Looking back on the four-year Donald Trump interregnum, the failure of the case against Trump for hoarding classified documents is not the most serious or influential—that would be the utter lack of accountability for Trump’s attempted overthrow of the government, including instigating the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol—but it might be the most maddening.

On his way out of office, the president removed documents that he had no right to keep, which included some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, according to the Justice Department’s indictment. When the government asked nicely for them, he refused to give them back. When the government demanded them by force of law, he ignored it. When officials came to collect them, he allegedly sought to hide them. Though he has denied breaking any law, Trump has not really disputed most of the facts of the case. The indictment describes what must be the stupidest crimes imaginable, and he totally got away with them.

The temptation might be to write this matter off as a lesser concern, akin to the byzantine case that branded Trump a felon in New York. Apologists have noted that other officials, including Joe Biden, also mishandled classified documents. Resist the siren call of these rationalizations. The documents that Trump mishandled were full of tightly controlled information that he stored on an insecure ballroom stage and in a spare water closet. Besides, the improper handling of classified documents was a key line of attack that Trump himself used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

[David A. Graham: Aileen Cannon is who critics feared she was]

Moreover, the charges that Trump faced weren’t about taking the documents. They were about his alleged all-out effort to avoid a lawful subpoena and defy federal law-enforcement officials. He has now named some of his defense attorneys in the case to be top officials at the Justice Department that investigated him. If Americans hadn’t already gotten so used to this sort of thing over the past decade, it would be beyond belief.

The particular process by which Trump got off is exemplary and instructive. Step one: Defy the rules without hesitation, and dare the system to stop you. Trump may not have set out to abscond with the documents; it seems to have been a matter of negligence, given that they were haphazardly stashed in boxes with newspapers and golf shirts. Trump was so intent on stealing the 2020 election, and apparently thought he had enough of a chance, that he then had to hurriedly pack up to leave.

Step two: When the system does try to stop you, brush it off. When the National Archives realized in the spring of 2021 that Trump had removed some documents, it politely requested them back. He refused. It asked again. He eventually allowed the Archives to recover some but not all. After discovering classified information in them, the Archives finally referred the matter to the Justice Department in February 2022. In May 2022, a grand jury issued a subpoena requiring Trump to return more materials. He refused, and allegedly instructed his aide Walt Nauta to move some of the boxes elsewhere at Mar-a-Lago. The next month, FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago and collected some documents; Trump allegedly prevented them from examining boxes there. By the time the FBI conducted an unannounced search in August 2022, he appeared shocked but shouldn’t have been.

Step three: Fight the battle in public. Even though there was no dispute over whether Trump had the documents or whether they were sensitive—Trump argued, without evidence, that he was entitled to them or had declassified them—the former president used the FBI search as the central example in a narrative of unfair persecution. When the facts were unfavorable, he made up stories, claiming, for example, that the FBI agents may have been sent to kill him.

Step four: Rely on a justice system stocked with judges you appointed. Trump got very lucky when he drew Judge Aileen Cannon, an inexperienced jurist he’d appointed to the bench. First, she issued rulings restricting DOJ access to evidence; the rulings raised eyebrows and were eventually overturned by a higher court. Once charges were filed, she ran the case at molasses speed, drawing out every step; quarreled with prosecutors; and ultimately threw out the charges after ruling that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional, though other courts had repeatedly rejected similar ideas. (Trump might have gotten a less friendly judge, as he did in the federal case over the 2020-election subversion, but he can still always appeal to the Trump-stocked Supreme Court.)

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Step five: Let other people take the fall. Once Trump won the election, Smith dismissed the charges against him, but the charges against Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, Trump employees alleged to be his hapless accomplices, remain in place. (They have also denied any wrongdoing.) This turns out to be another stroke of good luck, because the Justice Department does not plan to release Smith’s report on the Trump investigation while other charges are pending. Once Trump is in office, he can have the case against Nauta and De Oliveira dismissed or pardon them; he may also be able to permanently suppress the report.

The result: Trump will never face consequences, and the public may never learn the results of the investigation. Americans have seen other instances in which the hesitation of the Justice Department, the slowness of the justice system, and the interference of Trump-friendly judges have prevented any chance at accountability. They just may never have seen any so brazen.

Four years ago, scores of police officers were attacked only yards away from where Donald Trump will swear to defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the duties of his office. The scene, in the words of one officer, was “a non-stop barrage” with “weapons and things being thrown, and pepper spray, and you name it … You could hear them yelling. You could hear them, screams and moans, and everything else.” One officer later said that he was certain he would die the moment he entered the crowd: “You know, you’re getting pushed, kicked, you know, people are throwing metal bats at you and all that stuff. I was like, yeah, this is fucking it.”

All of this happened because Trump, according to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, could not accept his loss in the 2020 election, and so he tried on January 6, 2021, to “direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.” The crowd that attacked the Capitol, Smith wrote, “was filled with Mr. Trump’s supporters, as made clear by their Trump shirts, signs, and flags,” and they “violently attacked the law enforcement officers attempting to secure the building.”

The ensuing riot was one of the worst days for law enforcement since 9/11. More than 140 officers were injured on January 6, but we know only the names of some of the most famous victims of the mob, such as Officers Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell, Harry Dunn, and others who have testified to Congress or given interviews. Their injuries were severe. Fanone was beaten to the point of a concussion and a heart attack; Gonell was attacked by more than 40 rioters and assaulted with his own riot shield. He has since undergone multiple surgeries and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

In his campaign for reelection, the man who conjured this violence against his own government—and then stood by as police from multiple jurisdictions were attacked—portrayed himself as the guardian of law and order. (One of the themes of the 2024 GOP convention was “Make America Safe Again.”) This strategy worked: Trump yet again nabbed the endorsement of the National Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP vice president, Joe Gamaldi, said in November that police see Trump’s victory as a mandate from voters who are “tired of all the chaos and disorder we’re seeing in our streets. We are tired of the ‘defund the police’ talk, and basically we’re just tired of the crap.”

[Read: Trump’s empty promise of ‘law and order’]

The new president’s supporters may be tired of what they mistakenly believe is a rise in crime in the streets, but they’ve memory-holed Trump’s willingness to throw a swarm of raging insurrectionists against the same police forces that will be protecting him at today’s inauguration. Nothing, however, should be allowed to erase the truth that the party of law and order is now led by not only a convicted felon, but one who callously looked on as outnumbered police officers did battle for hours to protect the lives of the members of the United States Congress.

I understand the anger that some police officers feel when the public assumes that they’re all corrupt bullies, potential killers no better than the men involved in the ghastly 2020 murder of George Floyd. My father and brother were both police officers (Dad in the 1950s, and my brother from the 1960s to the 1980s). Our next-door neighbor when I was a boy was a police officer, and I grew up among cops in my small New England city. Most of them became “law and order” Republican voters when Richard Nixon was able to turn riots—including the mess at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—into a campaign issue.

Trump has done the same through his three presidential campaigns, depicting America as a lawless hellhole. At least Nixon, however, had the advantage of pointing to the other party, and to his political opponents, as the source of danger to Americans and their armed protectors. Trump has managed to erase from millions of minds the fact that the people who attacked the police on January 6 were his own supporters, acting on what they believed were his wishes.

“I would like to see January 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11,” the conservative writer George Will said in 2021, “because it was that scale of a shock to the system.” But like so many of Trump’s outrages and scandals, the attack on the Capitol has faded into the noise of the 2024 campaign. Trump today will likely thunder on about the return of law and order and swear to make America’s streets safer, but American voters, no matter their party, should remember what actually happened to scores of police officers because of Trump’s own actions.

Police officers at the Capitol were being attacked with an assortment of weapons—bear spray, flagpoles, even their own equipment. (“My helmet came down and felt like someone was on top of me and I couldn’t see anything,” the Capitol Police officer Winston Pingeon told ABC News in an October 2024 interview. “And I remember just thinking, I have to protect my gun, because they stole my baton.”) During all of this, Trump, as usual, was tweeting: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order-respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!” Meanwhile, the mob pressed on. One officer recounted that rioters dragged him into the crowd, where they beat and tased him while yelling things such as “I got one!” and “Kill him with his gun!”

[Tom Nichols: Trump’s dangerous January 6–pardon promise]

Trump now refers to many of the rioters who have been convicted and jailed as “hostages.” He has promised to pardon some of them upon taking office. “Most likely, I’ll do it very quickly,” he said on Meet the Press last month, adding that “those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look. But, you know, if somebody was radical, crazy.”

The once and future president seems to have a forgiving definition of radical. On the campaign trail, he lauded a choir formed by some of the jailed insurrectionists. He even lent them his voice; their song, “Justice for All,” includes Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Trump regularly played it at his rallies. “Our people love those people,” Trump said last May.

Four of this “J6 Prison Choir” were charged with assaulting a law-enforcement officer. One rioter, Julian Khater, had already pleaded guilty to assaulting multiple officers before the song was recorded. He was sentenced to almost six years in prison. Another choir member, Shane Jenkins, was also sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of seven felonies and two misdemeanors, including throwing makeshift weapons at the police. “I have murder in my heart and head,” he wrote to an associate in the weeks after the riot, according to the Justice Department.

Trump has described January 6 as “a day of love.” The police who were there know better. Many of them live with physical and psychological scars. Four of them committed suicide within a year. “Tell me again how you support the police and law and order when all these things are happening?” Gonell asked last spring.

Safely back in the White House, Trump will never have to answer that question. But every time he and other elected Republicans claim to be the party of law and order, Americans should remember the day that the 47th president was willing to sacrifice the men and women on the thin blue line on the altar of his own ambitions.