The National Review is now confirming that Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States (and probable Republican nominee in 2024) does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former Sens. David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” later this summer.
That, of course, is not going to happen. It is, in fact, weapons-grade lunacy to imagine that it is even possible.
That, of course, is not going to happen. It is, in fact, weapons-grade lunacy to imagine that it is even possible.
But Trump’s embrace of the story shows how the right’s doom loop of craziness works — and how it is accelerating narratives that began in the fevered imaginations of his hardcore true believers.
It should also remind us that even though an idea is fake, the consequences of a new Big Lie can be very real, and even deadly.
Delegitimizing our democracy is now central to Trump’s agenda and his hopes for a political comeback. And polls suggest that his lies about the election have influenced tens of millions of voters.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll from May found that a quarter of Americans — and 53 percent of Republicans — actually believe Trump is the "true president" of the United States.
In this alternative reality, it’s only a small step to believe their “true president” might really return.
The idea of just such a magical, extra-constitutional Trumpian reinstatement was floated just last week at a QAnon conference. MAGA lawyer Sidney Powell said, without providing any evidence or details, that Trump “can simply be reinstated, but a new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House, and President Trump should be moved back in.”
The same idea has been amplified by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, whose baseless charges of election fraud bought him a $1.3 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems. (He is countersuing for $1.6 billion.)
For months, Lindell has been insisting that he would present evidence that would overturn Joe Biden’s victory. In April, during his two-day "Frankathon" he announced he had produced a documentary called “Absolute Interference” that would “change our world forever.” He promised “proof and evidence that China was attacking our country, and you're gonna know that this election was flipped.”
He followed up “Absolute Interference” with another documentary he called “Absolutely 9-0” in which he promised that a unanimous Supreme Court would throw out Biden’s victory and reinstall Trump.
Lindell also declared on Steve Bannon’s podcast that Trump would be “back in office in August.” The evidence, which he compared to “blood DNA at a crime scene,” would be so overwhelming, he promised, that even Rachel Maddow would accept Biden’s ouster.
"So when we get there and they do take this down and look at it, when that vote comes out 9 to 0, they're going to have more trust that it's 9 to 0," he insisted. "Wow, even the liberal judges did this. And we will get that case before the court."
This is delusional. But now, the former president appears to believe it. Or at least pretends to.
Days after Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn suggested the possibility of a military coup (he has since denied doing so despite it being captured on tape), New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted that “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.”
The Daily Beast heard the same thing: “In the past few weeks, two people close to Trump told The Daily Beast, the ex-president had begun increasingly quizzing confidants about a potential August return to power. What’s more, he claimed that a lot of ‘highly respected’ people — who Trump did not name — have been saying it’s possible.”
Lindell is pretty sure he knows where Trump got that idea. “If Trump is saying August,” the CEO told The Daily Beast, “that is probably because he heard me say it publicly.” (Lindell's August date, by the way, is similarly based on guesswork and conspiratorial theories tied to nonexistent election fraud in Arizona and a delusional hope that the Supreme Court will invalidate the election.)
Wherever he heard it, Trump appears obsessed with relitigating the election he lost. The Washington Post reported that the former president is “increasingly consumed with the notion that ballot reviews pushed by his supporters around the country could prove that he won, according to people familiar with his comments.”
It’s impossible to know whether Trump genuinely believes that he can move back into the White House this summer. But that’s not the point; the story works for him as long as other people believe it.
So don’t be surprised if this notion gathers momentum in the right’s feedback loop, especially if Trump continues to stoke false hopes. Lindell may be loony, but he is far from isolated in the right-wing media ecosystem. Look at the lineup for his rally in my home state of Wisconsin.
Not only is Trump himself scheduled to make an appearance at Lindell’s event, he will be joined by influencers like Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk and Trumpist loyalists like former Sheriff David Clarke, Dinesh D’Souza and Diamond and Silk. Can Marjorie Taylor Greene be far behind?
So far, most Republicans have maintained a studied strategic silence on Trump’s musings.
But it won’t take much for the idea to get traction in the MAGAverse — or for belief in the righteousness of the Trumpian restoration to become a new litmus test for GOP loyalty.
We’ve seen this pattern before: denial followed by heavy doses of whataboutism and the emergence of anti-anti-coup commentary. This commentary never exactly endorses reinstalling Trump, but instead it tries to refocus attention on over-the-top progressive or never-Trump reaction. Rationalization morphs into acquiescence and even complicity.
Meanwhile, belief in Trump’s return will spread among members of the base, sparking anger, suspicion and outrage when the promised restoration fails to materialize.
In other words, it’s a new twist on the same Big Lie that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection and continues to fuel threats of political violence. That makes it even worse than it looks.
The National Review is now confirming that Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States (and probable Republican nominee in 2024) does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former Sens. David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” later this summer.
That, of course, is not going to happen. It is, in fact, weapons-grade lunacy to imagine that it is even possible.
That, of course, is not going to happen. It is, in fact, weapons-grade lunacy to imagine that it is even possible.
But Trump’s embrace of the story shows how the right’s doom loop of craziness works — and how it is accelerating narratives that began in the fevered imaginations of his hardcore true believers.
It should also remind us that even though an idea is fake, the consequences of a new Big Lie can be very real, and even deadly.
Delegitimizing our democracy is now central to Trump’s agenda and his hopes for a political comeback. And polls suggest that his lies about the election have influenced tens of millions of voters.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll from May found that a quarter of Americans — and 53 percent of Republicans — actually believe Trump is the "true president" of the United States.
In this alternative reality, it’s only a small step to believe their “true president” might really return.
The idea of just such a magical, extra-constitutional Trumpian reinstatement was floated just last week at a QAnon conference. MAGA lawyer Sidney Powell said, without providing any evidence or details, that Trump “can simply be reinstated, but a new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House, and President Trump should be moved back in.”
The same idea has been amplified by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, whose baseless charges of election fraud bought him a $1.3 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems. (He is countersuing for $1.6 billion.)
For months, Lindell has been insisting that he would present evidence that would overturn Joe Biden’s victory. In April, during his two-day "Frankathon" he announced he had produced a documentary called “Absolute Interference” that would “change our world forever.” He promised “proof and evidence that China was attacking our country, and you're gonna know that this election was flipped.”
He followed up “Absolute Interference” with another documentary he called “Absolutely 9-0” in which he promised that a unanimous Supreme Court would throw out Biden’s victory and reinstall Trump.
Lindell also declared on Steve Bannon’s podcast that Trump would be “back in office in August.” The evidence, which he compared to “blood DNA at a crime scene,” would be so overwhelming, he promised, that even Rachel Maddow would accept Biden’s ouster.
"So when we get there and they do take this down and look at it, when that vote comes out 9 to 0, they're going to have more trust that it's 9 to 0," he insisted. "Wow, even the liberal judges did this. And we will get that case before the court."
This is delusional. But now, the former president appears to believe it. Or at least pretends to.
Days after Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn suggested the possibility of a military coup (he has since denied doing so despite it being captured on tape), New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted that “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.”
The Daily Beast heard the same thing: “In the past few weeks, two people close to Trump told The Daily Beast, the ex-president had begun increasingly quizzing confidants about a potential August return to power. What’s more, he claimed that a lot of ‘highly respected’ people — who Trump did not name — have been saying it’s possible.”
Lindell is pretty sure he knows where Trump got that idea. “If Trump is saying August,” the CEO told The Daily Beast, “that is probably because he heard me say it publicly.” (Lindell's August date, by the way, is similarly based on guesswork and conspiratorial theories tied to nonexistent election fraud in Arizona and a delusional hope that the Supreme Court will invalidate the election.)
Wherever he heard it, Trump appears obsessed with relitigating the election he lost. The Washington Post reported that the former president is “increasingly consumed with the notion that ballot reviews pushed by his supporters around the country could prove that he won, according to people familiar with his comments.”
It’s impossible to know whether Trump genuinely believes that he can move back into the White House this summer. But that’s not the point; the story works for him as long as other people believe it.
So don’t be surprised if this notion gathers momentum in the right’s feedback loop, especially if Trump continues to stoke false hopes. Lindell may be loony, but he is far from isolated in the right-wing media ecosystem. Look at the lineup for his rally in my home state of Wisconsin.
Not only is Trump himself scheduled to make an appearance at Lindell’s event, he will be joined by influencers like Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk and Trumpist loyalists like former Sheriff David Clarke, Dinesh D’Souza and Diamond and Silk. Can Marjorie Taylor Greene be far behind?
So far, most Republicans have maintained a studied strategic silence on Trump’s musings.
But it won’t take much for the idea to get traction in the MAGAverse — or for belief in the righteousness of the Trumpian restoration to become a new litmus test for GOP loyalty.
We’ve seen this pattern before: denial followed by heavy doses of whataboutism and the emergence of anti-anti-coup commentary. This commentary never exactly endorses reinstalling Trump, but instead it tries to refocus attention on over-the-top progressive or never-Trump reaction. Rationalization morphs into acquiescence and even complicity.
Meanwhile, belief in Trump’s return will spread among members of the base, sparking anger, suspicion and outrage when the promised restoration fails to materialize.
In other words, it’s a new twist on the same Big Lie that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection and continues to fuel threats of political violence. That makes it even worse than it looks.
Senators reveal further Capitol riot security failures in bipartisan report
A bipartisan group of senators released Congress' first report addressing security failures on Jan. 6, faulting the Capitol Police and multiple federal agencies.
Capitol security officials tracking threats of violence on Jan. 6 saw social media posts as early as late December 2020 about a plot to breach the complex — complete with maps of the building's tunnels and explicit threats of violence against members of Congress.
“Surround every building with a tunnel entrance/exit. They better dig a tunnel all the way to China if they want to escape,” wrote one user on a pro-Trump blog.
“Bring guns. It’s now or never,” another user wrote.
Those posts were spotted and written up by the Capitol Police’s intelligence division. But as revealed in a new bipartisan report cataloging failures ahead of the insurrection, now-acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman told congressional investigators that data on the social media posts was sent only to “command staff” and never reached the department's highest level. Even as the pro-riot chatter continued and tips came into the intelligence division, the full body of knowledge about what would become a deadly threat was not conveyed to the rest of Capitol Police leadership, rank-and-file officers or other law enforcement partners.
The intelligence failures are only one facet of the first official congressional accounting of the Jan. 6 insurrection, a nearly 100-page report released Tuesday morning by a bipartisan duo of Senate committee leaders. The report raps the Capitol Police and federal agencies for security lapses leading up to and during the attack.
The report faults Pittman, among other officials, for the “discrepancy” between her division’s reports on Trump supporters' public, online threats of violence and a more widely-circulated security assessment issued in late December. That assessment concluded there was “no information” on specific disruptions or civil disobedience and declared that actions by individuals or small groups weren’t “generally broadcast publicly” and were “impossible to detect.”
In a statement, the Capitol Police said they welcomed the assessment by the Senate committees and agreed improvements were needed, but reiterated its position that the information they had available did not indicate an attack on the Capitol.
There was “no specific, credible intelligence about such an attack,” the department said. “The USCP consumes intelligence from every federal agency. At no point prior to the 6th did it receive actionable intelligence about a large-scale attack.”
But despite the immense effort put into the report — including newly unearthed documents and interviews with top officials and more than 50 Capitol Police officers — its circumscribed scope limited its investigation. Senators and staffers focused on security, preparation and response to the attack rather than addressing bigger themes that might have fallen to the since-failed 9/11-style outside commission on the assault, such as the White House’s role or groups that participated.
The report concludes that “reforms to [the Capitol Police] and the Capitol Police Board are necessary to ensure events like January 6 are never repeated” without passing any judgment on the causes of the attack.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, called the security and emergency breakdowns “unacceptable” and “widespread” in a statement. He also said their report showed how the insurrection was “frankly planned in plain sight.” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the top Republican on the Rules Committee, said the Senate should focus on “immediately implementing” the report’s recommendations.
The senators leading the report declined to comment on the search for the next Capitol Police chief, instead deferring to the Capitol Police Board, the three-member panel tasked with finding a permanent replacement. But Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), chair of the Rules Committee, said their report detailed their “united concern about the leadership of the Capitol Police,” rather than individual officers.
The Senate report cited Donald Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 to a massive crowd of supporters that then marched to the Capitol, in an apparent attempt at balance, but did not conduct any thorough analysis of the former president's involvement.
The report will still likely cause consternation on the Hill. The No. 2 Capitol Police official and overseer of most of its uniformed officers, Chad Thomas, resigned Monday ahead of the review’s release. Senators' findings also put more pressure on Pittman, who led the department’s intelligence division during the attack.
No officers recalled hearing then-Chief Steven Sund on the radio during the attack, and they heard now-acting Chief Pittman only once, according to interviews with officers. Pittman said that an insufficient number of Capitol Police personnel were authorized to use less-lethal munitions like pepperballs and grenade launchers — officials have conceded those could have made a difference that day, but few officers were trained to use the equipment.
Some senators involved in the report still defended the Capitol Police, however.
"Capitol Hill police were put in an impossible situation without adequate intelligence, training and equipment because they didn’t have the tools they needed to protect the Capitol," said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), adding their report should be “informing” the debate over the emergency security funding.
Sund, the former chief, had faulted federal agencies for their intelligence blunders leading up to the attack, and the report agreed that the federal intelligence community failed to warn of the potential for violence on Jan. 6 despite social media chatter. Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the FBI released any threat assessment before Jan. 6, and federal law enforcement deemed social media posts calling for violence at the Capitol to be noncredible.
However, the report said that the Capitol Police “also failed to prepare a department-wide operational plan for the Joint Session.”
The report showed that top Pentagon officials raised concerns in the days before the insurrection as well, which went ignored.
As late as Jan. 4, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller asked in a conference call with the Cabinet if there was a way to revoke permits for the protesters who would later assemble on Capitol grounds, Miller told the committees. They also suggested locking down D.C. on Jan. 6. The Department of the Interior and D.C. officials assured them that the protests were constitutionally protected, and law enforcement told them there was no need to shut down the city, according to Miller, who said he then “felt comfortable” about their planning.
Although most agencies complied with the committees’ requests, they met some obstacles, according to the report. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and the House Sergeant at Arms did not comply with the committees’ requests for information, and a USCP Deputy Chief of Police declined to sit for an interview with the committee.
Lawmakers hailed the report’s bipartisan list of recommendations to rectify many of the intelligence and security breakdowns, including changes to the Capitol Police’s training, the clarification of statutes governing emergency assistance or the streamlining of their intelligence gathering. It is unclear how many of them can be implemented without additional funding or congressional action.
Senate Republicans last month blocked a bipartisan House-passed bill that would have established an independent Jan. 6 commission, and a nearly $2 billion emergency funding bill to plug security gaps, already passed by the Democrat-controlled House, looks headed for a similar outcome in the upper chamber.
But some senators were hopeful the report could help break the logjam over Congress’ response to the insurrection. Klobuchar expressed confidence in the Senate’s ability to pass legislation streamlining requests for the National Guard, saying she and Blunt would be introducing legislation to simplify the process. “We have to change that law immediately,” she said.
FILED UNDER: NATIONAL GUARD, ROY BLUNT, SENATE, ROB PORTMAN, AMY KLOB
What do you think of when I say the word “militia”?
It’s probably the kind of people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6: far-right anti-government extremists in the grip of paranoid conspiracy theories, paunchy White guys who fancy themselves defenders of liberty while running around the woods in military cosplay.
It’s the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Bois. It’s the people who have allegedly killed cops and plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan. That’s what “militia” means to most of us in 21st-century America.
But even as that is the reality on the ground, and even as most militia activity is actually illegal under state law, the dangerous ideology that drives those extremists is propped up not only by Republican politicians but by Republican-appointed judges.
That came through in a striking federal court decision handed down late last week, when U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez struck down California’s ban on assault-style weapons. The decision has gotten attention in part because it reads like a cross between an advertisement for the AR-15 (“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment”) and the stylings of a pre-law freshman trying to turn what he heard on Fox News into something resembling legal prose.
But the most notable part may be this, when Benitez quite literally says that the reason AR-15s should be legal is because they’d be useful if you wanted to overthrow the U.S. government:
-Before the Court there is convincing and unrebutted testimony that the versatile AR-15 type of modern rifle is the perfect firearm for a citizen to bring for militia service. A law that bans the AR-15 type rifle from militia readiness is not a reasonable fit for protecting the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for the militia. It has been argued that citizens with nothing more than modern rifles will have no chance against an army with tanks and missiles. But someone forgot to tell Fidel Castro who with an initial force of 20 to 80 men armed with M-1 carbines, walked into power in Havana in spite of Cuba’s militarized forces armed with tanks, planes and a navy.
What exactly is the “militia service” the judge speaks of? In America today, it does not mean anything like the “well regulated Militia” that the Second Amendment describes as “necessary to the security of a free State.”
There are no private militias defending America from outside attack. The ones who call themselves that — which are widely understood to be the greatest terrorism threat America faces today — are those that use the threat of violence, and sometimes actual violence, to achieve political aims.
There’s an extensive debate about exactly what the Framers intended in the Second Amendment. But as Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and co-author of “Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea,” told me: “There’s no such thing as a militia that’s untethered to the state.”
While Antonin Scalia may have claimed in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court decision that for the first time established an individual right to own guns, that the Framers conceived of every able-bodied man as part of a kind of militia-in-waiting, it’s only when organized and sanctioned by the government that they become a militia.
Which is why the only legitimate militias in America today are the 50 state National Guards. And in fact, every state has at least some laws forbidding paramilitary activity and training. But these laws are seldom enforced, either because law enforcement officials don’t take these groups seriously or are afraid to confront them.
While there are some such groups emerging on the left, they’re still primarily a creature of the extreme right. As Horwitz says, “The thing they do share is a fidelity to gun rights and to the idea that violence has a role in the political process.”
That’s the key — not just to the threat they pose, but to the way they’re supported by the Republican Party.
First, you have the insurrectionist groups themselves. Next, you have Republican politicians who validate their perspective, not just by promoting gun rights in general but by insisting that those rights exist so that private citizens can react to government policy they don’t like with violence.
When you see Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) wearing a mask that reads “Come and take it” when attending President Biden’s inauguration, what is the message of that phrase, said so often by gun advocates?
It’s a threat, that if gun regulations are made into law — not through a coup that overthrows the American government but through the legitimate process of legislation — then people like him will not only refuse to comply with the law but will meet any government official attempting to enforce that law with deadly violence.
Cruz might claim he wouldn’t go that far, or that he’s just showing how strongly he feels about his guns. But the message unequivocally validates the perspective of the insurrectionists.
And finally, you have conservative judges steadily dismantling the government’s ability to regulate guns. Gun advocates get to have it both ways: They can hand-wave about the “well regulated Militia” clause in the Second Amendment to make it all but meaningless, but also say that gun rights must be almost limitless so people can be ready to organize into private militias to overthrow the government.
So while we have no real militias in America apart from the National Guard, we do have people — including many people with power — who want to sustain the idea of private militias and the threat of insurrection. What does that mean for our politics?
“When push comes to shove, it looks like Jan. 6 and a bullet in Gabby Giffords’s head,” Horwitz says. “You can’t have a government where the private guys with guns make the rules.”
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