardons represent a reversal of justice.

January 6 did not require delicate forensics. It has to be one of the most well-documented crimes in modern history. There are tens of thousands of hours of video showing rioters beating up police with whatever tools are at hand.

At least five people died for reasons that are in some way related to the insurrection. Some 140 police officers were injured, and many could never work again. On Wednesday, retired officer Michael Fanone had choice words for Rhodes that he expressed live on CNN.

Michael Fanone: This is what I would say to Stewart Rhodes: Go f— yourself. You’re a liar.

Anchor: We didn’t obviously to beep that word out …

Rosin: Fanone said he’s worried for his safety and that of his family.

The judge who sentenced Taylor Johnatakis, Judge Royce Lamberth, wrote a letter in connection with the sentencing. He wrote: “Political violence rots republics. Therefore, January 6 must not become a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions.” Lamberth is 81. His wife died a few months ago. He had a handful of new January 6 cases on his docket, but of course they’ve disappeared. In that sentencing letter, he continued, “This is not normal.”

We tried to reach him to talk about the pardons, by the way, but he wasn’t ready to talk about them yet.

 Reffitt: My husband’s being processed out of Oklahoma right now. Can’t wait to see that man. He will be here in D.C. tomorrow. And you know what? We’re getting freedom, baby! That’s right. We’re getting freedom! We are getting freedom. And that’s absolutely right.

Rosin: At the Tuesday-night rally, Nicole got a call from Guy. He was out. On the road. Headed towards the airport.

Reffitt: He’s in the car. He’s in a car! In a car!

Rosin: Stewart Rhodes told the crowd that he was headed back to California this week. As for Marie and Taylor, they fly home on Thursday. Marie told me the kids are gonna make dinner.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Stef Hayes. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

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