Trump Defenders Try Evasive Maneuvers

To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor in chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”

Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”

Obviously? Immediately upon assuming office, Trump issued sweeping pardons and commutations for the approximately 1,500 people prosecuted for participating in the January 6 attacks, including convicted violent offenders. He might not have literally deployed any mobs yet, but he has freed members of paramilitary groups that are loyal to him, and who may see their pardons and commutations as license to act on his behalf again.

[Read: January 6ers got out of prison—and came to my neighborhood]

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, led military-style maneuvers on January 6 and had an armed strike force nearby. This week, while strolling the Capitol in a kind of victory tour, Rhodes told CNN, “I don’t regret calling out the election as what it was.” The Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who had to direct the attacks from a distance (a judge had barred him from the city for vandalizing a Black church), expressed vindication and a desire for revenge. “We went through hell—and I’m gonna tell you, it was worth it,” he exulted on The Alex Jones Show. “The people who did this [to us], they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars.” And the “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander said in a livestream, “I would storm the Capitol again for Donald Trump. I would start a militia for Donald Trump.”

The J6 pardons have chagrined many Republicans. But it is not going to make many of them rethink their support for Trump. If you want to understand why, look again at the sentence that Lowry wrote just before laughing off the hysterical fear of Trumpist paramilitaries. Trump “says crude and unworthy things.” He “behaved abysmally.”

Even when Republicans in good MAGA standing can bring themselves to scold Trump, their criticism is limited to discrete acts. Trump can say or do something bad, but he cannot be something bad. To acknowledge that his bad acts follow from his character and beliefs, and therefore offer a guide to his future actions, would throw into question the morality and wisdom of supporting him.

Before the fact, vanishingly few prominent Republican politicians or conservative intellectuals actively endorsed the notion of freeing the J6 criminals en masse. The party line before the inauguration held that Trump was in his rights to grant clemency to some of the nonviolent offenders, but not to the ones who’d beat up cops or planned the operation. The week before he was sworn in as vice president, J. D. Vance said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Even Representative Jim Jordan, one of the most flamboyant Trump devotees in Congress, wouldn’t endorse a full suite of pardons.

After Trump went ahead, his allies mostly stopped short of defending the pardons. Instead, they turned to a familiar menu of evasive maneuvers. Some expressed an implausible degree of unfamiliarity with Trump’s actions. (“I don’t know whether there were pardons given to individuals who assaulted police officers,” Senator Susan Collins said.) Others fell back on whataboutism. (“I assume you’re asking me about the Biden pardons of his family,” Senator Chuck Grassley sneered in response to a reporter’s question about January 6. “I’m just talking about the Biden pardons, because that is so selfish.”) Most expressed a desire to ignore the issue altogether. (“We’re not looking backwards; we’re looking forwards,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.) Awkwardly, almost immediately after bleating about their desire to move forward, House Republicans announced a new committee to “investigate” January 6, which presumably will advance Trump’s alt-history of the event as an FBI setup, a Democratic security failure, a day of love, or, somehow, all three.

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

The most revealing statement on the pardons came from House Speaker Mike Johnson. “The president’s made his decision,” he said. “I don’t second-guess those.” Here, Johnson was stating overtly what most of his colleagues had only revealed tacitly: that he does not believe that his job permits him to criticize, let alone oppose, Trump’s actions.

This admission has profound implications. It shows that Trump faces no effective constraints from within his party. Given the Republican trifecta, this means he faces no effective opposition from within the elected branches of the federal government. Even if his allies personally believe that a line exists that the president cannot or will not cross, what matters is that if he does cross it, nothing will happen to him. This realization ought to shake their confidence that the next imagined red line will hold. Instead, they have declined to revise any of their deeper beliefs about Trump.

The refusal to draw any broader conclusions from the January 6 pardons is evident not just on Capitol Hill but also in the handful of reproachful articles published in conservative media. The pardons are “a poor start for an administration that has pledged to end the partisanship of law enforcement and restore public order,” National Review editorialized. “This is a rotten message from a President about political violence done on his behalf,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote. “For those who have supported Trump, this is a moment to recognize when he doesn’t measure up, morally or constitutionally,” the editors of The Free Press observed. The implication of these dutiful reprimands is that Trump has failed to live up to his values, rather than having fulfilled them.

In the midst of the Soviet show trials in 1936, Workers Age, an American communist newspaper, gently rebuked Stalin for his heavy-handedness. Sure, the defendants were guilty of sabotage at the behest of Trotsky, but execution was an excessive punishment. “Furthermore,” the editorial declared, “we do not hesitate to say that the bureaucratic regime of Stalin in the CPSU makes it extremely difficult for healthy, constructive critical opposition forces developing in the Party ranks”—as if inhibiting criticism of Stalin was some kind of unintended consequence of executing his rivals.

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

The conservatives distressed over Trump’s mass pardons have a similar lack of curiosity about his motives. Why Trump would take such unfortunate actions, they do not ask. Could it be because he believes fundamentally that opposition to him is per se criminal, action on his behalf is per se legal, and any outcome in which he loses is illegitimate?

One might hope that Trump’s congressional allies, temporarily disappointed by his regrettable lapse in judgment regarding the January 6 pardons, might rethink their approach to the ongoing confirmation fights, which revolve around fears that the president will abuse his power. Given Trump’s reported desire to use the military to shoot peaceful protesters, maybe find a defense secretary who hasn’t written a series of hair-on-fire books depicting American liberals as tantamount to hostile enemy combatants. And given Trump’s obsession with criminalizing his critics, they might pick an FBI director who does not have an enemies list and who hasn’t produced a recording of a Trump anthem performed by violent insurrectionists.

Alas, the “moment,” as The Free Press revealingly put it, for expressing disappointment with the president has already passed. They are back to the workaday routine of supporting Trump’s efforts to keep his administration free of any official who might be stricken with conscience. There may be more moments of concern in the future. Indeed, the party’s acquiescence to Trump’s appetite for revenge and corruption all but guarantees it. But those moments, too, shall pass.