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  • Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’

    Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’

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    Confrontations over immigration and border security are moving to the center of the struggle between the two parties, both in Washington, D.C., and beyond. And yet the most explosive immigration clash of all may still lie ahead.

    In just the past few days, Washington has seen the collapse of a bipartisan Senate deal to toughen border security amid opposition from former President Donald Trump and the House Republican leadership, as well as a failed vote by House Republicans to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Simultaneously, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, supported by more than a dozen other GOP governors, has renewed his attempts to seize greater control over immigration enforcement from the federal government.

    Cumulatively these clashes demonstrate how much the terms of debate over immigration have moved to the right during President Joe Biden’s time in office. But even amid that overall shift, Trump is publicly discussing immigration plans for a second presidential term that could quickly become much more politically divisive than even anything separating the parties now.

    Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last month on social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.

    “What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they are themselves undocumented,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. “What he’s describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigration.”

    How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

    Such deployment of red-state forces into blue states, over the objections of their mayors and governors, would likely spark intense public protest and possibly even conflict with law-enforcement agencies under local control. And that conflict itself could become the justification for further insertion of federal forces into blue jurisdictions, notes Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

    From his very first days as a national candidate in 2015, Trump has intermittently promised to pursue a massive deportation program against undocumented immigrants. As president, Trump moved in unprecedented ways to reduce the number of new arrivals in the country by restricting both legal and illegal immigration. But he never launched the huge “deportation force” or widespread removals that, he frequently promised, would uproot the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the United States during his time in office. Over Trump’s four years, in fact, his administration deported only about a third as many people from the nation’s interior as Barack Obama’s administration had over the previous four years, according to a study by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

    Read: The GOP’s true priority

    Exactly why Trump never launched the comprehensive deportation program he promised is unclear even to some veterans of his administration. The best answer may be a combination of political resistance within Congress and in local governments, logistical difficulties, and internal opposition from the more mainstream conservative appointees who held key positions in his administration, particularly in his first years.

    This time, though, Trump has been even more persistent than in the 2016 campaign in promising a sweeping deportation effort. (“Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home,” Trump posted on his Truth Social site last month.) Simultaneously, Miller has outlined much more explicit and detailed plans than Trump ever did in 2016 about how the administration would implement such a deportation program in a second term.

    Dismissing these declarations as merely campaign bluster would be a mistake, Miles Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff under Trump, told me in an interview. “If Stephen Miller says it, if Trump says it, it is very reasonable to assume that’s what they will try to do in a second term,” said Taylor, who later broke with Trump to write a New York Times op-ed and a book that declared him unfit for the job. (Taylor wrote the article and book anonymously, but later acknowledged that he was the author.)

    Officials at DHS successfully resisted many of Miller’s most extreme immigration ideas during Trump’s term, Taylor said. But with the experience of Trump’s four years behind them, Taylor told me Trump and Miller would be in a much stronger position in 2025 to drive through militant ideas such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented migrants. “Stephen Miller has had the time and the battle scars to inform a very systematic strategy,” Taylor said.

    Miller outlined the Trump team’s plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden.

    To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, he said, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.

    In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to “building the Panama Canal.” He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to “deputize” local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.

    Miller offered two scenarios for enlisting National Guard troops in removing migrants. One would be in states where Republican governors want to cooperate. “You go to the red-state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard,’” he said. “We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.”

    The second scenario, Miller said, would involve sending National Guard forces from nearby Republican-controlled states into what he called an “unfriendly state” whose governor would not willingly join the deportation program.

    Read: The specter of family separation

    Even those sweeping plans understate the magnitude of the effort that mass deportations would require, Jason Houser, a former chief of staff at ICE under Biden, told me. Removing 500,000 to 1 million migrants a year could require as many as 100,000–150,000 deputized enforcement officers, Houser believes. Staffing the internment camps and constant flights that Miller is contemplating could require 50,000 more people, Houser said. “If you want to deport a million a year—and I’m a Navy officer—you are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment,” Houser told me.

    Enormous legal resources would be required too. Immigration lawyers point out that even if Trump detained migrants through mass roundups, the administration would still need individual deportation orders from immigration courts for each person it wants to remove from the country. “It’s not as simple as sending Guardsmen in to arrest everyone who is illegal or undocumented,” said Leopold, the immigration lawyer.

    All of this exceeds the staffing now available for immigration enforcement; ICE, Houser said, has only about 6,000 enforcement agents. To fill the gap, he said, Trump would need to transfer huge numbers of other federal law-enforcement agents, weakening the ability of agencies including the DEA, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service to fulfill their principal responsibilities. And even then, Trump would still need support from the National Guard to reach the scale he’s discussing.

    Even if Trump used National Guard troops in supporting roles, rather than to “break down doors” in pursuit of migrants, they would be thrust into highly contentious situations, Houser said.

    “You are talking about taking National Guard members out of their jobs in Texas and moving them into, say, Philadelphia and having them do mass stagings,” Houser said. “Literally as Philadelphians are leaving for work, or their kids are going to school, they are going to see mass-deportation centers with children and mothers who were just in the community working and thriving.” He predicts that Trump would be forced to convert warehouses or abandoned malls into temporary relocation centers for thousands of migrants.

    Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of The Deportation Machine, told me, “There’s no precedent of millions of people being removed in U.S. history in a short period of time.” The example Trump most often cites as a model is “Operation Wetback,” the mass-deportation program—named for a slur against Mexican Americans—launched by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. That program involved huge sweeps through not only workplaces, but also heavily Mexican American communities in cities such as Los Angeles. Yet even that effort, despite ensnaring an unknown number of legal residents, removed only about 250,000 people, Goodman said. To deport the larger numbers Trump is promising, he would need an operation of much greater scale and expense.

    The Republican response to Texas’s standoff with the Biden administration offers Trump reason for optimism that red-state governors would support his ambitious immigration plans. So far, 14 Republican-controlled states have sent National Guard troops or other law-enforcement personnel to bolster Abbott in his ongoing efforts to assert more control over immigration issues. The Supreme Court last month overturned a lower-court decision that blocked federal agents from dismantling the razor-wire barriers Texas has been erecting along the border. But Abbott insists that he’ll build more of the barriers nonetheless. “We are expanding to further areas to make sure we will expand our level of deterrence,” Abbott declared last Sunday at a press conference near the border, where he was joined by 13 other GOP governors. Abbott has said he expects every red state to eventually send forces to back his efforts.

    But the National Guard deployments to Texas still differ from the scenario that Miller has sketched. Abbott is welcoming the personnel that other states are sending to Texas. In that sense, this deployment is similar to the process under which George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden utilized National Guard troops to support federal immigration-enforcement efforts in Texas and, at times, other border states: None of the governors of those states has opposed the use of those troops in their territory for that purpose.

    The prospect of Trump dispatching red-state National Guard troops on deportation missions into blue states that oppose them is more akin to his actions during the racial-justice protests following the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. At that point, Trump deployed National Guardsmen provided by 11 Republican governors to Washington, D.C., to quell the protests.

    The governors provided those forces to Trump under what’s known as “hybrid status” for the National Guard (also known as Title 32 status). Under hybrid status, National Guard troops remain under the technical command of their state’s governor, even though they are executing a federal mission. Using troops in hybrid status isn’t particularly unusual; what made that deployment “unprecedented,” in Joseph Nunn’s phrase, is that the troops were deployed over the objection of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

    The hybrid status that Trump used in D.C. is probably the model the former president and Miller are hoping to use to send red-state National Guard forces into blue states that don’t want them, Nunn told me. But Nunn believes that federal courts would block any such effort. Trump could ignore the objections from the D.C. government because it’s not a state, but Nunn believes that if Trump sought to send troops in hybrid status from, say, Indiana to support deportation raids in Chicago, federal courts would say that violates Illinois’ constitutional rights. “Under the Constitution, the states are sovereign and coequal,” Nunn said. “One state cannot reach into another state and exercise governmental power there without the receiving state’s consent.”

    But Trump could overcome that obstacle, Nunn said, through a straightforward, if more politically risky, alternative that he and his aides have already discussed. If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, he would have almost unlimited authority to use any military asset for his deportation program. Under the Insurrection Act, Trump could dispatch the Indiana National Guard into Illinois, take control of the Illinois National Guard for the job, or directly send in active-duty military forces, Nunn said.

    “There are not a lot of meaningful criteria in the Insurrection Act for assessing whether a given situation warrants using it, and there is no mechanism in the law that allows the courts or Congress to check an abuse of the act,” Nunn told me. “There are quite literally no safeguards.”

    Read: America’s immigration reckoning has arrived

    The Insurrection Act is the legal tool presidents invoked to federalize control over state National Guards when southern governors used the troops to block racial integration. For Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to instead target racial minorities through his deportation program might be even more politically combustible than sending in National Guard troops through hybrid status during the 2020 D.C. protests, Nunn said. But, like many other immigration and security experts I spoke with, Nunn believes those concerns are not likely to dissuade a reelected Trump from using the Insurrection Act if courts block his other options.

    In fact, as I’ve written, a mass-deportation program staffed partially with red-state National Guard forces is only one of several ideas that Trump has embraced for introducing federal forces into blue jurisdictions over the objections of their local leaders. He’s also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.

    These plans could produce scenes in American communities unmatched in our history. Leopold, to take one scenario raised by Miller in his interview, asks what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trump’s request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, it’s easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?

    For all the tumult that the many disputes over immigration are now generating, these possibilities could prove far more disruptive, incendiary, and even violent.

    “What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Bucks County man accused of beheading father wanted Gov. Shapiro to ‘join forces’ against feds, prosecutors say

    Bucks County man accused of beheading father wanted Gov. Shapiro to ‘join forces’ against feds, prosecutors say

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    Justin Mohn, the man accused of decapitating his father at their home in Levittown, allegedly traveled to a Pennsylvania National Guard base before his arrest Tuesday in an effort to incite a state rebellion against the federal government, Bucks County prosecutors said Friday.

    Mohn, 32, allegedly told prosecutors he had hoped to speak with Gov. Josh Shapiro to convince him to “join forces” with his purported militia and raise arms against the feds. Mohn was arrested while trespassing on the grounds of the National Guard’s headquarters in Fort Indiantown Gap — about 100 miles away, in Lebanon County — where he was found with a loaded handgun and surrendered to authorities, police said.

    Mohn is charged with first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse in the killing of Michael Mohn, 68, a longtime employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Philadelphia. He allegedly purchased his gun Monday at a gun shop in Croydon, Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Schorn said at a news conference Friday.

    An autopsy determined that Michael Mohn was fatally shot in the head before his son allegedly used a knife and machete to sever his neck, Shorn said. The gun recovered by police was missing a single round.

    In a video Mohn posted to his YouTube channel Tuesday, he held up his father’s head in a plastic bag and described him as a traitor, prosecutors said. Mohn read a prepared speech that continued for more than 14 minutes, including threats against the Biden administration, a rant about the nation’s borders and a proclamation that he was declaring martial law as the new acting U.S. president, according to investigators. 

    Mohn is a graduate of Neshaminy High School and Penn State University. He previously spent time in Colorado working as a contractor for Microsoft, but returned home to live with his parents, prosecutors said. He recently had been unemployed. 

    Michael Mohn’s body was found by his wife, who notified authorities and said her son had left the home in his father’s car. The YouTube video, which had been filmed at the family home, was later brought to the attention of investigators as they searched for Mohn.

    Investigators arrested Mohn at the National Guard base at 9:25 p.m. Tuesday after tracking him down by using cell phone location data. But they feared the possibility of an extended search.

    “We were discussing that if Justin hadn’t been apprehended, can you imagine the manhunt that would have been underway shortly thereafter and how everything would have been focused on finding him — and the entire community would have been in a state of panic,” Middletown Township Police Chief Joseph Bartorilla said.

    Schorn said the investigation remains in its early stages and may continue for months. It’s possible Mohn will face federal charges, or additional charges in Bucks County, Schorn said. Authorities are looking into whether he had any established contact with others who planned to take up his cause.

    Mohn has no history of diagnosed mental health issues and there are no records of him having a voluntary or involuntary commitment for inpatient psychiatric treatment, Schorn said.

    “With the evidence we have gathered thus far, this individual was acting with clear mind, aware of his actions and proud of his consequences,” she said.

    Days before purchasing his gun, Mohn allegedly surrendered his state medical marijuana card so he could legally purchase a firearm, prosecutors said. Investigators have not detailed any events that led up to Mohn’s alleged actions or how long he may have been planning them.

    The video Mohn posted online was removed by YouTube and other social media platforms hours after it was uploaded. Schorn said it appeared to have been viewed thousands of times.

    “That was incredibly concerning,” Schorn said. “I mean, obviously, from evidentiary value, that video is very important and we need to have possession of that. But it’s quite horrifying how many views we understand it had before it was taken down.”

    Since Mohn’s arrest, reports have emerged of neighbors describing unusual behavior from him. His former roommate in Colorado told CNN that Mohn had shown signs of paranoia for years and thought the government was “out to get him.” Mohn was an amateur writer and musician who shared his work online, including material that alluded to his views. In multiple lawsuits Mohn filed against the U.S. government, he reportedly claimed his student loans were illegitimate because he wasn’t able to get a job and pay them back — which he attributed to being an “overeducated white man.” 

    Middletown Township police knew of three prior incidents involving Mohn, but none of them indicated a serious threat that required more attention, Bartorilla said. In 2011, he was involved in an argument in the driveway of his family’s home, but it was not a criminal matter. In 2019, Mohn told police he had been threatened by someone from an insurance company that he was suing in Ohio and that he wanted it documented. 

    The third incident was a report from an unnamed employer in Philadelphia who called to express concern about Mohn’s behavior at work. The employer was seeking legal advice about how to fire Mohn, but police referred the matter to other legal resources.

    “We keep hearing that police were outside of his home at various times — outside of what I just mentioned — (but) I can only speak for the Middletown Township Police Department,” Bartorilla said. “We were not.”

    The concern from Mohn’s former employer in Philadelphia stemmed from his online writings, authorities said. Middletown police did not follow up on the matter with Mohn.

    “Based on the information that the officer gathered and the decision the officer made, I don’t think we needed to have contact,” Bartorilla said.

    Mohn is being held without bail at the Bucks County Correctional Facility.

    “Our thoughts are with this family,” Schorn said. “This is the unimaginable. That’s going to take time. We’re going to provide the resources for this family, but this is truly just unimaginable for them.”

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    Michael Tanenbaum

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  • The End Is Coming for Trump’s GOP Rivals

    The End Is Coming for Trump’s GOP Rivals

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    The arctic chill that upended the final weekend of the Iowa Republican caucus provided a fitting end to a contest that has seemed frozen in place for months.

    This caucus has felt unusually lifeless, not only because former President Donald Trump has maintained an imposing and seemingly unshakable lead in the polls. That advantage was confirmed late Saturday night when the Des Moines Register, NBC, and Mediacom Iowa released their highly anticipated final pre-caucus poll showing Trump at 48 percent and, in a distant battle for second place, Nikki Haley at 20 percent and Ron DeSantis at 16 percent.

    The caucus has also lacked energy because Trump’s shrinking field of rivals has never appeared to have the heart for making an all-out case against him. “I think there was actually a decent electorate that had supported Trump in the past but were interested in looking for somebody else,” Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP activist who chaired Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign in Iowa, told me. But neither DeSantis nor Haley, he adds, found a message that dislodged nearly enough of them from the front-runner. “Trump has run as an incumbent, if you will, and dominated the media so skillfully that it took a lot of the energy out of the race,” Gross said.

    In retrospect, the constrictive boundaries for the GOP race were established when the candidates gathered for their first debate last August (without Trump, who has refused to attend any debate). The crucial moment came when Bret Baier, from Fox News Channel, asked the contenders whether they would support Trump as the nominee even if he was convicted of a crime “in a court of law.” All the contenders onstage raised their hand to indicate they would, except for Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, two long shots at the periphery of the race. With that declaration, the candidates effectively placed the question of whether Trump is fit to be president again—the most important issue facing Republicans in 2024—out of bounds.

    That collective failure led to Christie’s withering moral judgment on the field when he quit the race last week: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that he is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.” But even in practical political terms, the choice not to directly address Trump’s fitness left his principal rivals scrambling to find an alternative way to contrast with the front-runner.

    Over time, DeSantis has built a coherent critique of Trump, though a very idiosyncratic one. DeSantis runs at Trump from the right, insisting that the man who devised and articulated the “America First” agenda can no longer be trusted to advance it. In his final appearances across Iowa, his CNN debate with Haley last week, and a Fox town hall, DeSantis criticized Trump’s presidential record and 2024 agenda as insufficiently conservative on abortion, LGBTQ rights, federal spending, confronting the bureaucracy, and shutting down the country during the pandemic. He has even accused Trump of failing to deport enough undocumented immigrants and failing to construct enough of his signature border wall.

    Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again

    On issues where politicians in the center or left charge Trump with extremism, DeSantis inverts the accusation: The problem, he argues, is that Trump wasn’t extreme enough. The moment that best encapsulated DeSantis’s approach came in last week’s CNN debate. At one point, the moderators asked him about the claim from Trump’s lawyer that he cannot be prosecuted for any presidential action—including ordering the assassination of a political rival—unless he was first impeached and convicted. DeSantis insisted the problem was that in office, Trump was too restrained in using unilateral presidential authority. He complained that Trump failed to call in the National Guard over the objections of local officials to squelch civil unrest in the Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. When DeSantis visited campaign volunteers last Friday, he indignantly complained “it’s just not true” that he has gone easy on Trump in these final days. “If you watched the debate,” DeSantis told reporters, “I hit on BLM, not building the wall, the debt, not draining the swamp, Fauci, all those things.”

    Perhaps the prospect of impending defeat has concentrated the mind, but DeSantis in his closing trek across Iowa has offered perceptive explanations for why these attacks against Trump have sputtered. One is that Trump stifled the debates by refusing to participate in them. “It’s different for me to just be doing that to a camera versus him being right there,” DeSantis told reporters. “When you have a clash, then you guys have to cover it, and it becomes something that people start to talk about.” The other problem, he maintained, was that conservative media like Fox News act as “a praetorian guard” that suppresses criticism of Trump, even from the right.

    Those are compelling observations, but incomplete as an explanation. DeSantis’s larger problem may be that the universe of voters that wants Trumpism but doesn’t think Trump can be relied on to deliver it is much smaller than the Florida governor had hoped. One top Trump adviser told me that the fights Trump engaged in as president make it almost impossible to convince conservatives he’s not really one of them. Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical leader who has endorsed DeSantis, likewise told me that amid all of Trump’s battles with the left, it’s easier to try to convince evangelical conservatives that the former president can’t win in November than that he has abandoned their causes.

    The analogy I’ve used for DeSantis’s strategy is that Trump is like a Mack truck barreling down the far-right lane of American politics, and that rather than trying to pass in all the space he’s left in the center of the road, DeSantis has tried to squeeze past him on the right shoulder. There’s just not a lot of room there.

    Even so, DeSantis’s complaints about Trump look like a closing argument from Perry Mason compared with the muffled, gauzy case that Haley has presented against him. DeSantis’s choice to run to Trump’s right created a vacuum that Haley, largely through effective performances at the early debates, has filled with the elements of the GOP coalition that have always been most dubious of Trump: moderates, suburbanites, college-educated voters. But that isn’t a coalition nearly big enough to win. And she has walked on eggshells in trying to reach beyond that universe to the Republican voters who are generally favorable toward Trump but began the race possibly open to an alternative—what the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres calls the “maybe Trump” constituency.

    The most notable thing in how Haley talks about Trump is that she almost always avoids value judgments. It’s time for generational change, she will say, or I will be a stronger general-election candidate who will sweep in more Republican candidates up and down the ballot.

    Read: The real reason Republicans couldn’t kill Obamacare

    At last week’s CNN debate, Haley turned up the dial when she that said of course Trump lost the 2020 election; that January 6 was a “terrible day”; and that Trump’s claims of absolute immunity were “ridiculous.” Those pointed comments probably offered a momentary glimpse of what she actually thinks about him. But in the crucial days before the caucus, Haley has reverted to her careful, values-free dissents. At one town hall conducted over telephone late last week, she said the “hard truths” Republicans had to face were that, although “President Trump was the right president at the right time” and “I agree with a lot of his policies,” the fact remained that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” Talk about taking off the gloves.

    Jennifer Horn, the former Republican Party chair in New Hampshire who has become a fierce Trump critic, told me, “There’s no moral or ethical judgment against Trump from her. From anyone, really, but we’re talking about her. She says chaos follows him ‘rightly or wrongly.’ Who cares? Nobody cares about chaos. That’s not the issue with Trump. He’s crooked; he’s criminal; he incited an insurrection. That’s the case against Trump. And if his so-called strongest opponent won’t make the case against Trump, why should voters?”

    Gross, the longtime GOP activist, is supporting Haley, but even he is perplexed by her reluctance to articulate a stronger critique of the front-runner. “I don’t know what her argument is,” Gross told me. “I guess it’s: Get rid of the chaos. She’s got to make a strong case about why she’s the alternative, and it’s got to include some element of judgment.”

    The reluctance of DeSantis and Haley to fully confront the former president has created an utterly asymmetrical campaign battlefield because Trump has displayed no hesitation about attacking either of them. The super PAC associated with Trump’s campaign spent months pounding DeSantis on issues including supporting statehood for Puerto Rico and backing cuts in Social Security, and in recent weeks, Trump’s camp has run ads accusing Haley of raising taxes and being weak on immigration. In response, DeSantis and Haley have spent significantly more money attacking each other than criticizing, or even rebutting, Trump. Rob Pyers, an analyst with the nonpartisan California Target Book, has calculated that the principal super PAC supporting Trump has spent $32 million combined in ads against Haley and DeSantis; they have pummeled each other with a combined $38 million in negative ads from the super PACs associated with their campaigns. Meanwhile, the Haley and DeSantis super PACs have spent only a little more than $1 million in ads targeting Trump, who is leading them by as much as 50 points in national polls.

    Haley’s sharpest retort to any of Trump’s attacks has been to say he’s misrepresenting her record. During the CNN debate, Haley metronomically touted a website called DeSantislies.com, but if she has a similar page up about Trump, she hasn’t mentioned it. (Her campaign didn’t respond to a query about whether it plans to establish such a site.)

    “Calling him a liar right now is her strongest pushback, but I just don’t think GOP voters care about liars,” Horn told me. “If she engaged in a real battle with him for these last days [before New Hampshire], that would be fascinating to see. The fact that she’s not pushing back, the fact that she’s not running the strongest possible campaign as she’s coming down the stretch here, makes me wonder if she is as uncertain of her ability to win as I am.”

    Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to this careful approach to Trump, especially from Haley. A former top aide to one of Trump’s main rivals in the 2016 race told me that “nobody has found a message you can put on TV that makes Republicans like Trump less.” Some other veterans of earlier GOP contests believe that Haley and DeSantis were justified in initially trying to eclipse the other and create a one-on-one race with Trump. And for Haley, there’s also at least some argument for preserving her strongest case against Trump for the January 23 New Hampshire primary, where a more moderate electorate may be more receptive than the conservative, heavily evangelical population that usually turns out for the caucus.

    “She has to draw much sharper contrasts,” Gross told me. “And to be fair to her, once she gets out of here, maybe she will. What she strikes me as is incredibly disciplined and calculating. So, I do think you’re going to see modulation.”

    DeSantis has the most to lose in Iowa, because a poor showing will almost certainly end his campaign, even if he tries to insist otherwise for a few weeks. For Haley, the results aren’t as important because whatever happens here, she will have another opportunity to create momentum in New Hampshire, where polls have shown her rising even as DeSantis craters. Still, if Haley is unable or unwilling to deliver a more persuasive argument against Trump, she too will quickly find herself with no realistic hope of overtaking the front-runner, whose lead in national polls of Republican voters continues to grow. That’s one thing common to winter in both Iowa and New Hampshire: It gets dark early.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Texas National Guard Seizes Control Of Park In Eagle Pass, Prohibits Federal Border Patrol Agents From Entering

    Texas National Guard Seizes Control Of Park In Eagle Pass, Prohibits Federal Border Patrol Agents From Entering

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    Opinion

    Screenshot: Griff Jenkins X Video

    Earlier this week, the Texas National Guard took control of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, a city property where mass illegal crossings have been occurring.

    They are restricting Border Patrol from accessing the area, claiming that federal agents “perpetuate illegal crossings.”

    Two US officials confirmed the move to CBS News, which reported that Border Patrol agents had “used the park in recent weeks to hold migrants in an outdoor staging area before they are transported for further processing, including last month, when illegal crossings soared to record levels.”

    “They are denying entry to Border Patrol agents to conduct our duties,” one official told the network, adding that they are not sure “what authority (Texas officials) have over the federal government.”

    RELATED: Governor Abbott Slams ‘Unbelievable’ Video Of Border Patrol Opening Gate For Illegal Immigrants

    Texas National Guard Blocking Border Patrol

    The Texas Military Department has confirmed that the National Guard has deployed armed soldiers and vehicles to block federal government access to the park in Eagle Pass.

    Texas informed federal officials that no Border Patrol agents would be allowed to enter Shelby Park in any operational capacity.

    Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins posted a video showing BP agents being prevented from entering the area.

    “The current posture is to prepare for future illegal immigrant surges and to restrict access to organizations that perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings in the park and greater Eagle Pass area,” a statement from the Texas Military Department reads.

    They’re accusing the federal government of aiding and abetting illegal immigrants from entering the country.

    The Joe Biden administration is responsible for a record-breaking surge at the border even as they insist that “our approach…is working” and that the “border is secure.”

    It’s clear the Texas National Guard disagrees with that assertion, taking matters into its own hands.

    This Isn’t The First Clash Between Texas And The Feds

    This isn’t the first time the Texas National Guard got into a dispute with Biden’s Border Patrol agents, and it likely won’t be the last.

    Texas Governor Greg Abbott was furious after seeing video of Border Patrol agents opening a gate at the southern border and allowing dozens of illegal immigrants into the country after Texas National Guard officers had locked it shut.

    The incident took place in August of 2022.

    Abbott described the footage as “unbelievable.”

    In May of 2023, stunning video footage showed a United States Army soldier reportedly opening a gate and allowing a large crowd of illegal immigrants across the border onto private property in Texas.

    That incident took place in the same location in Eagle Pass, Texas.

    The Political Insider recently covered social media videos showing a sea of illegal immigrants numbering in the thousands waiting to be “processed” in Eagle Pass.

    There were 302,000 encounters along the southwest border in December, marking the highest monthly total ever recorded as Biden’s border crisis rages on.

    Jeffrey Epstein’s Brother Accuses Former Attorney General Bill Barr Of Covering Up His ‘Suicide’

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    Rusty Weiss has been covering politics for over 15 years. His writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, Fox News, Breitbart, and many more.

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    Rusty Weiss

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  • Trump Voters Are America Too

    Trump Voters Are America Too

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    This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

    In the last spring of the Obama administration, Michelle Obama was delivering her final commencement address as first lady, at City College of New York. Then, as now, the specter of Donald Trump had become the inescapable backdrop to everything. He’d spent the past year smashing every precept of restraint, every dignified tradition of the supposedly kindhearted nation he was seeking to lead. Obama couldn’t help but lob some barely cloaked denunciations of Trump’s wrecking-ball presidential campaign—the one that would soon be ratified with the Republican nomination. “That is not who we are,” the first lady assured the graduates. “That is not what this country stands for, no.”

    The promise did not age well. Not that November, and not since.

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    “This is not who we are”: The would-be guardians of America’s better angels have been scolding us with this line for years. Or maybe they mean it as an affirmation. Either way, the axiom prompts a question: Who is “we” anyway? Because it sure seems like a lot of this “we” keeps voting for Trump. Today the dictum sounds more like a liberal wish than any true assessment of our national character.

    In retrospect, so many of the high-minded appeals of the Obama era—“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”; “When they go low, we go high”—feel deeply naive. Question for Michelle: What if they keep going lower and lower—and that keeps landing the lowest of the low back in the White House?

    Unthinkable: 50 moments that define an improbable presidency

    Recently, I read through some old articles and notes of mine from the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, when Trump first cannonballed into our serene political bathtub. This was back when “we”—the out-of-touch media know-it-alls—were trying to understand Trump’s appeal. What did his supporters love so much about their noisy new savior? I dropped into a few rallies and heard the same basic idea over and over: Trump says things that no one else will say. They didn’t necessarily agree with or believe everything their candidate declared. But he spoke on their behalf.

    When political elites insisted “We’re better than this!”—a close cousin of “This is not who we are”—many Trump disciples heard “We’re better than them.” Hillary Clinton ably confirmed this when she dismissed half of the Republican nominee’s supporters—at an LGBTQ fundraiser in New York—as people who held views that were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” Whether or not she was correct, the targets of her judgment did not appreciate it. And the disdain was mutual. “He’s our murder weapon,” said the conservative political scientist Charles Murray, summarizing the appeal that Trump held for many of his loyalists.

    After the shock of Trump’s victory in 2016, the denial and rationalizations kicked in fast. Just ride out the embarrassment for a few years, many thought, and then America would revert to something in the ballpark of sanity. But one of the overlooked portents of 2020 (many Democrats were too relieved to notice) was that the election was still extremely close. Trump received 74 million votes, nearly 47 percent of the electorate. That’s a huge amount of support, especially after such an ordeal of a presidency—the “very fine people on both sides,” the “perfect” phone call, the bleach, the daily OMG and WTF of it all. The populist nerves that Trump had jangled in 2016 remained very much aroused. Many of his voters’ grievances were unresolved. They clung to their murder weapon.

    From the January/February 2024 issue: Jennifer Senior on what happens to the American psyche if Trump is reelected

    Trump has continued to test their loyalty. He hasn’t exactly enhanced his résumé since 2020, unless you count a second impeachment, several loser endorsements, and a bunch of indictments as selling points (some do, apparently: more medallions for his victimhood). January 6 posed the biggest hazard—the brutality of it, the fever of the multitudes, and Trump’s obvious pride in the whole furor. Even the GOP lawmakers who still vouched for Trump from their Capitol safe rooms seemed shaken.

    “This is not who we are,” Representative Nancy Mace, the newly elected Republican of South Carolina, said of the deadly riot. “We’re better than this.” There was a lot of that: thoughts and prayers from freaked-out Americans. “Let me be very clear,” President-elect Joe Biden tried to reassure the country that day. “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.”

    One hoped that Biden was correct, that we were in fact not a nation of vandals, cranks, and insurrectionists. But then, on the very day the Capitol had been ransacked, 147 House and Senate Republicans voted not to certify Biden’s election. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, skulked back to the ousted president a few weeks later, and the pucker-up parade to Mar-a-Lago was on. Large majorities of Republicans never stopped supporting Trump, and claim they never stopped believing that Biden stole the 2020 election and that Crooked Joe’s regime is abusing the legal system to persecute Trump out of the way.

    Here we remain, amazingly enough, ready to do this all again. Trump might be the ultimate con man, but his essential nature has never been a mystery. Yet he appears to be gliding to his third straight Republican nomination and is running strong in a likely rematch with an unpopular incumbent. A durable coalition seems fully comfortable entrusting the White House to the guy who left behind a Capitol encircled with razor-wire fence and 25,000 National Guard troops protecting the federal government from his own supporters.

    You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “This Is Who We Are.”

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • A War on Blue America

    A War on Blue America

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    During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes.

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    Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully cooperate with federal immigration agents. He attempted to strip California of the authority it has wielded since the early 1970s to set its own, more stringent pollution standards.

    Read: Trump’s war on blue America

    In Trump’s final year in office, he opened a new, more ominous front in his campaign to assert control over blue jurisdictions. As the nation faced the twin shocks of the coronavirus pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trump repeatedly dispatched federal law-enforcement agents to blue cities, usually over the opposition of Democratic mayors, governors, or both. Trump sent an array of federal personnel to Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to protect a federal courthouse amid the city’s chaotic protests; reports soon emerged of camouflage-clad federal agents without any identifying insignia forcing protesters into unmarked vans. Trump responded to the huge racial-justice protests in Washington, D.C., by dispatching National Guard troops drawn from 11 states, almost all of them led by Republican governors. Later he sent other federal law-enforcement officers to combat rising crime in Kansas City and Chicago, a city Trump described as “worse than Afghanistan.”

    Trump has signaled that in a second presidential term, he would further escalate his war on blue America. He’s again promising federal legislation that would impose policies popular in red states onto the blue states that have rejected them. He has pledged to withhold federal funding from schools teaching critical race theory and “gender ideology.” He says he will initiate federal civil-rights investigations into liberal big-city prosecutors (whom he calls “Marxist local District Attorneys”) and require cities to adopt policing policies favored by conservatives, such as stop-and-frisk, as a condition for receiving federal grants.

    Even more dramatic are Trump’s open pledges to launch militarized law-enforcement campaigns inside blue cities. He has proposed initiatives that cumulatively could create an occupying federal force in the nation’s largest cities. Trump has indicated that “in cities where there’s been a complete breakdown of public safety, I will send in federal assets, including the National Guard, until law and order is restored.”

    Read: Why the 2020s could be as dangerous as the 1850s

    Trump envisions an even more invasive door-to-door offensive against undocumented immigrants. In an early-2023 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said he “will use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Stephen Miller, who was his top immigration aide in the White House, later added that Trump envisions establishing massive internment camps for undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation. Trump has also promised “to use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets,” and move them to camps as well. (On this front, Trump has said he would work with states, but in practice that would likely involve partnering with Republican governors to impose policies to clear the streets opposed by their own Democratic mayors.)

    Michael Nutter, a former mayor of Philadelphia, told me that if a reelected Trump sought to implement these policies, the result would be “chaos, confusion,” and “massive demonstrations.” “Nobody is going to allow that to just happen,” Nutter said. “You are just going to see standoffs. It is going to be the Philadelphia Police Department versus the National Guard. Neighbors are going to be surrounding people’s houses. Folks are going to rush and seek safety in churches and synagogues and mosques and temples.”

    Of course, Trump would face other obstacles in attempting to implement these plans. The president’s legal authority to deploy federal forces over the objections of local officials is murky. And the relatively small number of federal law-enforcement officers under his direct control at agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection could limit his options, according to Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University Law School who studies relations among cities, states, and the federal government.

    But in Trump’s final months in office, he got creative about augmenting the forces at his command by drawing on National Guard troops provided by sympathetic Republican governors. His advisers are already talking about doing the same to staff his deportation agenda, as well as using the emergency authority he cited to fund his border wall to build his camps for undocumented immigrants without congressional approval.

    Briffault told me that the inevitable court challenges to any Trump-ordered projections of force into blue cities would likely pivot on the courts’ interpretation of how much authority the president possesses under various emergency statutes. His advisers have already discussed invoking the 19th-century Insurrection Act, for example. As legal scholars have pointed out, the scope of the president’s emergency powers is much broader than most Americans recognize, and Trump is clearly signaling that if he returns to the White House, he intends to test the outer boundaries of that authority. The question for the courts will be “to what extent can he engage directly in law enforcement and having militarized law enforcement in the United States, in the absence of a request by a governor or a mayor that there is a riotlike condition or civil disorder?” Briffault said. “Can he declare an emergency even though he’s not being asked for it?”

    From the January/February 2022 issue: Barton Gellman on how Trump’s next coup has already begun

    As president, Trump seemed to view himself less as the leader of a unified republic than as the champion of a red nation within a nation—one that constitutes the real America. If anything, Trump has assumed that factional role even more overtly in his 2024 campaign, promising that he will deliver “retribution” for his supporters and dehumanizing his opponents. Powered by such fetid resentments and grievances, the agenda Trump seeks to impose on blue cities and states could create the greatest threat to the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A War on Blue America.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • The Specter of Family Separation

    The Specter of Family Separation

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    Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office in 2017, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were dispatched across the country to round up as many undocumented foreigners as possible, and the travel ban put into limbo the livelihoods of thousands of people from majority-Muslim countries who had won the hard-fought right to be here—refugees, tech entrepreneurs, and university professors among them. The administration drew up plans for erecting a border wall, as well as an approach to stripping away the due-process rights of noncitizens so they could be expelled faster. These changes to American immigration policy took place in the amount of time that it would take the average new hire to figure out how to use the office printer.

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    Within days of Trump’s election, his key immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, was already gathering a group of loyal bureaucrats to start drafting executive orders. Civil servants who were veterans of the George W. Bush administration found the proposals to be so outlandishly impractical, if not also harmful to American interests and perhaps even illegal, that they assumed the ideas could never come to fruition. They were wrong. Over the next four years, lone children were loaded onto planes and sent back to the countries they had fled without so much as a notification to their families. Others were wrenched from their parents’ arms as a way of sending a message to other families abroad about what awaited them if they, too, tried to enter the United States.

    From the September 2022 issue: The secret history of the U.S.
    government’s family-separation policy

    If given another chance to realize his goals, Miller has essentially boasted in recent interviews that he would move even faster and more forcefully. And Trump, who’s been campaigning on the promise to finish the job he started on immigration policy, would fairly assume if he is reelected that harsh restrictions in that arena are precisely what the American people want. “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he declared during a speech in Iowa in September, referring to 1954’s offensively titled Operation Wetback, under which hundreds of thousands of people with Mexican ancestry were deported, including some who were American citizens.

    Trump and other key fixtures of his time in office have refused to rule out trying to reinstate family separations. They have been explicit about their plans to send ICE agents back into the streets to make arrests (with help from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the National Guard), and finish their work on the wall. They say that they will reimpose the pandemic-related expulsion policy known as Title 42, which all but shut off access to asylum, and that they will expand the use of military-style camps to house people who are caught in the enforcement dragnet. They have laid out plans and legal rationales for major policy changes that they didn’t get around to the first time, such as ending birthright citizenship, a long-held goal of Trump’s. They’ve floated ideas such as screening would-be immigrants for Marxist views before granting them entry, and using the Alien and Sedition Acts in service of deportations. Trump and his advisers have also made clear that they intend to invoke the Insurrection Act to allow them to deploy the U.S. military to the border, and to use an extensive naval blockade between the United States and Latin America to fight the drug trade. That most drug smuggling occurs at legal ports of entry doesn’t matter to Trump and his team: They seem to have reasonably concluded that immigration restrictions don’t have to be effective to be celebrated by their base.

    The breakneck pace of work during Miller’s White House tour was periodically hampered by worried bureaucrats attempting end runs around him, or by his most powerful detractors, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, whispering reservations into the president’s ear. But Trump’s daughter and son-in-law have left politics altogether, and Miller used Trump’s term to perfect strategies for disempowering anyone else who dared to challenge him. As for job applicants to work in a second Trump administration, Miller told Axios that being in lockstep with him on immigration issues would be “non-negotiable.” Others need not apply.

    Those who choose to join Trump in this mission to slash immigration would do so knowing that they would face few consequences, if any, for how they go about it: Almost all of the administration officials who pushed aggressively for the most controversial policies of Trump’s term continue to enjoy successful careers.

    The speed of Trump’s work on immigration can obscure its impact in real time. This is why Lucas Guttentag, a law professor at Stanford and Yale and a senior counselor on immigration issues in the Obama and Biden administrations, created a database with his students to log and track the more than 1,000 immigration-policy changes made during Trump’s years in office. Most remain in place. This is worth dwelling on. Trump’s time in office already represents a resurgence of old, disproven ideas about the inherent threat—physical, cultural, and economic—posed by immigrants. And if Trump does return to office, this moment may qualify less as a blip than an era: a period like previous ones when such misconceptions prevailed, and laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act and eugenics-based national-origins quotas ruled the day.

    Caitlin Dickerson: America never wanted the tired, poor, huddled masses

    Returning Trump to the presidency would reopen wounds that have barely healed in the communities he has said he would target immediately. Recently, I stood outside a church in the Northeast that caters mostly to undocumented farmworkers, with a Catholic sister who oversees the parish’s programming. As we stood in the autumn light, I remarked on the picturesque scene around her place of worship and work. She replied by pointing in one direction, then another, then another, at the places where she said ICE agents used to hide out on Sunday mornings during the Trump administration, waiting to capture her congregants as they left Mass to go about their weekly errands at the laundromat and the grocery store.

    Beyond the emotional impact of Trump’s return, the economy could also face a pummeling if the number of immigrant workers, legal and otherwise, were to drop. In a November 2022 speech, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, detailed the harm from COVID-related dips in immigration, which left the country short an estimated 1 million workers.

    America’s rightward shift on immigration is part of a global story in which Western countries are, in general, turning against immigrants. But the world tends to look to the United States as a guide for what sorts of checks on immigration are socially permissible. A new Trump administration would provide a pretty clear answer: just about any.

    An anything-goes approach to immigration enforcement may indeed be what the country is left with if Trump succeeds in the next general election. “The first 100 days of the Trump administration will be pure bliss,” Stephen Miller told Axios, “followed by another four years of the most hard-hitting action conceivable.”

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Specter of Family Separation.”

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    Caitlin Dickerson

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  • The Only Sin That Republicans Can’t Forgive

    The Only Sin That Republicans Can’t Forgive

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    The fall of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy today demonstrated again that the one sin that cannot be forgiven in the modern Republican Party is being seen as failing to fight the Democratic agenda by any means necessary.

    Of all the accusations that could be leveled against McCarthy, the notion that he was insufficiently committed to battling Democrats would not seem high on the list. As the GOP minority leader in the previous Congress, McCarthy voted to reject the 2020 election results in two key states and tried to impede the House committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. Then, as speaker this year, he backed the GOP vote last summer to censure Democratic Representative Adam Schiff over his role in investigating former President Donald Trump while Democrats held the majority; empowered hard-line Republican conservatives to undertake sweeping investigations of President Joe Biden’s administration as well as his son Hunter; and even launched, on his own authority, an impeachment inquiry into the president without any hard evidence of wrongdoing.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy’s Brief Speakership Meets Its End

    Yet on two occasions this year, McCarthy refused to risk chaos in the domestic and global economy, choosing instead to accept bipartisan deals with Democrats, first to avoid default on the federal debt and then to keep the federal government open when it faced a possible shutdown last weekend. And that was simply too much collaboration for the eight hard-line conservative Republicans who voted to remove him today, making him the first speaker ever forced out by a motion to vacate the position.

    The proximate cause of McCarthy’s fall was his decision, during his agonizing 15-ballot ascent to the speakership in January, to accept a change in House rules that allowed a single member to file a motion to remove him. That let Representative Matt Gaetz trigger the process that doomed McCarthy, even though the majority of the GOP conference voted to maintain him as their leader.

    Yet McCarthy’s removal also underscored how the incentives in the modern GOP coalition now almost entirely push in one direction: toward greater conflict with Democrats and the embrace of polarizing policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the GOP base. It’s no coincidence that critics accused McCarthy of not fighting hard enough for conservative demands at the same moment Trump and the other 2024 GOP presidential contestants are advancing militant ideas once considered politically radioactive, such as deploying the U.S. military into Mexico to attack drug cartels, ending birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, ripping up civil-service protections for government workers, and dispatching the National Guard into blue cities to fight crime.

    “Certainly if you step back at 30,000 feet, whatever the particular causes or idiosyncrasies of this decision, it will be part of a general sense of the party going further and further in this hard-line direction,” Bill Kristol, a conservative strategist, told me.

    In one respect, McCarthy’s demise continues a cycle among House Republicans that now traces back nearly half a century. From the late 1970s through the ’80s, a coterie of combative young House members led by Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber rose to prominence by founding a group, called the Conservative Opportunity Society, that accused Republican congressional leaders—and, at times, even then-President Ronald Reagan—of negotiating too many deals with Democrats.

    Gingrich’s pugnacious rejection of cooperation carried him to the speakership when Republicans recaptured the chamber in 1994, after four decades in the minority. But within a few years, Gingrich faced his own rebellion on the right from critics who thought he was too quick to cooperate with then-President Bill Clinton. Gingrich eventually resigned from the speakership under pressure after the GOP suffered unexpected House losses in the 1998 midterm election, following its move to impeach Clinton over his affair with a White House intern.

    The pattern resurfaced after Republicans won a sweeping House majority in 2010. Representative John Boehner, an old-school Republican who ascended to the speakership, faced an unending barrage of criticism from conservatives rooted in the new Tea Party movement over his attempts to reach agreements with Democratic President Barack Obama to avoid a debt default or government shutdown. Boehner resigned from the speakership and Congress itself in 2015, one step ahead of conservative critics in his conference determined to remove him. The same dynamic unfolded under Boehner’s successor as speaker, Representative Paul Ryan, who only lasted two tumultuous terms before deciding to leave Congress and not seek reelection in 2018.

    McCarthy found himself caught in the same undertow as Boehner and Ryan, with a portion of his conference immovably convinced that he was conceding too much ground to Democrats. “We saw it with Boehner and saw it with Ryan, and now this is, of course, the epitome of it,” former Democratic Representative David Price, a political scientist who has written several books on Congress, told me.

    In the first speech from critics during the debate over McCarthy’s removal, Republican Representative Bob Good of Virginia echoed the arguments that the right had raised against Boehner and Ryan. After arriving in Congress in 2021, Good declared, he was frustrated that Republicans “had not used every tool at our disposal to fight against the harmful, radical Democrat agenda that is destroying the country.” McCarthy had promised something different, Good insisted, but had failed to take the fight to Democrats hard enough. “We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything, other than just staying or becoming speaker,” Good said.

    The key difference from those earlier episodes is that the attack on McCarthy came even though he conceded far more to his critics on the right than Boehner or Ryan did. McCarthy’s strategy as speaker generally was to give the right almost everything it demanded and to expect the members from more competitive districts (including the 18 in districts that voted for Biden in 2020 and another 16 in seats that only narrowly preferred Trump) to eventually support him. By and large, they did so. And today, the members from that competitive terrain stood indivisibly beside McCarthy, perhaps fearful that whoever comes next would create even more problems for them. The Republicans from more competitive seats “are very much at risk in 2024, and yet I don’t know what their limits might be,” Price said. “They haven’t revealed that yet. And so all the attention is on the far right.”

    Read: Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right

    As today’s vote demonstrated, most House Republicans were comfortable with McCarthy’s leadership. Yet the fact that a rump group of conservatives still rejected him after all his concessions to the right captures the seemingly boundless sense of urgency and threat that now animates the GOP coalition. For years, Trump and other party leaders have told their voters that the Democratic agenda represents an effort to erase and uproot America as these voters understand it; in his last public rally before the January 6 insurrection, Trump declared that if Democrats won control of the Senate, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never—I believe—be able to come back again.”

    As Trump’s commanding lead in the GOP presidential race demonstrates, there’s enormous receptivity in the party for that apocalyptic message. And it’s those fears of being displaced in a changing America that have created the cycle in which the pressure on Republican congressional leaders perpetually pushes them toward harsher tactics and more aggressive policies. Former Republican Representative Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, notes that the hard-liners who deposed McCarthy are accurately reflecting the views of their own voters. “It’s frustration and anger at Washington, and we are going to throw sand in the wheels at whatever they are going to do there,” Davis told me a few hours before McCarthy’s fall. “That’s the level of anger out there in these districts. Blame it on members, but voters elected these folks.”

    The January 6 attack on the Capitol provided one grim measure of how that anger bubbling through large swaths of the Republican base can trigger tumultuous and destabilizing events. McCarthy’s removal today showed another. It’s not likely that either was the last.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • The Inside Story of the GOP on January 6

    The Inside Story of the GOP on January 6

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    Mitch McConnell froze when a Capitol Police officer rushed into the Senate chamber carrying a semiautomatic weapon. The majority leader had been so engrossed in the Electoral College debate happening before him that he hadn’t realized anything was amiss—until pandemonium erupted.

    Mere moments before, Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail had subtly entered the room and beckoned the vice president away from the dais where he was overseeing proceedings, a rarity for agents who usually loitered outside the doors. A hum spread through the chamber as staff shut down the debate, whispering to senators that “protesters are in the building.”

    “This is a security situation,” a security officer said into the microphone on the dais. “We’re asking that everyone remain in the chamber. It’s the safest place.”

    Suddenly, armed guards were racing to McConnell, hurriedly escorting him out of the room. With no access to a cellphone or television—neither was allowed in the Senate—McConnell had no idea what was happening, but he certainly had a guess. During a brief break in the January 6 Electoral College proceedings, he had caught a few televised snippets of Donald Trump’s speech at the Ellipse. The outgoing president, who had been spewing falsehoods that the election had been stolen from him, was spinning up his supporters, encouraging the thousands who had come to Washington to take their protest to the Capitol.

    Earlier that afternoon, McConnell had once again implored his GOP colleagues to stand down in objecting to the Electoral College. From a lectern in the Senate chamber, he noted that there was no proof of fraud on the level Trump was alleging. And he argued that “if this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

    Outside, unbeknownst to McConnell, at least 10,000 Trump supporters were besieging the Capitol. Agitators had broken through a series of flimsy bike racks marking the Capitol’s outer perimeter and begun scaling the sides of the Capitol building, chanting, “We want Trump! We want Trump!”

    Capitol Police tried to push them back with riot shields, dispensing tear gas into the crowd. But they were quickly overwhelmed by the swelling mob, which turned their flagpoles—bearing a mix of Confederate, American, Trump, and “Don’t Tread on Me” banners—into makeshift lances and spears.

    McConnell’s detail whisked him down to the Capitol basement and through the snakelike tunnels that weaved through the complex. As his staff updated him on the unraveling situation, officers hurried him away to an underground parking garage and shoved him in a car to get him off the property. As McConnell’s SUV pulled away from the Capitol grounds, his aides pulled up pictures and videos on their phones to show their boss the chaos outside.

    Read: America is running out of time

    McConnell was dumbfounded. For the first time in more than two centuries, the Capitol was under siege.

    In a small private room off the side of the Senate chamber, Pence was refusing to evacuate. Despite the rioters coursing through the hallways outside, when his Secret Service detail told him it was time, he said no. A few minutes later, Secret Service agents tried again. Once again, Pence refused. “The last thing I want is for these people to see a motorcade fleeing the scene,” he said. “That is not an image we want. I’m not leaving.”

    As Pence resisted his Capitol evacuation on January 6, Trump continued to taunt him on Twitter. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” he wrote. “USA demands the truth!”

    Two minutes later, Pence’s Secret Service agents stopped giving him a say in the matter. Pointing to the glass panels on the chamber door, they told the vice president they could not protect him or his family there.

    “We need to go!” a Secret Service agent said.

    The officers managed to get Pence as far as the basement garage of the Capitol before the vice president began protesting his evacuation again. His security detail implored him to at least sit inside the armed limousine they had standing by. Again, Pence adamantly refused.

    Standing in the parking garage, Pence turned to his longtime chief of staff, Marc Short, to devise a plan. Trump, by design or by circumstance, wasn’t responding to the chaos unfolding above their heads inside the Capitol. Someone needed to act presidentially and end this madness.

    “Get Kevin McCarthy on the phone,” Pence instructed. Short pulled up his cell and pressed the call button.

    McCarthy, for his part, was on the phone with Trump. He screamed into the receiver at the president as his detail spirited him away from the Capitol, where protesters had overrun his office. Bombs had been discovered at the Republican and Democratic National Committees, the House minority leader told Trump. Someone had been shot.

    “You’ve got to tell these people to stop,” he said.

    Trump wasn’t interested. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” he replied blithely.

    When Trump told McCarthy that the rioters must “like Trump more than you do,” the GOP leader fumed. How many times had he bent over backwards to protect the president? How many times had he buried his head in the sand when he knew the president’s actions were wrong? Trump owed him—and all House Republicans—an intervention to stop the attack. Their lives were on the line.

    “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” McCarthy yelled. Trump told McCarthy that antifa was behind the violence, not his own supporters. McCarthy was aghast.

    “They’re your people,” McCarthy said, noting that Trump supporters were at that very moment climbing through his office window. “Call them off!”

    As his car sped away from the Capitol, McCarthy tried to come up with a plan. He called the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, begging him to get to the White House and make Trump put an end to the violence. McCarthy began to think about trying to reach Trump via television. Maybe if he took to the networks, he could break through by calling the president out publicly.

    Before McCarthy could do anything, his phone rang. It was Pence. McCarthy told the vice president what Trump had just said to him.

    This is the story of Republican leaders’ rude awakening on January 6, as they realized that despite their past loyalty to Trump, their party leader would do nothing to save them. GOP leaders had spent four years defending Trump through an impeachment and an endless stream of scandals. But on the day they needed him most, the president did nothing to help even his loyal rank and file escape violence.

    Although Republicans have since rallied behind the former president, that day, the chasm between GOP leaders and Trump could not have been wider. From their lockdown off campus, in a series of previously unreported meetings, McConnell and other GOP leaders would turn to their Democratic counterparts for assistance in browbeating the Pentagon to move the National Guard to send armed troops to the Hill. Together, the bipartisan leaders of Congress, agreed in their conviction that Trump was stonewalling if not outright maneuvering against them, joined forces to do what the president would not: Save the Capitol.

    At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump sat in a dining room abutting the Oval Office, watching television coverage of his devotees storming the Capitol. Multiple aides were rushing in and out, begging him to make a public statement calling for peace. “This is out of control,” Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, told Trump, imploring him to send a white flag via Twitter. His daughter Ivanka also kept running in and out of the room, pleading with her father to call off the riot. “Let it go,” she pleaded with her dad, referring to the election.

    Even Trump’s son Donald Jr., who had urged Trump’s followers to “fight” at the rally that morning, had been alarmed by the chaotic scene at the Capitol. From the airport, before he departed town, he had tweeted, “This is wrong and not who we are. Be peaceful.” He also texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, imploring him to get his dad to stop the violence.

    “He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP,” he texted. “We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

    Don Jr. wasn’t the only one appealing to Meadows. Fox News personalities such as Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity begged the White House chief of staff to get the president to call off the crowds. Down the hall, Meadows’s staff warned him that Trump’s supporters “are going to kill people.”

    Shortly after 2:30 p.m., Trump begrudgingly issued a tweet calling on his supporters to “please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement.” As far as Trump was concerned, the riot was Congress’s problem, he told his aides. It was their job to defend the Capitol, he said, not his. Perversely, the riot had actually buoyed Trump’s hopes that he might be able to strong-arm his way to overturning the election. When the chaos started to unfold, he began calling his GOP allies in Congress—not to check on their well-being, but to make sure they didn’t lose their nerve about objecting to the election results.

    Across the Capitol campus, in a large Senate conference room guarded by cops, tensions were reaching a boiling point. The typically even-keeled Mitt Romney was lambasting Josh Hawley, blaming him for triggering the riot by endorsing Trump’s outlandish election objections. Lindsey Graham, Trump’s closest ally in the chamber, flew into a fit of rage at the “yahoos” who had invaded the Hill and screamed at the Senate sergeant-at-arms, who was hiding in the safe room with them.

    “What the hell are you doing here? Go take back the Senate!” Graham barked at the chamber’s top security official. “You’ve got guns … Use them!”

    Graham only grew angrier upon hearing a rumor that started circulating among Trump allies in the room: that the president was refusing to send in troops to help secure the Capitol. From their lockdown, he tried to call Trump to get clarity. When the president didn’t answer, Graham phoned Ivanka, asking her whether her dad was intentionally keeping the National Guard from responding to the crisis. He couldn’t see any other reason it was taking so long for reinforcements to arrive.

    Ivanka assured Graham that this wasn’t the case, but Graham was still furious at Trump’s nonchalant response to hundreds of his followers laying waste to the Capitol. He pressed Ivanka to get her dad to do more. He then called Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and threatened that Republicans would forcibly remove Trump from office using the Twenty-Fifth Amendment if the president continued to do nothing. Lisa Murkowski was equally shaken as she waited out the violence. The Alaska Republican had been in her private hideaway office in the Senate basement when the riot had begun. All of a sudden, she had heard someone stumbling into the bathroom next to her office and heaving into the toilet. Peeking outside, she saw a bathroom door open and a police officer washing his face in the sink.

    “Can I help you?” she asked, surprised. “Are you okay?”

    The officer had paused and looked up at her, his eyes red and swollen nearly shut from what appeared to be tear gas.

    “No, I’m okay,” he said almost frantically, racing out of the bathroom. “No, I’ve got to get out there. They need my help.”

    As she waited out the violence, hoping the marauders wouldn’t find her, Murkowski could still hear the police officer’s retching, playing like a track on repeat, over and over in her head.

    A couple of miles away, at a military installation along the Anacostia River, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were trying to figure out what was going on with the National Guard. The speaker and the minority leader had been evacuated to Fort McNair, along with the other most senior lawmakers in Congress from both parties. Since the moment they’d arrived, they had turned their holding room into a command center for their desperate operation to save the Capitol.

    Sitting around a large break room with a leather couch so worn that it was held together with red duct tape, Pelosi and Schumer tried to make sense of the unfolding situation. Pelosi had been ushered away so quickly that she’d left her cellphone on the House chamber dais. Schumer had his antiquated flip phone out and was calling his rank-and-file members and aides, asking for updates. Every few minutes, their Capitol security details hovering in the hall would race into the room with a bit of news. Lawmakers in both chambers had been led to secret holding rooms in the congressional office buildings, though there was no telling if the mob would follow and find them. There were reports that some of the rioters were armed. And a group of Pelosi’s aides had barricaded themselves in a conference room, hiding under a table as rioters yelled, “Where’s Nancy?” and tried to kick down the doors. One of Steny Hoyer’s top aides was calling him frantically, insisting that the leaders clear the Capitol.

    A large projection screen had been lowered and tuned to CNN. The leaders gaped as, for the first time, they took in the full scene outside the Capitol. It looked like a war zone—with Congress on the losing side. Outnumbered cops clashed with protesters. Rioters were breaking down doors and shattering windows. Police were getting sprayed with tear gas.

    “This is all Trump’s fault!” Hoyer cried out helplessly, to no one in particular. Pelosi agreed. The man who started all of this, she reminded them grimly, still had control of the nation’s nuclear codes.

    “I can’t believe this,” she said indignantly. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

    Elsewhere in D.C., the head of the National Guard had put armed troops on buses as soon as the Capitol Police chief alerted him to the riot underway at the Capitol. But he had still not received required orders from the Pentagon to deploy them. Troops in Virginia and Maryland were ready to move, the Democratic leaders were hearing—yet they too had not received the green light.

    At 3:19 p.m., just over an hour after the Capitol was breached, the Democratic leaders connected via phone with top Pentagon brass and demanded answers. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy insisted that his superior, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, had already approved mobilization of armed National Guard units. But seven minutes later, the besieged House sergeant-at-arms told them the opposite: He was still hearing from D.C. Guard leaders that no such order had been given.

    Hoyer was getting a similar message from Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, who had 1,000 National Guard troops on standby, ready to move. In a frantic phone call, Hoyer tried to explain to Hogan that the Pentagon had given those troops permission to mobilize—the top Army brass had just told Schumer so. But Hogan protested.

    “Steny, I’m telling you, I don’t care what Chuck says,” the governor said. “I’ve been told by the Department of Defense that we don’t have authorization.”

    The Democratic leaders looked at one another, alarmed. What the hell was really going on? They asked each other the unthinkable: Could the problem be Trump? Was it possible that the president of the United States was telling the military to stand down—or worse, helping to orchestrate the attack?

    Down the hall, Kevin McCarthy was working other channels. Pacing the conference room where GOP leaders were sequestered at Fort McNair, he screamed at Dan Scavino, a top White House aide who often handled Trump’s Twitter account. The tweet Trump had put out around 2:30 p.m. calling for calm was not good enough, McCarthy insisted. They had to do more to stop the violence.

    “Trump has got to say: ‘This has to stop,’” McCarthy growled into the phone. “He’s the only one who can do it!”

    In the GOP room, McConnell; his No. 2, John Thune; House Minority Whip Steve Scalise; and other GOP lawmakers were also on the phones trying to figure out what was happening. It was clear that McCarthy’s appeals to Trump were falling flat. They would need to find a way to work around the president—the man they had collectively defended for four years—if they wanted to get the National Guard to the Capitol.

    The GOP leaders, however, could not figure out who was in charge. They kept returning to basic questions: Who had the authority to order in the troops? Was it the Army secretary? Was it the acting defense secretary? Did they need Trump’s approval?

    Since he had arrived at Fort McNair, McCarthy had ordered his aides to get him on as many television networks as possible. He kept darting in and out of the room to take their calls, hoping Trump would be watching one of the channels he was speaking on.

    “This is so un-American,” McCarthy said in a Fox News appearance at 3:05 p.m., attempting to shame Trump into acting. “I could not be sadder or more disappointed with the way our country looks at this very moment.”

    Adam Serwer: Fox News hosts knew–and lied anyway

    At one point between television hits, McCarthy announced to the room that he had finally won a concession from the White House: Trump, after much begging, had begrudgingly agreed to record a video calling for calm. The news, however, was not particularly reassuring to the Republicans in the room. The president was entirely unpredictable. Would such a video help—or make it worse? they asked each other. And what of the Guard?

    Off in the corner, Scalise was scrolling through Twitter on his iPad, looking at images of the  Capitol. One photo in particular made him stop short: a rioter rappelling down the wall of the Senate chamber and onto the rostrum where Mike Pence had been presiding. Scalise held his device out so McConnell could see.

    “Look, they’re in the Senate chamber,” he said.

    McConnell’s face paled.

    Since the evacuation, McConnell had been torn between feelings of disbelief and irrepressible anger toward Trump for fomenting the assault. The Capitol had been his home for decades. The members and the staff who worked there might as well have been his family. Yet the president had put them all in mortal danger. McConnell’s aides had been texting his chief of staff, who had accompanied him to Fort McNair, about the situation at the Capitol as it grew more precarious. Rioters were banging on their office doors, claiming to be Capitol Police officers to try to gain entry. Others were scaling the scaffolding outside their windows, trying to peer inside. In the hallway outside their barricaded doors, staffers could hear a woman praying loudly that “the evil of Congress be brought to an end.”

    McConnell knew that his aides had been coordinating with Schumer’s office from their lockdown, working their Rolodexes to summon help from the federal agencies. They had been calling and sending cellphone pictures of the chaos to anyone and everyone they knew at the Pentagon and Justice Department. They’d even roused former Attorney General Bill Barr and his chief of staff to use internal channels.

    “We are so overrun, we are locked in the leader’s suite,” McConnell’s counsel Andrew Ferguson had whispered to Barr’s former chief from his hiding place, keeping his voice down so as not to be heard by rioters. “We need help. If you don’t start sending men, people might die.”

    McConnell knew that appealing to Trump directly would be a waste of time. He hadn’t spoken with the president since December 15, the day McConnell publicly congratulated Joe Biden for winning the election. Trump had called him afterward in a rage, hurling insults and expletives. “The problem you have is the Electoral College is the final word,” McConnell had told him calmly. “It’s over.”

    McConnell didn’t bother calling Trump again. Even on the morning of January 6, he purposefully ignored a phone call from the president, believing he could no longer be reasoned with. So when the Capitol came under attack, McConnell focused on getting in touch with military leaders, leaving it to his chief of staff to communicate with Meadows to enlist the White House’s help to quell the riot—if they would help at all.

    An FBI SWAT team had arrived at the Capitol campus just as the leaders of Congress were being escorted into Fort McNair. But McConnell knew they would need more manpower to stop the rampage. It was why he called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, to implore him to help dispatch the Guard. But as far as McConnell could tell, the Guard still wasn’t moving.

    As the duty officers at Fort McNair tried in vain to hook up a television so the Republicans could watch the latest scenes of destruction at the Capitol, McConnell huddled with his staff around a telephone, trying to reach the Pentagon. “I have the majority leader on the line,” McConnell’s aide announced, trying to connect her boss with Acting Defense Secretary Miller. They were promptly put on hold, infuriating GOP lawmakers in the room who couldn’t understand why the Pentagon was dodging their inquiries.

    Around 3:40 p.m., an hour and a half after the breach occurred, McConnell’s patience gave out. He stormed out of the room and crossed the hall to find Pelosi, Schumer, and Hoyer. “What are you hearing?” McConnell asked his Democratic counterparts as the other GOP leaders followed him into the room. “Do you know what the holdup is with the Guard?”

    They didn’t know any more than he did. At a loss, Pelosi and Schumer had just signed off on a joint statement demanding that Trump call for an end to the violence. Everyone knew it was little more than a gesture. It was time to bring the combined weight of all four congressional leaders to bear on the administration.

    “Get Miller on the phone,” someone barked.

    As aides worked to set up the call, the Republicans who had just entered the room stared at the CNN footage on the projector screen. It was the first time they’d witnessed the enormity of the scenes at the Capitol on anything larger than their phone or tablet screens. The footage rolling in was shocking: Rioters, having ransacked the building, were now taking selfies and cheering. They were stealing historic artifacts as keepsakes; one even carried away the speaker’s lectern, waving with glee at the camera. On one end of the Capitol, protesters were storming the Senate chamber and rummaging through senators’ desks. On the other, insurrectionists were doing the same in Pelosi’s office.

    “That’s my desk!” one Pelosi aide blurted out when an image of a man sitting in her chair with his feet propped up by her computer flashed on the screen. “They’re going through my desk!”

    Hoyer, still furious, started lecturing Scalise that the riot was the GOP’s fault for enabling Trump.

    “This isn’t the time for that,” Scalise retorted. “Right now, we need to get the chamber back, secured and open.”

    McConnell, Schumer, and the other lawmakers, meanwhile, stood by awaiting the call. Amid the chaos of the afternoon, two special elections in Georgia had been officially called for the Democratic candidates. That meant Schumer’s party would be taking control of all of Washington—and he would soon be taking McConnell’s job. McConnell had already congratulated Schumer on his forthcoming promotion.

    A few minutes later, huddled around a cellphone, the leaders jointly excoriated Miller for his snail-like response to what had all the markings of a coup at the Capitol. It was perhaps the first time since Trump took office that the congressional leaders had presented such a united front. Why hadn’t troops been sent in already? they demanded to know. Where was the National Guard?

    “Tell POTUS to tweet, ‘Everyone should leave,’” Schumer insisted, yelling into the device over speakerphone.

    “Get help in ASAP,” McConnell said firmly. “We want the Capitol back.”

    Miller stammered that Pentagon leaders needed to formulate a “plan” before they moved troops.

    “Look, we’re trying,” Miller said. “We’re looking at how to do this.”

    His vague answer did not suffice. There was no time to waste, the leaders insisted, as they pressed him to say how soon armed troops would arrive. After demurring several times, Miller finally gave them a partial answer: It could take four hours to get the National Guard to the Capitol, and up until midnight until the building could be cleared.

    At that, Schumer lost it.

    “If the Pentagon were under attack, it wouldn’t take you four hours to formulate a plan!” he roared. “We need help now!”

    Scalise pressed Miller to tell them how many troops they could expect to arrive. When again the secretary declined to answer, Pelosi exploded.

    “Mr. Secretary, Steve Scalise just asked you a question, and you’re not answering it,” she said. “What’s the answer to that question?”

    But Miller simply dodged again, murmuring that they were trying their best.

    That the most powerful nation in the world didn’t have a plan in place to protect its own Capitol from attack was unthinkable to the leaders. And the fact that Miller was refusing to give clear answers appalled them. There was only one other person in Washington who might have more sway than they did. Hanging up on Miller, they reached out to their last hope: It was time to call Pence.

    In the parking garage in the basement of the Capitol, Pence listened as the congressional leaders beseeched him to help dispatch troops to the Capitol. As vice president, he had no authority to assume Trump’s powers as commander in chief and give orders to the secretary of defense. But he couldn’t understand why the Guard wasn’t already on its way. Something had to be done.

    “I’m going to get off this call and call them, then call you right back,” Pence told the lawmakers, hanging up to dial Miller and Milley.

    Next to him, Pence’s brother, Greg, and his chief of staff, Marc Short, were still seething at how cavalierly Trump had abandoned them. They had read the president’s most recent Twitter attack against Pence on their phones in the Senate basement, fuming that in the heat of the riot, the president had chosen to stir up more vitriol about the vice president instead of calling to check on him. Trump’s conspiratorial advisers were also emailing Pence’s team, telling them that the riot was their fault for not helping overturn the election. It was outrageous.

    The vice president, however, didn’t have time to dwell on the slights. When they’d first arrived in the garage, he had phoned McCarthy and McConnell, then Schumer and Pelosi, to make sure they all were safe. He didn’t bother dialing Trump. Short, however, angrily called Meadows to tell the White House that they were okay. And in case he or anyone else was wondering, Short added, “we are all planning to go back to the Capitol to certify the election tonight.”

    Meadows didn’t object. “That’s probably best,” he replied.

    At the White House, aides were gradually giving up hope that the president would do anything useful to restore order at the Capitol, though by mid-afternoon, the pressure on Trump to act was relentless. Republican lawmakers; longtime Trump allies, including Barr and former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney; and conservative influencers such as Ann Coulter reamed him publicly. Even former President George W. Bush had issued a reprimand. Trump ignored all of them.

    As they worked the phones, Pence’s staff heard that a high-level meeting had been convened at the White House to discuss the chain of command and how to get the National Guard moving. The fact that the administration could not figure out who was in charge as the Capitol was overrun was beyond alarming—though, in the estimation of Pence and his team, Trump at any point could have picked up the phone and forced the Pentagon to move faster. That he hadn’t, they all agreed, spoke volumes. And because of that—and the Hill leaders’ desperation—Pence knew it was time for him to step up.

    At 4:08 p.m., Pence called the acting defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mustering his most commanding tone, he gave an order that was technically not his to issue.

    “Clear the Capitol,” he said. “Get troops here. Get them here now.”

    Back in lockdown at Fort McNair, McConnell was issuing orders of his own.

    “We are going back tonight,” he insisted to Pence and Pentagon officials on a 4:45 p.m. phone call with Hill leaders. “The thugs won’t win.”

    The vice president’s order to the military seemed to have finally snapped things into place. Pence had let congressional leaders know that armed Guard troops were on the way. It would take another half hour for them to arrive.

    McConnell had always delighted in good political combat. But when the votes were in, he believed in accepting outcomes with dignity. There was no dignity in what had happened that day—only embarrassment for the Republican Party. And McConnell was just that: embarrassed. Trump didn’t even have the decency to be sorry. That afternoon, as congressional leaders joined forces across party lines to get reinforcements to the Capitol, the president had been egging on his supporters.

    “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred land-slide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Remember this day forever!”

    Even in the video he released calling for “peace,” Trump praised his followers for revolting against a “fraudulent election,” calling them “very special” and adding, “We love you.”

    It was too much for McConnell to stomach. After the senator had spent four years trying to accommodate the president’s demands, Trump had threatened his Capitol, and McConnell was finally done with him. Congress had to certify Biden as the next president, and they had to do it that night, in prime time, he insisted. The whole country had to know that Trump had lost, and that his gambit to cling to power had failed.

    There was one major impediment to McConnell’s plan. Capitol Police were saying the building would not be secure enough to welcome lawmakers back that night. They had to sweep the chamber for bombs and ensure that no straggling rioters were hiding in a bathroom—and there was no way to do that quickly. Defense officials had even suggested busing lawmakers to Fort McNair to certify the election that night from the military base.

    To McConnell, waiting until morning was entirely out of the question. He knew that the vice president and other leaders had his back. They were just as adamant as he was that Trump’s flunkies would not push Congress out of its own Capitol. Pence had even offered the Capitol Police his own K-9 unit to help sweep the building faster.

    Given the sensitivity of the discussion, the congressional leaders had gathered in a smaller space down the hall, away from the probing eyes and ears of aides and other lawmakers who had joined them at Fort McNair. Within minutes, Pelosi had lit into the military brass, accusing them of ignoring the blaring warning signs of coming violence in the days before the attack.

    “Were you without knowledge of the susceptibility of our national security here?” Pelosi demanded of Miller, her patience dwindling.

    From the January/February 2022 issue: A party, and nation, in crisis

    “We assessed it would be a rough day,” Miller said. “No idea it would be like this.”

    For a brief, resolute moment on January 6, the GOP’s leaders were prepared to do whatever they needed to do to bring Trump to heel. Pence acted that day to restore peace. Party affiliation made no difference to Republican leaders as they worked with Pelosi and Schumer to save their rank and file.

    But these flashes of defiance were fleeting. Mere days later, when Democrats moved to impeach Trump for inciting the riot, Republicans balked. Both McCarthy and McConnell voted against impeachment, and Pence, whose aides had steamed about Trump while in hiding, barred his staff from testifying at Trump’s second trial. In the months since, GOP leaders have done their utmost to bury the truth of what happened that day—leaving Republican voters with the distinct impression that Trump and his followers did nothing wrong. Meanwhile, as the country contends with the protracted consequences of their whiplash, Trump is plotting a return to the White House.

    This article has been adapted from Rachael Bade and Karoun Dimirijan’s new book, Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump.

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    Rachael Bade

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  • Army National Guard Soldiers, Especially Those Deployed and Exposed to Combat, Are at Risk for Alcohol Misuse After Military Deployment

    Army National Guard Soldiers, Especially Those Deployed and Exposed to Combat, Are at Risk for Alcohol Misuse After Military Deployment

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    Press Release
    –


    updated: Mar 10, 2022


    PISCATAWAY, N.J., March 9, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Using alcohol to cope with negative emotions after military deployment is known to be common among active-duty servicemembers. But a new study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs suggests that Army Guard soldiers who return home after deployment may face similar risks.

    Further, the situation might be more troublesome for Guard soldiers who were exposed to combat.

    “Combat events, such as having engaged in direct combat and experienced combat trauma, may precipitate a great deal of personal discomfort (‘moral injury’), necessitating some form of self-soothing, such as excessive alcohol use,” says study author James Griffith, Ph.D., a faculty member and research fellow at the University of Utah’s National Center for Veterans Studies.

    In his research, Griffith looked at survey responses from Army National Guard soldiers who had recently returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2010.

    Griffith used data from more than 4,500 Army National Guard soldiers who responded to the U.S. Army’s Reintegration Unit Risk Inventory. The anonymous survey includes 80 questions about alcohol and drug use, as well as other aspects of the soldiers’ lives such as criminal behavior, interpersonal relationships, social support and psychological distress symptoms.

    He compared their responses to those of Guard soldiers serving their traditional part-time military role, as well as to previous research on deployed Army Guard and active-duty military personnel.

    Overall, recently deployed and returned Army Guard soldiers had higher rates of heavy drinking than nondeployed Army Guard soldiers serving in a traditional, garrison role (29.9% vs. 24.1% for heavy drinking, and 33.9% vs. 31.8% for binge drinking, respectively). The rate of drinking among deployed Guard soldiers also exceeded that for deployed military personnel in several past studies.

    The most impactful factor was exposure to combat during deployment, which was associated with greater alcohol use.

    Griffith says that the nature of the reserve military service may help contribute to its members being at higher risk for alcohol use. Most of the time, Army Guard personnel serve one weekend a month and 15 annual active-duty training days, as do most reservists. When called up, they serve full-time for a period of about one year. And in the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Army Guard and Army Reserve personnel constituted about 30% to 40% of the U.S. forces.

    “On their return, Guard personnel resume their part-time military service and civilian life and employment,” he says. “Unlike active-duty military personnel, Guard personnel typically do not live near military installations to receive behavioral health care. And many are not eligible for military health care unless conditions are directly related to active-duty military service.”

    Griffith says more needs to be done to help recently returning, deployed Army Guard soldiers, such as more thoroughly assessing alcohol risk.

    Media contact:

    James Griffith

    Jhgriffith@comcast.net

    Source: Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs

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