WASHINGTON — Everybody in a position of power failed to protect you from this.
Many of those same people and leaders are now cashing in, paying millions in protection money, or laughing about what has happened. Others are pretending there was nothing they could do to stop it — and preemptively surrendering now.
On this cold Monday afternoon in the nation’s capital, a twice-impeached convicted felon was inaugurated in the very building where his attempt to steal an election four years ago left pools of blood. Donald Trump beat the damning federal criminal cases against him because the Supreme Court, and then will of voters, snuffed out any possibility for those historic trials to commence. He was elected, this time with a plurality of the popular vote, on a platform that is somehow more rancidly authoritarian and anti-democratic, proudly corrupt and abusive, and ethnic-cleansing-prone than his and his party’s platforms were in 2016 and 2020. His personality cult and iron grip on the GOP only grew in the years since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that he instigated, as it did in the years since his first administration produced a four-year-long arterial spray of scandal, barbarism, and abhorrent mismanagement, including during the mass death and economic implosion of the coronavirus pandemic.
He and the Republican Party now have trifecta control of the federal government. Trump retakes the White House with a largely demoralized Democratic Party as his opposition, and a far-right Supreme Court supermajority entrenched. The country is theirs, and we will be ruled by the meanest nerds and most nihilistic dorks, who now pretend to speak for a working class they despise. Every cultist, clampdown zealot, and deliriously boring psycho who Trump appoints to perches of seniority and influence are leering at the American people the same way the protagonists in Natural Born Killers looked at patrons of a diner in the middle of a desert.
To them, this is all very funny. The day before his swearing in, Trump held a “victory rally” party for his super-fans at the Capital One Arena in the Chinatown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Kid Rock performed, and everybody bawitdaba’d. Several middle-aged, MAGA-merch-donning ladies bopped and sang along to Kid Rock’s 2022 song that features the lyric “a whole generation is mentally ill.” Kid Rock charmed the crowd with the line about how “the mainstream media can suck my dick,” though he sheepishly self-censored the best word.
The “Girls Gone Bible” podcast duo revved up the arena audience by honoring Trump’s “love and devotion,” praying for “angelic protection” of the 47th president and the punishment of his foes, and thanking Jesus Christ for his second term in office. Trump-adulating Oscar winner Jon Voight showed up on-stage, as the words “DREAM BIG AGAIN” were displayed on arena screens. Trump lieutenant Stephen Miller hit the stage to deliver canned applause lines in his scarringly irritating voice about “sending the illegals home” and about how gender is decided by the Almighty. Megyn Kelly came out to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” then made fun of Jennifer Lopez’s marital record. She also stressed that Trump’s people had the right to “annoy” others, which, yes, accurate, no notes there.
UFC CEO Dana White practically declared that Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being he’s ever known in his life. Lara Trump claimed that her father-in-law will save “the entire world.” And after Lee Greenwood performed his requisite “proud to be an American” tune, Trump walked out to spike the football, give a shout-out to some “beautiful ladies” in the arena, riff on his hysterical xenophobia, and introduce a perennially awkward Elon Musk. Trump promised his voters they’d “have a lot of fun watching television tomorrow.”
As a grand finale to Trump’s victory-rally address, disco group Village People burst onto the stage to perform their hit “Y.M.C.A.” song, which had become Trump’s campaign jingle, as the former and new president mostly wiggled and stood there next to the costumed bandmates during the performance. A large number of attendees rose, way more enthusiastically than they did for the rally’s pledge of allegiance or national anthem, to do their own versions of Trump’s “Y.M.C.A.” hand-dancing from the campaign trail. This gesticulating and hand-pumping to Village People melodies is now a partywide cultural ritual in the age of Trump, and this inauguration week in D.C. is no different.
(This Rolling Stone reporter tried to cover the rally as best he could, but he kept involuntarily scribbling “this is hell, we live in hell, I’m in Hell” over and over.)
The jubilant Village People aside, this is a scenario that we were raised and taught in our schools to believe was not practically or legally possible in our time. This is, we were assured at school, something that occurs in Europe, especially in bygone decades of empire, world wars, and global cold war. Maybe it’s something that unfolds during the democratic backsliding of Latin American nations, particularly the poorer ones. The Middle East. The Philippines. Other places we can’t locate on a map without cheating or a hint, and in countries and regions we can barely deign to pronounce correctly.
Not here. At least that’s what we were told again, and again, and again, and then again.
In a sense, a moment like today’s should not shock the mind, given that there are so many citizens alive right now who experienced America when it was not in any meaningful sense a democracy at all. And yet, if you rewound the clock a decade, and told virtually any Republican or Democrat that a president could do exactly what Trump did in his final year in office and not only escape justice, but be lavishly rewarded for it and sent back to the Oval Office, each one of them would have told you that you were out of your mind.
Openly working to steal a presidential election you lost and then causing American civilians to die in the process was once considered universally, permanently disqualifying in modern America. Now? What can you do but laugh. It’s clear to everyone willing to honestly examine the thought that the American ideal came with a massive and unspoken asterisk. From now until the end of time, we will never not be the country that allowed the host of Celebrity Apprentice to bring us to the brink of democratic and constitutional hemorrhage.
When Team Trump crows on and on about how their guy mounted the “greatest political comeback” in American history, they are not entirely wrong — though there is a casual depravity to talking about it, like it’s part of a Friends-replacement TV show that Trump used to star on, instead of the abomination that it is.
But no matter how venal or fascistic Trump is, he was never the sole author of this violent tragicomedy that we’ve endured for a decade, and will continue to endure for years. One morally vacant aristocrat could not have accomplished today on his own.
This is all happening because everyone — every one — who was supposed to protect the American people from this failed in the most miserable, unforgivable ways. It was a catastrophic top-to-bottom failure that many millions of people at home and abroad will be living with, now and long after Trump is no longer leader of a nominally free world.
Every institution you may have believed had value revealed itself to be for-sale or out-to-lunch.
The highest court in the land, and its right-wing supermajority that Trump cemented, can just decide that laws aren’t real if they inconvenience the larger and more important agenda of keeping Trump out of prison and above the law so he can be president again.
The elite news media — yes, I am aware that includes me; I’ve always been open to the idea that I am part of the problem — that craves the decadence and the mammoth ratings and readership that President Trump previously unleashed has found itself with diminished audiences and a rebellion by former subscribers who see us for what we too often are. That is: ineffective at best, and giddily abetting at worst.
President Joe Biden defeated Trump, including in the key battleground states that Trump swept this time, on his ambient vows to “restore the soul of America.” Central to that promise — and to the formation of his political legacy — was making Trump go away and reducing his fanatically bloodlusting MAGA movement to a footnote in history. Presumably, this did not involve selfishly committing to running for a second term when apparently his own Democratic Party insiders, not to mention the American public, could already tell that he very visibly wasn’t up to the task of beating Trump. History reduces all important people to a single sentence or phrase, and it is difficult to see President Biden as anything more than an abject failure to accomplish his explicitly central goal. By his own actions, it appears Biden had determined his own ego was worth more than the cost of the nation’s entire soul.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Democratic Party leaders (if you can call them that) have settled for now on a strategy of noble pre-surrender to Trump and his goons. “In the history of wrongdoing, both alleged and proven, few — if any — crimes by a public official have reached this level of gravity,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said, following this month’s release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s 2020 attempted coup. “Moving forward, each generation of Americans has a responsibility to work to preserve our republic.”
… Thanks.
Elsewhere, the idea that federal law enforcement — which is billed as an institution ostensibly designed to serve and protect you from criminals, such as ones who illegally attempt to overthrow American democracy — was ever going to shield the public and the electorate from Trump’s wrath was always a ludicrous notion. This is primarily because this is the United States of America, which has a richly documented track record of letting our brazenly lawless presidents get off scot-free. But for this one moment in our recorded history, Trump’s actions on multiple fronts were so uniquely shameless that briefly a consensus began to form that something had to be done. That moment was shambolically squandered to the point that even President Biden reportedly regrets appointing Attorney General Merrick Garland, because he moved too slowly and prioritized supposed norms in an appallingly abnormal juncture. It’s a country of liberty and justice for all, though not if doing so feels like too much of a headache for those with institutional authority.
And it truly goes without saying and comes with vanishingly little surprise that American’s corporate titans — who just once made a big public-relations spectacle of frowning over Trump’s Jan. 6 coup attempt and his obvious threat to a fragile democratic order — have lined up around the block to shovel obscene sums of their cash into Trump’s coffers and war chests. “The second Trump inaugural fund is on track to be the most lucrative yet,” The Wall Street Journal reported late last year.
And it almost feels too easy to blame the upper crust of the GOP and conservative movement, even though Trump will forever be their fault. All of them — from Mitch McConnell on down — who knew he would tear out the guts of the country if they let him, well, let him.
Days before Trump’s 2025 inaugural festivities, Rolling Stone spoke to one of the conservative Republicans who didn’t want this to happen, and watched as her party spent the last four years actively purging, punishing, and blackballing those who weren’t comfortable co-signing Trump’s autocratic game-show personality cult.
“I knew there was value in the American people hearing from a former Trump staffer, particularly the fact I was a spokesperson for him and I was willing to say this man violated his oath of office, and does not deserve to set foot near the Oval Office ever again,” says Sarah Matthews, who was one of Trump’s deputy White House press secretaries, including on Jan. 6, 2021.
Matthews became a pariah in elite Republican circles largely over her public testimony before the select House committee that investigated Trump’s plot to cling to power.
“It’s one of those things where I want to be able to look my future children in the eye and be able to tell them that when history called for it, their mother did the right thing. That she stood up,” she adds. “I wonder if those Republican elected officials who chose to roll over and take it and let Trump walk all over them, all in the name of power, [if they ask themselves]: Is it worth it? Losing your dignity? They’re the ones who have to wake up every morning and look themselves in the mirror… If I hadn’t spoken out, having to carry that on my conscience and living with that far outweighed any fears I had about [Trump] coming after me, or losing friendships, or career opportunities. I have no regrets about my decision.”
The fact that Trump is being sworn in on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is another small, cruel joke, as if to punctuate the last decade of American life with: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward the bad guy winning, getting away with it, then getting everything he desires.
Everyone failed. This afternoon is proof of that, and there is nothing else polite to say. The story of the coming years and eras will likely be not a morality play of undoing the frenzied damage done, but a tragedy where we’re picking up the pieces of what’s left.
About the author...
ASAWIN SUEBSAENG
SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER
Asawin "Swin" Suebsaeng is a Senior Political Reporter at Rolling Stone, covering the modern American conservative movement and GOP. Before joining Rolling Stone, he was a White House reporter for The Daily Beast, a politics and culture reporter for Mother Jones, and a reporter at the Bangkok Post in Thailand. Swin is the co-author of the book, "Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington," and also works as a lecturer at the University of Cincinnati. You can follow him on Twitter at @swin24.
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