The committee airs critical testimony by a Trump loyalist and criticises his daughter, Ivanka Trump.

“Many secrets, no mysteries”: That is the basic rule of all Donald Trump scandals.

There has never been any mystery about what happened on January 6, 2021. As Senator Mitch McConnell said at Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There’s no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

Thanks to the work of the congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Americans now have ample detail to support McConnell’s assessment. They know more about when and how Trump provoked the event. They have a precise timeline of Trump’s words and actions. They can identify who helped him, and who tried to dissuade him.

But with all of this information, Americans are left with the same problem they have faced again and again through the Trump years: What to do about it? Again and again, they get the same answer: “It’s somebody else’s job.”

[David Frum: Biden laid the trap. Trump walked into it.]

Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated Trump’s collusion with Russia. Mueller brought charges against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort; against Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn; against Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen; against Trump’s longtime political ally Roger Stone; against many Russian nationals and organizations too. But on Trump himself, Mueller refused to pass judgment, because he believed he had no legal power to indict a serving president. He further believed that because he did not have that power, he should make no clear comment on whether the president’s conduct was indictable. Mueller presented evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice, but beyond that … he tossed the responsibility over to Congress.

Within a few months of Mueller’s report, brave whistleblowers revealed Trump’s scheme to blackmail the president of Ukraine to help Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. This time, Congress took responsibility for investigating the matter. Testimony on the record confirmed the whistleblowers’ allegations. The House impeached Trump; the Senate tried him. The main argument of Trump’s defense? Holding Trump to account should be somebody else’s job: in this case, the voters.

Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone argued, “For all their talk about election interference, they’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history—and we can’t allow that to happen.” If Trump did wrong, let an election decide the matter, not Congress. Enough Republican senators accepted that argument to ensure Trump’s acquittal.

[Quinta Jurecic: The January 6 hearings changed my mind]

In November 2020, the voters delivered their verdict. By a vote of 81 million to 74 million, they repudiated Trump. Trump and his supporters refused to accept the outcome. First by fraud, then by force, they tried to overturn the election. Once again, they argued, it was somebody else’s job to hold Trump to account: not the voters but the state legislatures, which should reject the popular vote and appoint their own electors instead.

Trump’s plot led to his second impeachment—and to one more round of “It’s somebody else’s job.” Trump’s attempted coup had failed, his enablers argued, and he would be leaving office on schedule. Impeachment is not the only remedy for presidential misconduct, McConnell said: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

And so the circle was complete. Criminal prosecution? No, it’s up to Congress. Congressional impeachment? No, leave the decision to the voters. Refusal to accept an election defeat? Back to criminal prosecution.

To repeat McConnell’s phrase, it’s “practically and morally” very difficult to hold a wayward president to account. An American president is bound by law and operates through legal institutions, but a president also has sources of personal authority that are not beholden to the law and are exercised outside institutions. Trump drew more deeply than most presidents on nonlegal, noninstitutional authority.

[David Frum: Mueller helped Trump keep his most important secrets]

He and his core supporters repeatedly threatened that any attempt to apply laws to him would provoke violence against the law. Trump allies and Trump himself have warned of riots if he were ever prosecuted.

Maybe these threats are empty boasts. But nothing like them has ever been heard before from a modern American leader. On January 6, Trump welcomed political violence on his behalf—and got what he wanted. He has not repented or reformed in the two years since.

But the very threat makes it all the more necessary to proceed with the January 6 Committee’s criminal referrals. If Trump does not face legal consequences for the events of that day, he and his supporters have reason to believe that Trump somehow frightened the U.S. legal system into backing down from otherwise amply justified action.

[Mark Leibovich: Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality]

Show Trump a line, and he’ll cross it. That was his record as president, down to his last days in office, when he absconded with boxes of government materials as though they were his private property. Trump has already announced a run for president in 2024. Whatever happens with that run, his likeliest Republican rivals are studying his methods, considering which to emulate and which to discard. The incitement of violence by the head of the government is not an infraction that can be dismissed and forgiven by any political system that hopes to stay constitutional.

For six years, the job of upholding the rule of law against Donald Trump has been passed from one unwilling set of hands to the next. Now the job has returned to where it started. There is nobody else to pass it to. The recommendation has arrived. The time for justice has come.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked, “What should be done about fentanyl? Has it affected your family or community?”

Judy shared a personal tragedy:

My 26-year-old son died of an overdose of heroin doctored with fentanyl. We would learn two weeks later that he had passed the bar exam in South Carolina and would have become a practicing attorney. I was not aware my son had ever used heroin. He was not an addict but was dating a woman who was purportedly in recovery. I found a text exchange between them on his iPhone in which he sent her a photo of a baggie with the question “What is this?” The baggie had been found on the floor of his truck. Her reply was couched in slang that I cannot decipher, so I’m not certain he knew exactly what he was using. He was the youngest of my three sons. I’ll never know the full details of why he overdosed.

Max is “a recovering addict … and now, an ex-felon, free after three-plus years in federal prison for drug crimes.” He writes:

The market for fentanyl exists for one reason—because it is easier and cheaper to import than heroin, making circumventing interdiction easier. The high is the same.

From experience, I can tell you without doubt that opioid addicts are just looking for the same high they always sought. Users are not seeking out fentanyl because it gets them higher, or because it’s somehow better than other opioids—they’re buying fentanyl because that’s what’s on the street now. And fentanyl is what’s on the street now because it’s easier to get into the country. Fentanyl is stronger, per microgram, than any illicit opioid that has come before—everyone knows this. But the salient point about that fact is that drug producers, smugglers, and dealers can suddenly get as many people high off of one kilo of pure fentanyl as they would have with 10 kilos of heroin. Which means equal profits for a fraction of the shipping cost and risk of arrests, interdiction, etc.

The fact is, people want to get high. There is a portion of the population that is just plain uncomfortable in their own skin—no matter how successful they may appear—and are predisposed to seeking chemical assistance. I just don’t think it’s an issue we can legislate or enforce away. Until we find a cure for the sad human condition, we will have a drug problem. (I’ve been clean six years now—including three inside [prison]—but only because I’ve managed to obtain access to buprenorphine, which is actually just another opioid [prescribed to treat an opioid-use disorder], although a milder, legal one.)

The fentanyl problem exists on the same level as the synthetic marijuana problem: It’s only here because we forced it to be. America’s War on Drugs has imposed a ridiculous, artificial price hike on everything we’ve deemed “illicit” … Think about it: Marijuana doesn’t cost any more to produce than cilantro. Heroin could be as cheap as aspirin. And so on and so on—99 percent of the cost of “drugs” stems from the fact that they’re deemed illegal, and thus every step of production and distribution must be clandestine.

By trying to fix this social ill through prohibition, we’ve simply created an incentive for the market to come up with something that turned out to be worse. The mere existence of the fentanyl problem—like the synthetic cannabinoid problem, the “bath salt” problem, and many others—traces back to our own efforts. The drug war needs to be rethought before something even worse comes along. We have only ourselves to blame.

Read: What does a good health-care system look like?

Claire proposes a policy change:

Fentanyl has flooded the market because of the restricted access to pharmaceutical-grade opioids, and because cartels manufacture it for a tiny fraction of the cost of an equivalent kilo of Afghan heroin, at a much higher potency, with precursors made in China. The clandestine production leads to variability in quality and potency that imperils the consumer. The cartels make billions and may even work with endemically corrupt government(s), such that it isn’t just a matter of sneaking past a border guard; they can facilitate elaborate systems of fraud (like buying or imitating pharmaceutical companies).  

I would be in favor of decriminalizing all drugs so that consumption can be regulated for safety, and usage can be guided via education or harm-reduction programs, when necessary. The bureaucracy built around the War on Drugs is incentivized in the opposite direction.

Melanie’s loss of a family member colors how she thinks about her work helping children, which she sees as the key to heading off substance-abuse problems:

My sister-in-law's stepdaughter died from a fatal drug overdose. I always called her my niece. She had been actively addicted to heroin, so fentanyl is considered [a likely factor]. She grew up in a rural area on the New York–Pennsylvania border called “meth valley” 20ish years ago; meth took a huge toll on the area, but it’s not as though the community was thriving before.

On her 13th birthday, her mother gathered her possessions into a garbage bag, drove her to her father’s house, and said, “I can’t handle her anymore.” A few months later, her father went to jail, his girlfriend (my sister-in-law) sent her back to her mother’s house, and her mother placed her in a group foster home. There were a lot of group foster homes in that area and very few services to keep families together.

Parents were keen to protect their children from the ravages of meth by putting them into therapeutic group homes; parents would do this when their kids exhibited typical teenage drug use like drinking or smoking marijuana, or even teen waywardness. But the trauma was immense, and the services of underwhelming value. Staff seemed to think my niece’s decision to use drugs (at that point, marijuana) had more to do with depictions of it on That ’70s Show than the fact that she’d watched her father try to kill her brother and regularly hid with her little half sister when her father went on violent rampages.

When she was transitioning out of the group home, getting ready to live with me first, then eventually her mother, she mentioned that people in her area were switching from meth to heroin. Eventually the rest of the world caught on and other locales caught up.

My niece emerged from the group home very angry, more traumatized, and desperate for love. That’s probably the most potent combination for ensuring that the generational cycle of addiction and trauma continues, and her adulthood was a series of abusive relationships and addictions, interrupted by stays in jail. At times she could overcome her addiction to chemicals, but not to relationships that held the promise of giving her the family she never quite had. When she died, she left three children behind in foster care. I want to believe they can have good lives, but I know the statistics about how terrible foster care is.

What role did the War on Drugs play in all this? It led us to believe that we needed to fight a war on drugs, not a war on child abuse, neglect, maltreatment, and general human misery.

We love narratives that imply that the mere proximity of a drug causes addiction, and that waves of different chemicals (crack, meth, heroin) are discrete events, instead of a continual effort by the most hurt among us to numb their pain. Fentanyl is a little different in that it is so likely to cause overdose fatalities. So it makes addiction harder to hide, both within families and in the media. We’re talking about it more, and we’re talking about its users with greater kindness and compassion. But we need to move the conversation to prevention.

We have known for over 20 years that childhood trauma is strongly linked to substance abuse. We have known for nearly 50 years how to prevent a significant amount of childhood trauma, and we have had plenty of time to invest in more research, if that was ever a priority. It’s my job to prevent childhood trauma through public education and policy. And normally I’m very optimistic about it. But right now, I’m facing the first Christmas without my niece and I’m not optimistic about much.

Claire’s family had a positive experience with fentanyl:

Five years before she died in 2006, my mother came to live with me. In addition to severe scoliosis and emphysema, she already had multiple compression fractures of her spinal vertebrae, and there were to be many more. A couple of years later, following a particularly painful compression fracture, her medical team gave her a fentanyl patch—and the effect was magical. The pain receded and remained bearable even after the patch was removed. No other form of pain relief other than morphine ever gave her as much relief as that one patch. Until I learned of all the fatal overdoses, I have always thought of fentanyl with gratitude for the relief it gave my dear mother. My deepest sympathy and love to all those who have suffered because of this drug.

Marjorie needs powerful opioid pain medication:

I am 44 years old, single, female, and an acupuncturist with my own successful business for 12 years. Before that I was a licensed social worker in New York City. I have an inoperable thoracic syrinx that causes me 24/7 severe nerve pain that requires a combination of nerve medications and opioid pain medications. It became active three years ago so that my torso, chest, and pelvis burn and stab. I go to the Ainsworth Institute for Pain in New York and my primary-care doctor prescribes non-opioid medications. I have undergone several procedures from neurosurgeons at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, including two failed spinal-cord-stimulator trials and a failed pain-pump trial with complications.

I have never felt addicted to these medications. I am dependent on them for physical nerve pain.

It took me about a year, and getting my gallbladder removed, to finally be prescribed opioids regularly. I was bounced around like a hot potato because of the “opioid epidemic.” If I were to go to an ER, staff could label me “drug seeking.” During three ER trips, my blood pressure soared, I cried and was never prescribed pain medications.

I wish I did not have to take these medications. They cause constipation so bad that I have almost gone to the ER multiple times. I now take stool softeners daily and magnesium powder three to four times a week. I have miraculously learned to work in a lot of pain, to cope the best I can. I was switched to 20 milligrams of methadone daily and Percocet as needed, which I try not to take. I take [the neuropathic pain medications] pregabalin and gabapentin. I get blood drawn every three months. My liver enzymes were batty two times because I was taking too much acetaminophen.

I worry about my liver processing so much medication. However, the medication is keeping me alive. The indescribable pain caused me suicidal thoughts for the first time in my life in the first year. Those thoughts are now gone because my pain is controlled “just enough.”

I have become an avid cold-water swimmer with a group on Long Island that has helped me to cope. I belong to a chronic illness/pain group called the Chronicon Community by Nitika Chopra that has been a godsend. We are reading The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke for our book club. I pray the street-fentanyl crisis is healed. I pray science can someday solve nerve pain and neuropathies.

Marsha blames the Drug Enforcement Administration for the hardships she experiences in getting the pain medication that she needs:

The doctors in the Emory Pain Center made it more and more difficult for me to get oxycodone. Finally, my doctor simply refused to give it to me. He agreed that there was no likelihood that I would become an addict as I have been stable on the same dose since 2007. But he simply did not want to give me the one drug that helps my pain with the fewest side effects. I had been receiving oxycodone from my rheumatologist for about 12 years. She became frightened that her office would be raided by the DEA if she kept prescribing Percocet to patients. She gave me a month to find another doctor to prescribe it.  

Has the DEA saved anyone from drug addiction? Or has it simply made life very difficult for people like me?  

I see a specialist for pain alone every 28 days. The appointment lasts about 20 minutes from arrival to departure. I am given a paper prescription. I must carry that paper prescription in person with ID to a pharmacy. I must stand in line while it is refilled.  I am 79. I have trouble driving. I have trouble standing. I fear catching COVID.  

There are only two DEA accomplishments that I am aware of. One is to make pain control more difficult for people like me. The other is to cause many, many deaths. By putting such strict control on prescription drugs, users have been driven to heroin and fentanyl.  

What an accomplishment.

Victoria’s daughter died from fentanyl. She is raising that daughter’s four children (ages 14, 14, 10, and 4).

She writes:

You are spot-on about the failure of interdiction to stop the proliferation of fentanyl. Better luck catching a moonbeam in your hand, as the nuns sang in The Sound of Music.

We have to drop the stigma and provide lifesaving treatment, even if that is achieved by providing safe fentanyl. We need to follow in Canada’s footsteps and provide clinics where people can obtain safe heroin and fentanyl, not just clinics where they can use the drugs they procured on the street. Without the stigma, these are eminently reasonable ways to save lives. And it keeps people in the medical orbit until they are ready to seek treatments like buprenorphine or methadone.

Heather agrees:

I lost my 23-year-old cousin to heroin, despite him trying incredibly hard to overcome his addiction. I am a proponent of harm-reduction centers where naloxone is available. I would love to see these centers have options for treatment and counseling at no cost.

Waging a War on Drugs is not going to stop deaths. Allowing people to be seen and heard in a judgment-free safe place is what I think will start to make a difference. There are so many people who are afraid to get the help they need because of the fear of “getting in trouble.” As a previous EMS provider, I cannot tell you how many times we picked up a teenager who (for example) took cocaine and suddenly panicked but who would not admit to it for us to safely and effectively treat them.

Whereas Peter favors a draconian crackdown on the illegal-drug trade. Among the steps that he suggests:

Unless we fundamentally revisit U.S. self-limitations on much stronger actions to both reduce supply and improve treatment, there really aren’t any good answers here, just bad versus less bad.   

Singapore has 50 times fewer opioid users per capita and over 35 times fewer opioid deaths per 100,000 people (1.18 vs. 42 ) than British Columbia, Canada, because Singapore has maintained extremely harsh punishments for drugs, like public flogging and the death penalty for drug dealing/smuggling. One could rightly say such punishments are inhumane.

However, given the more than 80,000 annual U.S. opioid deaths [in 2021], and another 500,000 [opioid] addicts inflicting misery on themselves and widely spreading their crime and homelessness through neighborhoods they live in, at this point it’s pretty clear that, from an objective humanitarian and societal perspective, Singapore’s approach is much more successful. It may well be time to consider Singapore-type draconian measures for at least medium- to large-scale trafficking.

… And since interdiction is no longer significantly useful, we’re going to have to go much harder after manufacturing bases and precursor interdiction. It’s relatively well known where manufacturing is being done, and could be much further improved with drone and/or satellite-based chemical-signature area scanning. Because of complete systemic governmental corruption, the U.S. needs to start playing real hardball with Mexico, up to and including suspension of the NAFTA/USMCA treaty, to allow rapid, direct U.S. attacks on cartel manufacturing facilities via drone and/or precursor-transport networks.

Read: Will an influential conservative brain trust stand up to Trump?

Jaleelah does not believe fentanyl can be eliminated. She explains why before offering an alternative approach to the problem:

In Canada, large cartels aren’t the main importer, and domestic producers contribute to the trade. Fentanyl use is often accidental—less potent drugs are often laced with fentanyl—so public-service announcements discouraging use won’t stop the deaths. It’s hard for authorities to detect it in the mail, and it’s hard for run-of-the-mill drug users to detect it in their supply. Given these facts, the focus should be mitigating the harms of fentanyl rather than stopping it in its tracks.

If the government cares about stopping fentanyl overdoses, it must implement testing programs for other drugs. Users of cocaine, heroin, and meth should be encouraged to bring their supply to government facilities where they can figure out if their drugs are laced. The government must assure users that they will not be arrested or tracked for the crime of being safe. Facilities like this already exist in parts of Canada.

Government intervention alone will not stop the death. Uptake will be slow, and some people will still use fentanyl intentionally. Additionally, many people can’t call for help by themselves when they’re suffering the effects of fentanyl. We need strong social norms in favor of helping our fellow citizens when they are actively overdosing.

People are afraid of drug users. I have seen an overdose once in my life. I was 18, and I regrettably did not rush to help. I was in a parked car in a dark, nearly empty garage and I was initially paralyzed by the fear that the man screaming and coughing up his lungs would lash out if I offered assistance. Thankfully, two passers-by jumped into action: One ran to grab a naloxone kit, and one sat with the man and comforted him until an ambulance arrived.

Lots of people see drug users as irresponsible, selfish people who refuse to get their lives in order. The reality is that rehab programs—if they’re even affordable—are ineffective. To reduce use of common fentanyl vectors like heroin, cocaine, and meth, we need to invest in scientific and sociological research to produce recovery programs that aren’t based on religious moralizing.

Opioid addiction has a genetic component, meaning that many addicts aren’t morally responsible for lifetime addictions (beyond the responsibility they bear for making one or two bad decisions—or succumbing to peer pressure—as a teen or young adult). We need to stop viewing addiction as a moral failing and start realizing that it’s a failure of the health-care system.

Congressional panel urges Justice Department to indict ex-president for inciting insurrection, among other charges.

Among the many Holocaust anecdotes I heard again and again as a child—my grandparents were the kind of survivors who liked to talk—certain stories took on the force of fables. And none was more common than the tale of the brother who stayed and the brother who left. Different versions of this basic narrative abounded, set in 1933, in 1938, in 1941. One brother couldn’t bear to abandon his small shop or his parents or his homeland, while another brother packed a suitcase at the first inkling of danger and set off toward the French border or over the North Sea or into Soviet territory. The more impetuous one lives. That was the takeaway. When the social and political barometric pressure begins to drop, when you can feel that tingling: Leave.

Even recounted by survivors, maybe especially so, the simple story of a threshold, in or out, always seemed too shaped by retrospect. A decision like that—ethical, national, personal—must have been grueling and not at all obvious. How many of the people who swore they would leave after Donald Trump was elected, fearing the same collapse of democratic norms that the Nazis portended, actually did? Not so many. Identifying that point at which all is lost is not so easy.

This existential dilemma is Lion Feuchtwanger’s abiding concern in The Oppermanns, a long-forgotten masterpiece published in 1933 and recently reissued with a revised translation by the novelist Joshua Cohen. It is a book written in real time—written, that is, right on that threshold. Feuchtwanger was one of the most popular German writers of his generation, and he meant for this family saga (think of a high-speed Buddenbrooks) to open the eyes of those blind to Hitler’s full intent. It offers something more, though, almost in spite of itself. The novel is an emotional artifact, a remnant of a world sick with foreboding, incredulity, creeping fear, and—this may feel most familiar to us today—the impossibility of gauging whether a society is really at the breaking point.

In The Oppermanns, the members of one German Jewish family come to realize, each at a different pace, that they are no longer welcome in the country they have come to think of as home. Showing us this dawning, its varying velocity and consequences, is Feuchtwanger’s project. The best-selling writer of popular historical fiction was already living in exile in the south of France by the spring of 1933, when he began writing this book. The Nazis had ransacked his personal library. His own work was being burned in massive bonfires. And his German citizenship had been stripped. It was at this moment that he cast back just a few months to begin his story of the Oppermann siblings, describing their fate over the course of nearly a year, from November of 1932, just before Hitler was appointed chancellor, through his quick consolidation of all power, and ending in the summer of 1933 with the family “scattered to all the eight winds.”

[Read: Why democracies are so slow to respond to evil]

Feuchtwanger endows his titular clan with a 19th-century forebear, Immanuel Oppermann, a paragon of successful assimilation who built a well-loved business producing affordable, good-quality furniture for the German middle class. His portrait serves as the firm’s logo, a testament to a man who made “the emancipation of the German Jew a fact, not a mere printed paragraph.” His four grandchildren have inherited this sense of ease in German society. Martin is the serious-minded steward of the company. Gustav is a self-satisfied intellectual and playboy, whose passion project is a biography of the German philosopher Gotthold Lessing. Edgar is an internationally recognized throat specialist. And Klara, though mostly absent from the book, is married to Jacques Lavendel, an outspoken Eastern European Jew who has remade himself in Berlin through his connections to the family. (We learn of a fourth brother, Ludwig, who was killed as a soldier in World War I—the ultimate tribute to fatherland.)

When we meet them, staying or going is not the siblings’ immediate concern. They are not there yet. They confront a different choice: maintaining dignity versus heeding common sense. These two phrases, dignity and common sense, echo throughout the book, and Feuchtwanger’s characters are troubled, in this moment of emergency, by the tension between these imperatives: Do you follow where your ethics and ego lead, or do you pay attention instead to the sounds of breaking glass outside, the “barbarism,” as the Oppermanns describe it, and recognize that it cannot be overcome by one person, let alone by a Jew?

Martin, for whom dignity is “a quality that was so dear to his own heart,” is given one of the first tests. When the newly empowered Nazis begin moving toward the “Aryanization” of all Jewish businesses, his advisers, including his brother-in-law, Lavendel, tell him to come to an agreement with a competing furniture firm’s owner, Heinrich Wels, and allow for an orderly takeover before the family is dispossessed of everything. Martin won’t do it. He won’t abase himself in front of Wels, who is very much enjoying his sudden advantage.

Common sense here dovetails with historical sense, and it’s left to Lavendel, the fatalistic Eastern European, to make the argument (and a Jewish joke of sorts), telling a totemic story about a town: “Grosnowice changed masters seventeen times. Seven times the changes brought pogroms with them. Three times they seized a certain Chayim Leibelschitz and told him: ‘Now we are going to hang you.’ Everyone said to him, ‘Be sensible, Chayim, Leave Grosnowice.’ He did not leave. They seized him a fourth time and again they did not hang him. But they did shoot him.”

Eventually, Martin relents. Wels demands that he come visit him, makes Martin wait 40 minutes, and then finally appears dressed in a storm-trooper uniform. Martin is then denied an honorific (“he would not be Herr Oppermann any longer”) and at first even a chair, a hint of what will come in the book’s last act, when he finds himself forced to stand in a dank prison basement for hours as a form of torture. This, though, is the first premonition of dehumanization. Martin’s belief in his individual value, in his everlasting, exalted place in Berlin, is no match for the societal forces shaping the moment. “I let you wait a long time, Oppermann,” Wels tells Martin. “A matter of politics. As you know, Oppermann, politics are now the first consideration.”

Feuchtwanger ratchets up the moral intensity for Martin’s 17-year-old son, Berthold. A Nazi has recently become his instructor and informed him that the report the young man had been planning to deliver to the class—“Humanism and the Twentieth Century”—won’t do. The Nazi forbids him “on principle” from taking on such “abstract subjects.” Instead, he switches Berthold’s topic to Arminius, an ancient tribal leader who triumphed in battle over the Romans and is heralded as a proto-German nationalist. From “Humanism” to “What can we learn today from Arminius the German?”: Feuchtwanger here, as in many other places, is far from subtle.

Berthold’s talk goes awry when he begins to raise a few possible objections as to Arminius’s lasting significance. From the back of the classroom, the glowering Nazi instructor starts shouting, “Who do you think you are, young man? What sort of people do you suppose you have sitting here before you? Here, in the presence of Germans, in this time of German need, you dare to characterize the tremendous act that stands at the beginning of German history as useless and devoid of meaning?” To this harangue, Berthold answers, “I am a good German, Herr Senior Master. I am as good a German as you are.” A battle of wills ensues, with the Nazi demanding a public apology from Berthold if he wants to avoid expulsion, and Berthold, like his father, standing on principle, defending his dignity.

Berthold can’t understand what he did wrong. He fails to see that national identity and power matter more than intellectual inquiry in Nazi Germany. The greatest injury to his sense of dignity is the notion that he must lie. Or, more precisely, that he must take back something he said in his lecture that was irrefutably true—that Arminius’s resistance to the Roman legions, the source of the nationalists’ pride, made hardly a dent on the empire. The primacy of lying, its role as the building block for this new form of German-ness, is something that he, and the other Oppermanns, simply can’t handle. “Was it un-German to tell the truth?” he asks himself.

But Berthold, unlike his father, does not abandon his dignity for common sense. On the evening before he must publicly apologize in front of the entire school, he swallows a fatal handful of sleeping pills—the hinge moment of the novel. On top of the manuscript of his lecture, Berthold leaves behind a short note: “There is nothing to explain, nothing to add, nothing to leave out. Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no.” The date is March 1, 1933, one day after Hitler’s Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspends civil liberties and due process of law. In a few weeks, the Dachau concentration camp will open.

The fact that Feuchtwanger could write with such clarity about history-altering events that had not yet been fully digested is astonishing. We still don’t have the 9/11 masterpiece or the pandemic novel to silence all other pandemic novels. The book has its share of heavy-handedness, to be sure: the busts of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, standing in for reason and brute power, respectively, that sit in opposite corners of a schoolmaster’s office; a stain on the wall of one character’s apartment that grows as his situation worsens. Feuchtwanger intended his book to be a morality tale, a work of proselytizing by the brother who left.

But what pulses through this story of the Oppermanns is the emotion. Feuchtwanger, sitting in exile, was grieving and angry. He was panicked. Not enough people were seeing just how corrosive this confusion of truth and lies could be, how harmful it was for the most vulnerable in society, who were liable to be turned into scapegoats for almost anything. Hannah Arendt elaborated on these insights in The Origins of Totalitarianism 18 years later, after Auschwitz, but Feuchtwanger just felt them. He wants to provide a structure, a container for the story of madness that he’s telling, but what leaks out is the madness itself, the experience of men enduring the same pain and sorrow that he is.

[Read: Monuments to the unthinkable]

The varied reactions to what feels, in 1933, like a rupture that might lead to worse or might not, will be recognizable to readers of the reissue in 2022. Some of the first pages are filled with laughter at these new contenders for power, at just how “ridiculous” they are, how “vulgar.” Certainly they are no match for the civilizing force of German culture and Bildung. Gustav Oppermann mocks the terrible German of Mein Kampf. The crudeness of Hitler and his followers seems enough to strangle National Socialism in its cradle. Mockery leads to incredulity: How can people not see what’s in front of their noses?

One by one, each sibling is confronted with a reality that feels as determined as a natural disaster, in which the volume of lies being hurled against them, and against Jews in general, becomes impossible to even begin to refute. “It was an earthquake, one of those great upheavals of concentrated, fathomless, worldwide stupidity,” Feuchtwanger writes at the moment of no return. “Pitted against such an elemental force, the strength and wisdom of the individual was useless.”

Once in exile, they still must contend with how hard it is for Germans to acknowledge exactly what is happening. When Gustav’s girlfriend, Anna, visits him in the south of France, where he (like Feuchtwanger) is taking refuge, he tries to impress upon her that the Germany they knew is slipping away. A national boycott of Jewish businesses has just taken place. But she can’t, or won’t, absorb this. “One national government had given place to another, which was still more nationalist,” is how Feuchtwanger captures Anna’s point of view. “That boycott was, of course, an atrocious thing and so was the book burning. It was disgusting to read the papers and disgusting to hear the row the Nationalists made. But who took that seriously? As a matter of fact, life was going on just the same as before.” Gustav doesn’t even blame her too harshly. This self-deception is “the only way to protect oneself; even honest, right-thinking people did it, so as not to lose their very foundations, their homeland.”

We do get a glimpse of the horror to come, the aftershock upon aftershock of that earthquake: Gustav, for example, sneaks back into Germany under an assumed name to confirm the facts in a dossier passed on to him detailing pogroms and other acts of local violence, and is arrested and taken to a concentration camp, where he is tortured before being released. But in 1933, deracination seems to be as bad an outcome as Feuchtwanger can imagine for Germany’s Jews. Occasionally, I’d be reminded of how little, for all his worry, he could really guess about what would follow. A minor character, upset that the new anti-Jewish sentiment might mean the loss of his job and his apartment, thinks to himself, “If the rest of his life were to go on as it was at present, one might just as well turn on the gas right away.” I almost dropped the book.

Feuchtwanger himself had a harrowing escape from Europe. When Germany and France went to war in 1939, he was detained, eventually released after his publisher paid a bribe, then detained again. He managed to break out of barracks in Nîmes with the aid of his wife, and he became one of the many German Jewish artists and intellectuals (including Arendt) whom the journalist Varian Fry helped flee to the United States. Feuchtwanger settled into his unlikely edenic exile in Los Angeles alongside Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann. There, he continued writing novels at a steady pace until his death in 1958.

It’s hard to know how much to relate a book like The Oppermanns to our present reality. The same retrospective knowledge that can produce needed foresight and activism can also lead to overreaction, panic, and distraction. Has it ever really been that useful to compare Trump to Hitler? Sometimes yes, but oftentimes no. Feuchtwanger himself doesn’t seem to be offering a template for how democracy dies. If anything, in his novel, templates shatter easily and quickly. For all the lessons he is trying to impart in 1933, there is no clearer answer about when exactly it’s time to go, when holding on to dignity becomes self-indulgent and dangerous. What remains instead is a deep sense of that rumbling “elemental force,” and the impossible choices should you find yourself stuck in its path.

Illustrations by Matt Huynh

The problem is not that there is evil in the world. The problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?

— V. M. Varga

There have been four (soon to be five) seasons of the TV show Fargo, adapted from the Oscar-winning film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. I am the show’s creator, writer, and primary director. When I pitched my adaptation of the film to executives at FX, I said, “It’s the story of the people we long to be—decent, loyal, kind—versus the people we fear the most: cynical and violent.” I imagined it as a true-crime story that isn’t true, about reluctant heroes rising to face an evil tide.

This vision of Americans is, of course, a myth.

It is summer 2022, and I am on a road trip with my family from Austin, Texas, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. States to be visited include New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. As we cross each state line, my wife asks, “Do I have all my rights here?” The week before our departure, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, making what was a fundamental right contingent on which state a woman happens to be in. So Kyle wants to know, as we enter each state, whether she is a full citizen in this place, or a handmaid. It’s handmaid in two out of five, I tell her. And in one of them, our 15-year-old daughter could be forced to have a baby if she were raped.

On May 16, 1986, David and Doris Young entered an elementary school in Cokeville, Wyoming. They carried semiautomatic weapons and a homemade gasoline bomb. David had spent the previous few years working on a philosophical treatise he called “Zero Equals Infinity.” This is how it is with a certain type of American male. They start with Nietzsche. They end with carnage.

David had devised a plan to hold each of the school’s 136 children hostage for $2 million apiece. It wasn’t a well-thought-out plan, as David was not exactly a sane man. He rounded up all the kids and handed the bomb’s detonator to his wife, then excused himself and went to the bathroom. Moments later, he heard the explosion. His wife had ignited the device accidentally, bursting into flames. Horrified, the children fled the building.

David found his wife writhing in agony on the classroom floor. He shot her in the head, then turned the gun on himself.

So much for the big ideas of small men.

We stopped for gas in Cokeville on our way north. Rising through the West, we experienced what a philosopher might call reality. The physical world: sagebrush and junkyards, dry streambeds and buttes. The sulfur baths of Pagosa Springs, the road-running groundhogs of eastern Utah. Fewer Donald Trump signs than I’d expected, but more poverty. Abandoned homes and businesses, piles of rusted metal. We saw that each state is in fact multiple states; southeastern New Mexico looks nothing like northwestern New Mexico.

As we drove, we streamed music and listened to podcasts. Texts, emails, and news alerts pinged my phone. In the back seat, my daughter Snapchatted with her friends. It is said that one cannot be in two places at once, but there we were, our bodies moving in tandem through physical America as our minds journeyed alone through a virtual land, one born in a computer lab decades ago: Internet America. This virtual nation is arguably more real to most Americans than all the stop signs, livestock, and boarded-up storefronts.

Internet America is the place where our myths become dogma.

Let me ask you something. When you see a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump’s head on Rambo’s body, do you think, Why Rambo?

I tell you the story of David and Doris Young not because it is remarkable—maybe it used to be, in the 1980s and ’90s, but not anymore. I tell it to you because this figure, the violent outsider driven by extremist views and hate-filled philosophies, is everywhere now. Incel spree-killers and race-war propagators. Young white men radicalized and weaponized. They are the children of the Unabomber, each with his own self-aggrandizing manifesto. They live not in Albany, Pittsburgh, or Spokane, but in the closed information loop of Internet America, a mirror universe that reflects their own grievances back at them.

Their actions may seem irrational, but they are the practical application of a political philosophy. A decades-long undertaking to remake America, to reverse what most would call progress—toward equal rights, better schools, curbs on fraud and pollution, everything our society has done to create a safer and more caring nation—and return it to the way it was in the 19th century. A savage frontier where the strong survive and the weak surrender.

In a hotel lobby in Big Spring, Texas, my daughter and son watch the police arrest a young man for strangling his girlfriend. She is carried out on a stretcher. It has been 36 hours since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

I think about the power of myth often. Though the series poses as “a true story,” each season of Fargo is designed as a modern myth, a tall tale of midwestern crime. On-screen, myths are created not just through story action, but through everything from lens choice to costume. Picture the black suits and skinny ties of Reservoir Dogs. Or the Willy Loman raincoat worn by the criminal mastermind V. M. Varga, the antagonist of Fargo’s third season, a sad disguise he has chosen in order to make himself appear pathetic, easily overlooked in a crowd.

No myth has a greater hold over the American imagination than the Myth of the Reluctant Hero. He is John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood. He is John Wick, Jack Reacher, Captain America. A man who tries to live a peaceful life until the world forces him into violence. He is John Dutton, the noble rancher in the show Yellowstone, who will murder just about anyone to preserve his way of life, to protect his family and his land. The violence is not his choice, you understand. It is thrust upon him by the demon-tongued forces of progress, modernity, and greed. But he is prepared. And in the end, he is capable of far greater brutality than his enemy.

This is why Trump’s face is on Rambo’s body. Who was Rambo if not a reluctant hero trying to live a life of peace? But the system—small-town cops with their rules and laws—wouldn’t leave him alone. So he did what he had to do, which was destroy the system that oppressed him.

This is how a man must be, the myth tells us: interested in peace, but built for war.

As we enter Colorado, Kyle and I discover an inverse correlation between vehicles that display the American flag and vehicles that follow the rules of the road. As if the performance of patriotism frees one from responsibility, not just to the law, but to other people. Cruise control set, we wince as decorative patriots speed past us, tailgating slower vehicles and veering wildly from lane to lane.

It makes me think of a line from Sebastian Junger, who wrote, “The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”

The clearest visual representation of the struggle between good and evil is the white hat and the black hat.

Symbols from the heyday of the Hollywood Western, the white hat and the black hat create a gravity well that storytellers struggle to escape even now. Specifically, the expectation that every story must have a hero and a villain, and that at the end the hero must face the villain in a gunfight (literal or metaphorical) that results in death. High noon is coming, we’re told, a final showdown that will settle things once and for all. Only in this way can the story be resolved: The good guy with a gun kills the bad guy with a gun.

This is not how real life works. Nor is it how the film Fargo works. When Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is arrested at the end, Chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is not there. Lundegaard has fled the state, is out of her jurisdiction. The viewer is thus robbed of that crucial showdown—of the hero vanquishing the villain—a choice that felt unsatisfying to some. What you saw instead was actual justice, a system at work, delivering consequences efficiently yet impersonally.

The reluctant hero is noble. He is capable of collaboration, but happier on his own. He is every cop told to drop the case who refuses to quit.

I have created these characters myself. In the first three seasons of Fargo, each of my tenacious if agreeable deputies finds him- or herself at odds with the police force writ large. Molly Solverson; her father, Lou; and Gloria Burgle—each must go it alone (or with the help of a partner) to solve the case and bring the forces of darkness to justice.

It is a seductive premise, the idea of the individual versus the state. Writers as different as Franz Kafka and Tom Clancy have made a career of it. But this year on Fargo I feel compelled to champion the system of justice, not the exploits of a single person—to spotlight the collective efforts of a team of hardworking public servants putting in the hours, solving the cases, bringing the wicked to account. In the real world this is how the peace is kept, how rules and laws are written and enforced.

Here’s an exchange from the next season of Fargo:

Gator: “I swear to God, him versus me, man to man, and I’d wipe the floor with him.”

Roy: “What, like high noon? That only happens in the movies, son. In real life they slit your throat while you’re waiting for the light to change.”

The moral of the Myth of the Reluctant Hero is always the same: If you want real justice, you have to get it yourself.

There is a name for this form of justice. It is called frontier justice. And it’s an idea worth exploring, because we are all of us being dragged back to the frontier, whether we like it or not.

But first it’s worth noting who had rights and who didn’t in frontier times. We can do it quickly, because the list is short.

White men had rights. That is all.

In July, Trump gave a speech addressing the America First Policy Institute, in which he described in great detail what the new frontier looks like. “There’s never been a time like this,” he said. “Our streets are riddled with needles and soaked with the blood of innocent victims. Many of our once-great cities, from New York to Chicago to L.A., where the middle class used to flock to live the American dream, are now war zones, literal war zones. Every day there are stabbings, rapes, murders, and violent assaults of every kind imaginable. Bloody turf wars rage without mercy.”

The belief that America has become a hell on Earth—“a cesspool of crime,” in Trump’s words—is rampant on the new frontier. The people who believe it, the New Frontiersmen, used to live on the fringes of American life, but not anymore. They are citizens of Internet America who do their own research, who believe that something vital has been not just lost but stolen. In their minds, the 2020 election was only the latest in an ever more audacious scheme to disenfranchise and disrespect the hardest-working Americans.

Have you ever noticed that in stories of the zombie apocalypse, such as The Walking Dead, the real enemy is always other people? This is not an accident. It is a worldview rooted in the belief that, were the rules of civility to fall away, your neighbor would just as soon kill you as lend a hand. This is a core belief of the New Frontiersman.

In December 2016, when The New York Times looked at where The Walking Dead was most popular in the United States, it found its fan base concentrated in rural areas and states like Kentucky and Texas, which had voted for Trump. It makes a certain amount of sense. If you’re convinced that the world is intrinsically uncivilized, you will gravitate to stories that agree with you: wish-fulfillment fantasies where neighbor can kill neighbor.

If this is how you see the world, then the laws of civilization—laws that would force you to surrender your arms and join the rest of the sheep—must feel like madness. You might even begin to suspect that the sheep telling you not to fear the wolf is in fact a wolf himself.

The New Frontiersman believes that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. In his mind, he is that good guy.

Another name for frontier justice is vigilante justice. The words have a long, ugly history in America, evoking images of the lynch mob. But they are modern words too. Hollywood is full of stories of vigilante justice. Batman is a vigilante; so is the latest Joker. Vigilante stories offer a romanticized vision of violent men who live in darkness, fighting to protect the rest of us from the evils of the world. They do the dirty work the rest of us are too scared or too weak to do. This is another myth.

In 2021, we were introduced to the oxymoronic idea of vigilante law. In Texas, S.B. 8 was approved by the legislature and signed into law by the governor. The law deputizes citizens to sue anyone who helps a woman get an abortion. It has been allowed to continue unchallenged by the Supreme Court, which seemed to suggest there was nothing our 246-year-old democracy could do to combat the will of the mob.

There is no named enemy in Top Gun: Maverick, the summer blockbuster playing at every American multiplex we pass on our drive. No Arab state or resurgent Cold War foe. Instead, the enemy is the rules themselves and the bureaucrats who enforce them. Navy brass with their flight floors and ceilings, their by-the-book mentality. Only a maverick can save us, the film tells us, not just from foreign threats, but from the system itself.

Top Gun’s motto is “Don’t think. Just do.” Instincts, not reason, are a real man’s strengths. Thinking loses the battle. The things a man knows cannot be improved by innovation or progress.

Here myth and reality separate, because in the real world, “Don’t think. Just do” is not a governing philosophy. Do what for whom? What if different groups want different things?

But to ask such questions is pointless in the face of a worldview that dismisses the very idea of questions. “Don’t think. Just do” harkens back to an older American motto: “Shoot first. Ask questions later.”

On the road trip, we listen to Lyle Lovett. We listen to Willie Nelson. Hayes Carll sings a song about God coming to Earth that ends with the refrain “This is why y’all can’t have nice things,” and I find myself tearing up. I’ve got a 9-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl in the back seat of the car, and I don’t know how to prepare them for a world in which half of the citizens of their country already appear to be living in the zombie apocalypse, armed to the teeth and fighting for survival. The zombies they’re aiming at are the other half of the country, still very much alive and struggling to understand.

Myths endure because they’re simple. The real world rarely offers up important choices that are binary: black hat or white hat. I think of Fargo as many moving pieces on a collision course. Which pieces will collide and when is never clear. Randomness, coincidence, synchronicity—all are available to me as I attempt to capture something resembling the complexity of life.

Here’s another way I describe Fargo: a tragedy with a happy ending. Tragedy in Fargo is always based on an inability to communicate, sometimes even with ourselves. People are like this. We avoid difficult subjects.

As in life, everyone in the stories I tell has their own perspective, their own experience. The more selfish they are—the less able they are to accept that other people’s needs matter too—the worse they act. I’m the victim here, they shout, as they impose their will on others.

What was the QAnon Shaman if not a creature of the frontier? How many versions of him did we see on January 6, dressed in colonial or Revolutionary War garb? It’s no accident that the cosplay insurrection drew from early American iconography. It was a throwback to the era when white men battled their way through what they saw as an uncivilized nation. When the only way to fight the savagery of their enemies was savagely, without mercy.

A tragedy based on an inability to communicate is also a good way to describe the current American predicament. You have two sides that both feel aggrieved. Each believes that their own pain is real and that the other’s is a fantasy.

One side believes the last election was stolen. The other believes the right to vote itself is being taken away.

One side believes that the answer is reform, better government, a truly equitable system of justice. The other believes that government itself is the problem. Both sides are yelling and neither is listening, like a man in a fun-house mirror convinced that his reflection is a stranger.

When communication stops, violence follows. Your opponent becomes your enemy, a black hat to your white, and we all know what happens after that.

The show 1883, created by Taylor Sheridan, who also created Yellowstone, explores the frontier mindset with great sympathy. To quote its young heroine, “The world doesn’t care if you die. It won’t listen to your screams. If you bleed on the ground, the ground will drink it. It doesn’t care that you’re cut.”

[From the December 2022 issue: How Taylor Sheridan created America’s most popular TV show]

It’s better not to try to make sense of this world, we’re told, after we watch a settler shoot a woman who has been scalped by Natives. The man is hysterical, quite rightly out of his mind with grief and shame at what he has done, but Sam Elliott’s character tells him: “You made a decision. You did what you thought was decent. Was it decent? Who knows. What the hell is decent out here? What’s the gauge? You’re the gauge. You made a decision. Now stand by it! Right or wrong, you fucking stand by it.”

This is frontier morality. The world is inherently indecent. No government law can tell us what is right and what is wrong. It is up to each of us to decide.

If you play it out—one step ahead, two—you realize that the inevitable end point of this new frontier mentality is crime. Because if you privilege what’s “right” over what’s legal—and appoint yourself as the arbiter of right and wrong—then you will inevitably end up in conflict with the rule of law.

In this way, the frontier becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who believe in it must create its conditions or become criminals in the civilized world.

The left, of course, has its own myths. The Myth of Stronger Together, the Myth of a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats. We like stories of collective action, stories about unlikely bands of misfits who realize that their differences are what make them strong. Think of the unsung Black women in Hidden Figures, overcoming personal prejudice and institutional racism to help make spaceflight possible. Even our Westerns are pluralistic—think of The Magnificent Seven and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Stranger Things is a liberal fantasy, all those plucky kids banding together, never leaving a friend behind.

Squid Game is a right-wing fever dream, as if I even have to say it.

Game of Thrones was a Stronger Together Myth posing as a Frontier Justice Myth. For all its rape fantasies, it was at heart a meditation on human nature, a cautionary fable about morality and power. Good was rarely rewarded, but only collective action could save the world.

If you map where Game of Thrones was popular in America, incidentally, it aligns primarily with blue states. It was the anti–Walking Dead.

On the Fourth of July, we gather in a park in downtown Jackson to hear music and watch the fireworks. Earlier in the day, a 21-year-old man shot dozens of people from a rooftop in Highland Park, Illinois, killing seven.

Later, Kyle and I compare notes: how we both noticed the same open window in a nearby building. How we both had a plan for where we would go with the kids if a gunman—no, let’s call him what he is: a terrorist—opened fire on the crowd.

Later still, I learn that a toddler was found alive in Highland Park, lying under the dead bodies of his parents. Is this really the price our children must pay for our inability to come to terms with one another, to communicate?

The next day, when I tell my son the story of the shooting, he asks what we’re going to do about it—we the surviving Americans.

We’re going to buy more guns, I tell him.

This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “The Myth of the Frontier Won’t Die.”

Welcome, tentatively, to the resistance.

It took half a dozen years, but large parts of the Republican establishment—elected Republicans, wealthy donors, the Murdoch media empire (Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the New York Post), and right-wing websites,radio-talk-show hosts, columnists, and commentators—have finally turned on Donald Trump. Some are more direct and public in their criticisms of the former president than others, but without question something fundamental has changed.

The GOP establishment is angry at Trump, who announced his bid for reelection on November 15, for recently hosting a prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier (Nick Fuentes) and an anti-Semite (Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West) for dinner. For embracing QAnon. For advocating for the termination of the Constitution. For trashing the Supreme Court, on which three of his nominees sit. For promising to look “very, very favorably” at pardoning January 6 insurrectionists if he’s reelected. And for being embroiled in multiple criminal investigations.

But mostly, they are angry at Trump for costing them seats in the House and control of the Senate. This midterm election was the third straight election cycle in which Republicans, under Trump’s leadership and in his shadow, suffered setbacks. They stood by as he handpicked terrible candidates and obsessively promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election—and they suffered the consequences.

Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist and a former top adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told The New York Times that the past several weeks have been “devastating for Trump’s future viability.”

“Abandonment has begun,” Reed said.

Whether the damage Trump has sustained is enough to keep him from winning the 2024 nomination is impossible to know at this point. Although the erosion in his support is significant, a large part of the base has shown sustained loyalty to Trump.

So how should those of us who, for years, have repeatedly warned Republicans about Trump view those who have finally done an about-face, in some cases mimicking the very criticisms that Never Trumpers have been making since the start of the Trump era?

[David Frum: What the Never Trumpers want now]

We ought to welcome their turnabout. This is, after all, what many of us have been urging them to do. Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone should have the chance to correct those mistakes, including onetime Trump enthusiasts. Just as important, purging Trump from America’s political landscape can only happen if the Republican Party first purges him from its ranks. If people who once supported Trump are, at last, willing to cast him aside, that is all to the good.

But we shouldn’t see a moral awakening where there is none. The reason many longtime Trump supporters are deserting him is because they believe he is a loser, and an impediment to their quest for power. They are tossing Trump overboard because he’s no longer useful to them. Their considerations are practical rather than principled, and precisely because the shift is for unprincipled reasons, we should assume that if they calculate that Trump can win again—and certainly if he’s the Republican nominee in 2024—they will once again rally around him.

Nor are the belated resisters honestly reckoning with their (recent) pro-Trump past. They are, instead, engaging in a series of rationalizations to explain why they enabled and championed this loathsome figure for so long.

Some have simply chosen to forget their role in Trump’s rise. Some are eager to portray themselves as having been far more critical of Trump than they actually were. Some prefer to turn the tables and go on the offensive, chiding longtime critics of Trump for not forgiving and forgetting. And still others are peddling a narrative in which Trump is only now “spinning out of control.” Since the midterms, we’re told, “something has snapped.” Trump has “apparently lost touch with reality.” These people feign shock at what the man in Mar-a-Lago has become. Who could possibly have seen this coming?

All of this maneuvering is born out of a natural desire to escape moral accountability, protect their reputation, and not admit their mistakes, and an even more intense desire to refuse to admit that Never Trumpers, whom they view with contempt, might have been right all along. Their psychological defense mechanisms—rationalizations intended to prevent feelings of guilt, shame, or discomfort about actions that on some level they know were wrong or unwise—are preventing them from coming to grips with their catastrophic misjudgments.

Context is important here. We’re not talking about a mistaken assessment of the effects that tariffs might have on prices for consumers; we’re talking about a party that nominated and at every turn defended a uniquely malicious figure in American politics. And he didn’t come disguised as anything other than what he was. Trump was a wolf in wolf’s clothing.

Trump’s dinner with Fuentes and Ye was not a break with the past. Rather, it exists on a long continuum of wrongdoing: making hush-money payments to porn stars, committing tax fraud, and falsifying records; pathological lying, cruelty, and political brutality; siding with the intelligence agencies of America’s enemies rather than America’s, complimenting savage dictators, and blackmailing our allies in order to dig up dirt on political opponents; demagoguery, borderless corruption, and calls for political violence; obstructing justice, abusing the pardon power, and wanting the IRS to investigate political foes; racist taunts and appeals to Americans’ ugliest instincts; lighting the flame that ignited a mob that stormed the Capitol, ignoring pleas for help during the insurrection, encouraging those who wanted to hang his vice president, and trying to overthrow the election.

[Read: The GOP can’t hide from extremism]

At no point did Trump deceive Republicans into supporting him; he simply broke them. Formerly fierce critics such as Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham became lapdogs. Republicans didn’t change Trump; he changed them. Fundamental convictions, or at least what had been sold as fundamental convictions, were inverted. Character in leaders used to matter, we were told—until depravity became acceptable and even fashionable.

As Trump descends further into madness, “it’s in the interests of Republicans to bury this record of iniquity—to move on as if it were all some kind of surreal dream,” in the words of Andrew Sullivan. But it wasn’t a dream: The trauma of the Trump years and the role of those who made them possible can’t be papered over, forgotten, or pushed down what George Orwell called “memory holes.” Individuals who allowed a man with fascist instincts into the Oval Office and, once he was there, provided him cover owe their fellow citizens—and themselves—an honest accounting.

Doing this would begin to repair one of the most damaging aspects of the Trump years, which was his (and his supporters’) gaslighting of America; their nonstop, dawn-to-dusk assault on facts and truth, their attempt to distort reality to fit their narrative. The Republican establishment that stood with Trump may now want to break with him, but in the process, they are still relying on some bad habits, including inviting the rest of us into their hall of mirrors.

Trump supporters have deformed history and reality quite enough. Even as we welcome them to the resistance, we ought to expect from them an acknowledgment of the role they played in the rise and rule of Donald Trump.

At some point all of us, even the GOP, will move on from Trump. That process is hopefully well under way. Healing our nation will require different things from different sides, including some measure of civic grace and some measure of civic honesty. Other nations, more divided than ours, have found the balance between truth and reconciliation. So can America. But it will take time, intentionality, and love of country.

The expected move by the January 6 committee to formally ask the Department of Justice to prosecute former President Donald Trump over his role in the US Capitol insurrection will make history, whether or not charges are ever brought.

Retiring Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey offered a pointed closing message for his fellow Republican colleagues on Sunday, saying that former President Donald Trump's hold on the party is "waning."