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      10 Republicans Voted to Impeach Trump. What's Become of Them?

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      Ten House Republicans voted to charge President Donald J. Trump with inciting the Capitol attack. All of them are still struggling with the consequences.WASHINGTON — The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump did so with the same conviction — that a president of their party deserved to be charged with inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — and the same hope — that his role in doing so would finally persuade the G.O.P. to repudiate him.But in the year since the deadliest attack on the Capitol in centuries, none of the 10 lawmakers have been able to avoid the consequences of a fundamental miscalculation about the direction of their party. The former president is very much the leader of the Republicans, and it is those who stood against him whom the party has thrust into the role of pariah.Since they cast their impeachment votes on Jan. 13, Representatives Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois have announced their retirements amid death threats from voters and hostility from colleagues. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming has gone from a star in the House Republican leadership to an exiled party gadfly and truth teller.Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, Peter Meijer of Michigan and Fred Upton of Michigan have Trump-endorsed primary challengers on their heels and uncertain political futures. Four others — John Katko of New York, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Tom Rice of South Carolina and David Valadao of California — have gone to ground, silent if not silenced, in the apparent hope that the entire episode will be forgotten.The fate of the 10 over the past year has offered a bracing reality check about the nature of today’s Republican Party, one that has fully embraced the lie of a stolen election and its main purveyor, and sidelined the few remaining members who have dared to publicly question Mr. Trump or his actions.“There’s been this waiting game and an arbitrage between an individual’s political future and the trajectory of that guy, assuming the apex has passed,” Mr. Meijer said in a lengthy interview, referring to Mr. Trump. “The view among some was that this would be essentially a self-correcting issue,” and that Mr. Trump’s power would fade.“I think that’s proven overly optimistic,” Mr. Meijer added.The 10 could be forgiven for believing that their votes last January would not leave them so exposed. In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, some of Mr. Trump’s most stalwart allies quit the government in disgust. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, voted against impeachment but declared, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, orchestrated Mr. Trump’s acquittal after a hasty Senate impeachment trial. But he had let it be known that he considered the president culpable, and said as much in a scathing speech afterward: “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”But the rhetorical cover fire proved as ephemeral as it was useless. Mr. Gonzalez, deluged with threats and fearing for the safety of his wife and children, announced in September that he would not seek re-election — and called Mr. Trump “a cancer for the country.”After receiving threats, Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio announced in September that he would not seek re-election.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesA Cuban American who starred as a wide receiver at Ohio State, Mr. Gonzalez had been considered the kind of politician who would ensure the Republican Party’s future in a multiethnic, multiracial country after his election in 2018. But he found little support from the party that recruited him into politics once Mr. Trump endorsed a primary challenger and the threats began.Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?Mr. Kinzinger, who announced his retirement in October, has faced similar threats. But he has turned his opposition to Mr. Trump into a capstone of his career, defying Republican leaders to join the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, laying into Mr. Trump and his defenders at every opportunity, and promising not to leave the political stage once his House career ends this year.“The 2020 election was not stolen,” Mr. Kinzinger said in a lengthy video message on Wednesday for the anniversary of Jan. 6. “Joe Biden won, and Donald Trump lost. We have to admit it. But the leadership of the Republican Party won’t. They lied to the American people and continue to push the big lie and echo the conspiracy theories that line their pockets, keeping them in power.”Mr. Upton has never been one for flash, yet his future is no more secure, despite 35 years in the House. He could face Steve Carra, a state representative endorsed by Mr. Trump, who would have to move homes to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Upton because of new congressional maps drafted by a bipartisan commission.“I’m 100 percent running for Congress, it’s an honor to have President Trump’s endorsement, and Fred Upton will not be a congressman in 2023,” Mr. Carra said in a text message.Even if Mr. Upton does not have to face Mr. Carra, his impeachment vote has placed him at risk. The new map pushed Mr. Upton into the same district as Bill Huizenga, a more conservative congressman who voted against impeachment.Under the circumstances, Mr. Upton is showing clear signs of fatigue.“You’ve got metal detectors now going on the House floor. We get really nasty threats at home. The tone gets, you know, tougher and tougher, and it’s a pretty toxic place,” he said last month on CNN. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”None of the 10 have fallen so far in the Republican firmament as Ms. Cheney, nor risen so high in the esteem of many in both parties who fear and loathe Mr. Trump. The daughter of a former vice president who was once the embodiment of confrontational conservatism, for better or worse, Ms. Cheney started 2021 as the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, a political knife fighter believed by many to be destined for the speakership.Her vote to impeach, and her outspoken denunciations of the lie — pushed by Mr. Trump and embraced by many of her colleagues — that the 2020 election was “stolen,” cost her dearly. She was ousted from her leadership post, ejected from the Wyoming Republican Party and targeted repeatedly by the former president, who has tried to unite Wyoming voters around the primary opponent he has endorsed, Harriet Hageman.Ms. Cheney has soldiered on, becoming the vice chairwoman of the House select committee investigating the riot, the face of Republican resistance to Trumpism and a one-woman wrecking crew for Mr. McCarthy’s ambitions to become speaker next year if the party retakes control of the House.Looking back, Ms. Cheney said in an interview that her fall from Republican leadership was inevitable as long as she had to share the stage with Mr. McCarthy, whose brief denunciation of Mr. Trump after Jan. 6 quickly gave way to a resumption of fealty.“It was increasingly clear that staying as conference chair was going to require me to perpetuate the lie about the election,” Ms. Cheney said. “I was simply not willing to look the other way and accept what he did.”Mr. McCarthy, by contrast, visited Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla, near the end of January, making it “pretty clear the path that he had chosen,” Ms. Cheney added. “It was one that was not faithful to the Constitution.”Never one to let bygones be bygones, Mr. Trump has relentlessly pursued retribution against those who voted to impeach him.In September, he endorsed a square-jawed, Army Special Forces veteran, Joe Kent, to challenge Ms. Herrera Beutler, who before her vote had revealed one of the most damning vignettes of Jan. 6 for Mr. Trump. She recounted a phone call in which Mr. McCarthy had personally pleaded with the president to call off the rioters during the assault. Mr. Trump had responded, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

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      A Year After Jan. 6: ‘Democracy Is at Risk’

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      Readers worry about the future of our Republic.To the Editor:Re “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now” (editorial, Jan. 2):We are very close to losing our Republic. I know we are tired after the last few years, but we have had a year to lick our wounds and we must rise up and push back on the Big Lie and hold all of the people who propagated this lie accountable. Period.We are past the “when they go low, we go high” point. The majority of us know that Donald Trump attempted a coup. Where is the Democratic Party with good countermessaging? We need to play the Republicans’ game — harsh, quick and now.We need to brand ourselves the Patriot Party and take away that claim from them. We need to point out through advertisements, billboards, etc., that the acts of Mr. Trump and the Republicans who supported him were seditious. We need to bring all of our advocacy groups together, put aside our causes for now and unite to save our country.A plea for my fellow patriots to write to their representatives, push back on misinformation, use billboards and advertisements, and reach out to notable people and news sources to roar.Susan M. McDonnellFort Pierce, Fla.To the Editor:Although The Times may be ringing in the new year with an alarm bell warning of the ongoing threat that the “stop the steal” movement poses to our democracy, I fear that President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland intend to lower the decibels.Regardless of how important the congressional investigation may be, Donald Trump and his supporters have exploited the weaknesses in Congress’s investigative process and powers. A congressional report may preserve facts for posterity but will change nothing. Only a criminal grand jury investigation can ferret out the truth and demand accountability by issuing criminal indictments.I believe that the president and his attorney general are concerned about the inevitable accusations of political prosecution, the cycle of recriminations such proceedings might ignite, and energizing a Trump movement fueled by grievance and reveling in victimhood. Maybe they presume the powers of normality will prevail to fend off future assaults on our electoral process, just as they had in 2020.Which strategy is the best is currently a matter of debate. What is certain is that in short order we will learn whether Ben Franklin was right to worry about whether we can keep our Republic.Asher FriedCroton-on-Hudson, N.Y.To the Editor:“Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now” evinces the paternalistic mentality that is likely to result in the Democrats facing a wipeout in the November 2022 elections. The evident panic in the editorial reflects the realization that Republicans are poised to retake the House this year. Why are Democrats polling so poorly? Perhaps it is because a dogmatic ideology that sees political opposition as a threat to be suppressed, surveilled, hounded or outlawed is itself a direct threat to our democracy.Political pluralism is a central tenet of our democracy and must be protected from both the reckless zeal of the mob and the self-righteous zeal of the elites. Ultimately, the American people are the caretakers of our democracy, having never failed to fulfill that obligation.Barry ZimanAlexandria, Va.To the Editor:I agree completely with your editorial. Unfortunately, our citizens are in denial. What you describe is terrifying, but denial is even more terrifying. Democracy is at risk, and the filibuster and the courts are collaborating against the will of the people. Without taking drastic measures, the majority will be ruled by the minority for years to come, by a party that denies truth to retain power.The House committee investigating Jan. 6 might be our last hope to save democracy. We need the public to hear the truth.Linda GravellWaterbury Center, Vt.To the Editor:You correctly observe that Democrats and the American public in general are “underestimating the threat facing the country.” Our democratic government remains in peril, as swing states enact laws that permit postelection nullification.Prosecutors and judges who face the insurrectionists in court are also showing a lack of appreciation of the seriousness of Jan. 6 and its ongoing threat to our democracy.Why are convicted rioters (even those who physically assaulted police officers defending the Capitol) getting off with no prison sentences or only three to five years? Why are so many of the Capitol attackers being charged with misdemeanors (such as trespassing or destruction of federal property) rather than with felonies up to and including insurrection and sedition?L. Michael HagerEastham, Mass.The writer is co-founder and former director general of the International Development Law Organization in Rome.To the Editor:You cite President Benjamin Harrison’s belief that the Constitution guarantees to all Americans a republican form of government. He added that “the essential features of such a government are the right of the people to choose their own officers” and to have their votes counted equally in making that choice.It is slightly ironic, however, that Harrison was elected president (in 1888) despite losing the popular vote.Donald IslerIrvington, N.Y.To the Editor:On the basis of information gathered so far by the congressional Jan. 6 committee, one can stipulate that not only did President Donald Trump, while in office, cry “Fire!” when there was no fire (i.e., the Big Lie about a stolen election), but he also did not cry “Fire!” when one was raging — for 187 minutes of presidential dereliction of duty on Jan. 6.Manfred WeidhornFair Lawn, N.J. More

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      Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies

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      When called upon to believe that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, millions got in line. When encouraged to believe that the 2012 Sandy Hook murder of twenty children and six adults was a hoax, too many stepped up. When urged to believe that Hillary Clinton was trafficking children in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor with no basement, they bought it, and one of them showed up in the pizza place with a rifle to protect the kids. The fictions fed the frenzies, and the frenzies shaped the crises of 2020 and 2021. The delusions are legion: Secret Democratic cabals of child abusers, millions of undocumented voters, falsehoods about the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccine.While much has been said about the moral and political stance of people who support right-wing conspiracy theories, their gullibility is itself alarming. Gullibility means malleability and manipulability. We don’t know if the people who believed the prevailing 2012 conspiracy theories believed the 2016 or 2020 versions, but we do know that a swath of the conservative population is available for the next delusion and the one after that. And on Jan. 6, 2021, we saw that a lot of them were willing to act on those beliefs.The adjective gullible comes from the verb to gull, which used to mean to cram yourself with something as well as to cheat or dupe, to cram someone else full of fictions. “Not doubting I could gull the Government,” wrote Daniel Defoe in 1701, and Hannah Arendt used the word gullible repeatedly in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951. “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and the higher the rank the more cynicism weighs down gullibility,” she wrote. That is, among those gulling the public, cynicism is a stronger force; among those being gulled, gullibility is, but the two are not so separate as they might seem.Distinctions between believable and unbelievable, true and false, are not relevant for people who have found that taking up outrageous and disprovable ideas is instead an admission ticket to a community or an identity. Without the yoke of truthfulness around their necks, they can choose beliefs that flatter their worldview or justify their aggression. I sometimes think of this straying into fiction as a kind of libertarianism run amok — we used to say “you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” Too many Americans now feel entitled to their own facts. In this too-free marketplace of ideas, they can select or reject ideas, facts or histories to match their goals, because meaning has become transactional.But gullibility means you believe something because someone else wants you to. You’re buying what they’re selling. It’s often said that the joiners of cults and subscribers to delusions are driven by their hatred of elites. But in the present situation, the snake oil salesmen are not just Alex Jones, QAnon’s master manipulators and evangelical hucksters. They are senators, powerful white Christian men, prominent media figures, billionaires and their foundations, even a president. (Maybe the belief that these figures are not an elite is itself a noteworthy delusion.)It’s true that these leading lights of the right often portray themselves as embattled outsiders. But they’re not; they’re the status quo gone rogue. They are still powerful, still insiders, but something even more potent is changing — you could call it the zeitgeist or the arc of justice or historical momentum or just demographic reality. The world is moving on; those who’d rather it stand still are eager to push narratives depicting these shifts as degeneration and white Christian heterosexual America as profoundly imperiled.A lot of conspiracy theories are organic or at least emerge from true believers on the margins when it comes to topics like extraterrestrials, but those at the top of conservative America have preached falsehoods that further the interest of elites, and those at the bottom have embraced them devoutly. Though when we talk about cults and conspiracies we usually look to more outlandish beliefs, climate denial and gun obsessions both fit this template.Both originated as industry agendas that were then embraced by both right-wing politicians and the right-leaning public. For decades, the fossil fuel industry pumped out ads and reports, and supported lobbyists and front groups misleading the public on the science and import of climate change. The current gun cult is likewise the result of the National Rifle Association and the gun industry pushing battlefield-style weapons and a new white male identity — more paramilitary than rural hunter — along with fear, rage and racist dog whistles. I think of it as a cult, because guns serve first as totems of identity and belonging, and because the beliefs seem counterfactual about guns as sources of safety rather than danger when roughly 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides and self-defense by gun is a surpassingly rare phenomenon.Right-wing political fictions have a long history, from Joe McCarthy’s bluffs about communists in the government to the United Nations’ black helicopters of 1990s paranoia to an endless stream of stories portraying immigrants, Jews, Muslims, gay men then and trans people now as sinister threats. The digital age and then the pandemic caused many of us to withdraw further from contact with people unlike ourselves, and pundits and social media offered those “others” back as phantasms and gargoyles leering at us through the filters.We all have confirmation biases, and of course leftists and moderates have also entertained delusions and paranoia — about extraterrestrials, vaccines and political assassinations, for instance. But mainstream figures in the center and the left are not pushing radically counterfactual stuff akin to the conservative lies about Covid-19, let alone trying to instigate or whitewash the kind of violence we saw on Jan. 6. Democrats operate on the basis of reasonably factual premises and usually accept the authority of science, law and history, while Republicans uninhibitedly push whatever’s most convenient for their goals and incendiary for their base. More

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      How to Stop Trump and Prevent Another Jan. 6

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      On Christmas morning, I woke up early and flipped on CNN, where I found the newscaster toggling among three news stories — two really depressing ones and an amazingly uplifting one.The first depressing story was the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. The other was the looming anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Both the threat from the virus and the distorted beliefs about the attack on the Capitol were being fueled by crackpot conspiracy theories circulated by Facebook, Fox News and Republican politicians.But then there it was — sandwiched between these two disturbing tales — a remarkable story of U.S. and global collaboration to reach a new scientific frontier.It was the launch at 7:20 a.m. Christmas Day of the James Webb Space Telescope. According to NASA, “thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians” — from 306 universities, national labs and companies, primarily in the U.S., Canada and Europe — contributed “to design, build, test, integrate, launch and operate Webb.”JM Guillon/ESAThank you, Santa! What a gift to remind us that a level of trust to do big, hard things together is still alive on planet Earth. By operating from deep in space, Smithsonian magazine noted, “Webb will help scientists understand how early galaxies formed and grew, detect possible signatures of life on other planets, watch the birth of stars, study black holes from a different angle and likely discover unexpected truths.”I love that phrase — unexpected truths. We have launched a space telescope that can peer far into the universe to discover — with joy — unexpected truths.Alas, though, my joy is tempered by those two other stories, by the fact that here on Earth, in America, one of our two national parties and its media allies have chosen instead to celebrate and propagate alternative facts.This struggle between those seeking unexpected truths — which is what made us great as a nation — and those worshiping alternative facts — which will destroy us as a nation — is THE story on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurgency, and for the coming year. Many people, particularly in the American business community, are vastly underestimating the danger to our constitutional order if this struggle ends badly.If the majority of G.O.P. lawmakers continue to bow to the most politically pernicious “alternative fact” — that the 2020 election was a fraud that justifies empowering Republican legislatures to override the will of voters and remove Republican and Democratic election supervisors who helped save our democracy last time by calling the election fairly — then America isn’t just in trouble. It is headed for what scientists call “an extinction-level event.”Only it won’t be a comet hurtling past the Webb telescope from deep space that destroys our democracy, as in the new movie “Don’t Look Up.”No, no — it will be an unraveling from the ground up, as our country, for the first time, is unable to carry out a peaceful transfer of power to a legitimately elected president. Because if Donald Trump and his flock are able in 2024 to execute a procedural coup like they attempted on Jan. 6, 2021, Democrats will not just say, “Ah shucks, we’ll try harder next time.” They will take to the streets.Right now, though, too many Republicans are telling themselves and the rest of us: “Don’t look up! Don’t pay attention to what is unfolding in plain sight with Trump & Company. Trump won’t be the G.O.P.’s candidate in 2024.”Who will save us?God bless Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republican House members participating on the Jan. 6 investigation committee. But they are not enough. Kinzinger is retiring and the G.O.P. leadership, on Trump’s orders, is trying to launch Cheney into deep space.I think our last best hope is the leadership of the U.S. business community, specifically the Business Roundtable, led by General Motors C.E.O. Mary Barra, and the Business Council, led by Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella. Together those two groups represent the roughly 200 most powerful companies in America, with 20 million employees. Although formally nonpartisan, they lean center-right — but the old center-right, the one that believed in the rule of law, free markets, majority rule, science and the sanctity of our elections and constitutional processes.Collectively, they are the only responsible force left with real leverage on Trump and the Republican lawmakers doing his bidding. They need to persuade their members — now — not to donate a penny more to any local, state or national candidate who has voted to dismantle the police or dismantle the Constitution.Yes, that’s false equivalency. Nothing is as big as the Trump cult’s threat to our constitutional order. But it’s still relevant. For a lot of Americans, watching a smash-and-grab gang ransack their local mall and violent crime jump — and then seeing the far-left trying to delegitimize, defund or dismantle their police — is just as frightening as those trying to dismantle their Constitution on the Capitol mall.Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesI believe there are many Americans in the center-left and center-right who vigorously oppose both, and they think it’s a disgrace when progressives tell them not to worry about the first or when Trumpers tell them not to worry about the second.When you take both seriously, many more people will listen to you on both. Individually, in their hometowns — like mine, Minneapolis — business leaders have effectively pushed back on dismantling the police. Now it is time for America’s business leaders to just as forcefully push back on the Trump Republicans trying to dismantle the Constitution.Why should they risk alienating pro-Trump lawmakers who soon may control both the House and the Senate? Besides love of country?Let me put it crassly: Civil wars are not good for business. I lived inside one in Lebanon for four years. Corporate America shouldn’t be lulled by 2021’s profits, because once a country’s institutions, laws, norms and unstated redlines are breached — and there is no more truth, only versions, and no more trust, only polarization — getting them back is almost impossible.Can’t happen here? It sure can.Rick Wilson, a longtime G.O.P. strategist opposed to Trump, recently described to The Washington Post what will happen if the campaign by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Trump cultists succeeds to get more Big Lie promoters elected in 2022 — and the G.O.P. takes the House or Senate or both: “We’re looking at a nihilistic Mad Max hellscape. It will be all about the show of 2024 to bring Donald Trump back into power.” He added, “They will impeach Biden, they will impeach Harris, they will kill everything.”So what will big business do? I wish I were more optimistic.CNBC reported Monday that data compiled by the watchdog group Accountable.US “shows that political action committees of top corporations and trade groups — including the American Bankers Association, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, Lockheed Martin and General Motors — continued to give to the Republican election objectors.”Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said in a statement: “Major corporations were quick to condemn the insurrection and tout their support for democracy — and almost as quickly, many ditched those purported values by cutting big checks to the very politicians that helped instigate the failed coup attempt. The increasing volume of corporate donations to lawmakers who tried to overthrow the will of the people makes clear that these companies were never committed to standing up for democracy in the first place.”The leaders of these companies are totally underestimating the chances that our democratic institutions will unravel. And if American democracy unravels, the whole world becomes unstable. That will not exactly be good for business, either.Neutrality is not an option anymore. As Liz Cheney put it on Sunday: “We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both.”So, my New Year’s wish is that item one on the agenda for the next meetings of both the Business Roundtable and the Business Council will be: Which side are we on?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ¿Qué significa el 6 de enero para Estados Unidos?

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      Un año después del humo y los vidrios rotos, de la horca simulada y la violencia demasiado real de ese día atroz, es tentador hacer una retrospectiva e imaginar que, de hecho, podemos simplemente hacer una retrospectiva. Es tentador imaginar que lo que sucedió el 6 de enero de 2021 —un asalto mortal en la sede del gobierno de Estados Unidos incitado por un presidente derrotado en medio de una campaña desesperada por frustrar la transferencia de poder a su sucesor— fue terrible pero que ahora está en el pasado y que nosotros, como nación, hemos podido avanzar.Es un impulso comprensible. Después de cuatro años de caos, crueldad e incompetencia, que culminaron en una pandemia y con el trauma antes impensable del 6 de enero, la mayoría de los estadounidenses estaban impacientes por tener algo de paz y tranquilidad.Hemos conseguido eso, en la superficie. Nuestra vida política parece más o menos normal en estos días: el presidente perdona pavos y el Congreso se pelea por la legislación de presupuesto. Pero si escarbamos un poco, las cosas están lejos de ser normales. El 6 de enero no está en el pasado: está presente todos los días.Está en los ciudadanos de a pie que amenazan a funcionarios electorales y otros servidores públicos, está en quienes preguntan “¿Cuándo podemos usar las armas?” y prometen asesinar a los políticos que se atrevan a votar con conciencia. Son los legisladores republicanos que luchan por hacer que el voto sea más difícil para las personas y, si votan, que sea más fácil subvertir su voluntad. Está en Donald Trump, quien continúa avivando las llamas del conflicto con sus mentiras desenfrenadas y resentimientos ilimitados y cuya versión distorsionada de la realidad todavía domina a uno de los dos principales partidos políticos de la nación.En pocas palabras, la república enfrenta una amenaza existencial por parte de un movimiento que desdeña de manera abierta la democracia y que ha demostrado su disposición a usar la violencia para conseguir sus propósitos. Ninguna sociedad autónoma puede sobrevivir a una amenaza así negando que esta existe. Más bien, la supervivencia depende de mirar al pasado y hacia el futuro al mismo tiempo.Encarar de verdad la amenaza que se avecina significa entender plenamente el terror de ese día hace un año. Gracias en gran medida a la labor tenaz de un comité bipartidista en la Cámara de Representantes, una toma de conciencia está en proceso. Ahora sabemos que la violencia y el caos transmitidos en vivo a todo el mundo fue solo la parte más visible y visceral de un esfuerzo por revertir las elecciones. Ese esfuerzo llegaba hasta el Despacho Oval, donde Trump y sus aliados planearon un autogolpe constitucional.Ahora sabemos que los principales legisladores republicanos y figuras de los medios de comunicación de derecha entendieron en privado lo peligroso que era el asalto y le pidieron a Trump que lo detuviera, incluso cuando públicamente decían lo contrario. Ahora sabemos que quienes pueden tener información crítica sobre la planificación y ejecución del ataque se niegan a cooperar con el Congreso, incluso si eso significa ser acusado de desacato criminal.Por ahora, el trabajo del comité continúa. Ha programado una serie de audiencias públicas para exponer estos y otros detalles, y planea publicar un informe completo de sus hallazgos antes de las elecciones intermedias de este año. Después de los comicios, si los republicanos recuperan el control de la Cámara, como se espera, indudablemente el comité será disuelto.Aquí es donde entra la mirada hacia el futuro. A lo largo del año pasado, legisladores republicanos en 41 estados han intentado promover los objetivos de los alborotadores del 6 de enero, y lo han hecho no rompiendo leyes, sino promulgándolas. Se han propuesto cientos de proyectos de ley y se han aprobado casi tres decenas de leyes que facultan a las legislaturas estatales para sabotear sus propios comicios y anular la voluntad de sus votantes, según el recuento activo de un consorcio no partidista de organizaciones a favor de la democracia.Algunos proyectos de ley cambiarían las reglas para hacer más fácil que los legisladores rechacen los votos de sus ciudadanos si no les gusta el resultado. Otros proyectos legislativos reemplazan a los funcionarios electorales profesionales con figuras partidistas que podrían tener un interés claro en que gane su candidato predilecto. Y, otros más intentan criminalizar los errores humanos de funcionarios electorales, en algunos casos incluso con amenaza de cárcel.Muchas de estas leyes se están proponiendo y aprobando en estados que suele ser cruciales en las elecciones, como Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia y Pensilvania. A raíz de la votación de 2020, la campaña de Trump se enfocó en los resultados electorales en estos estados: demandó para reclamar un recuento o trataba de intimidar a los funcionarios para que encontraran votos “faltantes”. El esfuerzo fracasó, en buena medida debido al profesionalismo y la integridad de los funcionarios electorales. Desde entonces, muchos de esos funcionarios han sido despojados de su poder o expulsados de sus cargos y reemplazados por personas que dicen abiertamente que las últimas elecciones fueron fraudulentas.De este modo, los disturbios del Capitolio continúan presentes en los congresos estatales de todo Estados Unidos, en una forma legalizada y sin derramamiento de sangre y que ningún oficial de policía puede detener y que ningún fiscal puede juzgar en un tribunal.Esta no es la primera vez que las legislaturas estatales intentan arrebatarle el control de los votos electorales a sus ciudadanos, ni es la primera vez que se advierte de los peligros que entraña esa estrategia. En 1891, el presidente Benjamin Harrison advirtió al Congreso del riesgo de que ese “truco” pudiera determinar el resultado de una elección presidencial.La Constitución garantiza a todos los estadounidenses una forma republicana de gobierno, dijo Harrison. “Las características esenciales de tal gobierno son el derecho del pueblo a elegir a sus propios funcionarios” y que sus votos se cuenten por igual al tomar esa decisión. “Nuestro principal peligro nacional”, agregó, es “el derrocamiento del control de la mayoría mediante la supresión o distorsión del sufragio popular”. Si una legislatura estatal lograra sustituir la voluntad de sus votantes por la suya, “no es exagerado decir que la paz pública podría estar en peligro serio y generalizado”.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

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      The Unsung Heroes of the 2020 Presidential Election

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      THE STEALThe Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped ItBy Mark Bowden and Matthew TeagueOn Nov. 23, 2020, Aaron Van Langevelde, a little-known 40-year-old Republican, did something routine, but — in the Trump era — something also heroic: He helped stop a plot to overturn the presidential election.As a member of the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, Van Langevelde calmly and modestly voted to certify the results of the election to reflect the will of the voters, not the candidate his party preferred. He did it without rhetorical flourish. He did it despite tremendous pressure from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, who were pushing lies and disinformation to undermine the outcome.“John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men,’” Van Langevelde said in a brief speech that would make him a villain of the far right and lead to his ouster from the board. “This board needs to adhere to that principle here today.”Scenes like this played out across the country: in Wisconsin, where Rohn Bishop, the Republican Party chair in Fond du Lac, stood up to Trumpian lies; in Arizona, where Clint Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, ducked the president’s phone calls; in Pennsylvania, where Valerie Biancaniello, a Republican activist and Trump campaign head in Delaware County, demanded evidence instead of conspiracies.The unheralded and mostly unknown Republicans active in local politics who refused to go along with Trump’s lies — and played a key role in preserving American democracy — are the main subject of “The Steal,” by the journalists Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague. At 230 pages of text, their book is a lean, fast-paced and important account of the chaotic final weeks of the Trump administration.Several major works have already been published about those last days, including “Peril,” from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, and “I Alone Can Fix It,” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. (Those books by Washington Post journalists have served as source material for the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.) In fact, the opening scene of “The Steal,” depicting Trump’s internal mind-set, is sourced to “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” by Michael C. Bender of The Wall Street Journal.But what “The Steal” offers is a view of the election through the eyes of state- and county-level officials. We see Biancaniello confronting her fellow Republicans, who were raising hell at a vote-counting center (“Do you understand that you can suspect something, but it means nothing if you don’t have evidence,” she tells one); and Bishop, whom the authors call in one sense maybe “the most authentic Republican in America,” explaining to a fellow Republican: “Dude, I voted for the same guy you did. I’m just telling you it wasn’t stolen; these ballots weren’t illegally cast.”In Maricopa County, Hickman listened to claims of fraud, but concluded that the count was accurate, and then refused to take Trump’s telephone calls. “What did the president expect of him?” Bowden and Teague write. “Nothing honorable.”As I was reading “The Steal,” I was reminded of the line in the HBO show “Succession” said by Logan Roy, the domineering patriarch of a conservative media empire, as he tries to corrupt an F.B.I. investigation: “The law is people, and people is politics, and I can handle people.”Trump and his allies were betting on handling Republican officials at the local, state and federal levels (including Vice President Mike Pence and the members of Congress). Those people still had to formalize the results.As someone who was trapped in the Capitol on Jan. 6 and has covered the aftermath, I found it easy to become consumed with the names of the men and women who attempted to carry out Trump’s bidding: John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote a memo on how to overturn the election; Phil Waldron, who circulated a message on Capitol Hill with wild claims about voting machines; Sidney Powell, the conspiracy theorist who raised millions to spread disinformation.Those Trump allies appear in “The Steal,” but Bowden and Teague highlight other names as well. The plot to overturn the election failed, the authors write, because it was “stopped by the integrity of hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers.”As Americans, we would do well to remember them. More

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      As Midterms and 2024 Loom, Trump Political Operation Revs Up

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      The former president is set to headline an event at Mar-a-Lago next month for endorsed candidates and major donors to benefit a supportive super PAC.Donald J. Trump and his allies are scheduling events and raising money for initiatives intended to make the former president a central player in the midterm elections, and possibly to set the stage for another run for the White House.He and groups allied with him are planning policy summits, more rallies and an elaborate forum next month at his Mar-a-Lago resort for candidates he has endorsed and donors who give as much as $125,000 per person to a pro-Trump super PAC.The efforts seem intended to reinforce the former president’s grip on the Republican Party and its donors amid questions about whether Mr. Trump will seek the party’s nomination again or settle into a role as a kingmaker.Taken together, the pro-Trump groups form a sort of shadow political party that could help start another presidential campaign and, if that were successful, shape his administration. They include Mr. Trump’s own PACs, which amassed more than $100 million by last summer, employ an overlapping roster of former top officials from his administration and have signaled that they intend to embrace policies and candidates supported by Mr. Trump.The groups have also helped reinforce his properties as a center of Republican power, holding events at his private Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., and at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Trump has welcomed to the clubs a stream of Republicans seeking his political blessing, issuing nearly 100 endorsements to aligned candidates, including challengers to G.O.P. incumbents who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment or supported the certification of his defeat to President Biden in the 2020 election.The candidate forum at Mar-a-Lago is being planned for Feb. 23 by a super PAC run by some of Mr. Trump’s closest allies called Make America Great Again, Again! Inc., according to an email to donors from Roy W. Bailey, a Texas businessman and Republican fund-raiser.“There will be an all-day candidate forum with back-to-back speeches from the endorsed candidates and familiar faces in the Trump orbit,” wrote Mr. Bailey, who was a leading fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and inaugural committee, then registered to lobby his administration. “We want those who attend to leave thinking that it was the best political event they have ever attended,” he wrote.Donors who raise $375,000 will be invited to a private dinner with Mr. Trump.Mr. Bailey noted that the PAC’s national finance director was Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is dating Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., and that its board included Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who advised Mr. Trump during his first impeachment; Richard Grenell, who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Germany and acting head of national intelligence; and Matthew G. Whitaker, who was acting attorney general.The forum is for federal candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump. It is not clear how many of them intend to attend. But some, including Harriet Hageman, who is mounting a primary challenge against Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of Mr. Trump’s harshest Republican critics, and Kelly Tshibaka, who is running in the primary against Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, have been asked to hold the date, according to a person familiar with the planning who was not authorized to discuss it.Still, Mr. Trump’s political activities have generated some grumbling within his circle of supporters.One donor who had supported Mr. Trump’s campaigns said he was leery about donating to Make America Great Again, Again! because of concerns that the money would be wasted. Citing events at the former president’s properties as an example, the donor, who insisted on anonymity to avoid antagonizing Mr. Trump and his allies, said he declined invitations to the February candidate forum and to a $125,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner with Mr. Trump held by the super PAC last month at Mar-a-Lago. Other donors and party leaders worry about the damage that could be done by Mr. Trump’s backing of primary challenges to Republicans who pushed back against his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Mr. Trump was impeached twice, including after his supporters stormed the Capitol seeking to disrupt the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. Since then, he has been banned from the social media accounts he had wielded so effectively to generate attention and punish enemies without spending any money.While Mr. Trump has announced the formation of his own media company, including a new social network to reinsert himself into the conversation, it has yet to launch and its financing has come under scrutiny from securities regulators.Mr. Trump’s team also has continued fund-raising voraciously online for various PACs that he directly controls, which had compiled a war chest of more than $100 million last summer, and his team has continued financing campaign-style rallies. He has plans for one in Arizona this month, and more to follow, according to a person familiar with the matter.Many of Mr. Trump’s rallies in 2021 were paired with private donor round tables to raise money for his super PAC. He is planning more rallies in 2022 at locations chosen to help the candidates he has endorsed, according to people familiar with the plans.Groups allied with him have stepped up their fund-raising in recent months, indicating they intend to spend funds to promote his causes and endorsements.A nonprofit group called America First Policy Institute, which was started last year to serve as a think tank for Trump world, has the look of a Trump administration in waiting. It raised more than $20 million last year and has 110 employees, including Ms. Bondi, Mr. Whitaker and a number of former Trump cabinet members, such as David Bernhardt (who ran the Interior Department), Rick Perry (Energy Department) and Andrew Wheeler (Environmental Protection Agency).The group held two events with Mr. Trump at his properties — a fund-raising gala at Mar-a-Lago in November, and an event at Bedminster in July with Ms. Bondi to promote a lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump against tech companies that barred or limited his use of their platforms — and it is planning twice-a-year policy summits around the country.The next summit, planned for April in Atlanta, could feature Mr. Trump, according to the group’s president, Brooke Rollins, who served as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Mr. Trump and says she remains in contact with Mr. Trump about her group’s efforts.She said her group’s goal was to persuade Americans to support policies like those Mr. Trump pursued as president, and “not about getting anyone re-elected,” though she said she hoped the group’s efforts would shape the debates around the midterms and the 2024 presidential election.“The metric of a successful policy organization is how much those policies are part of the debate,” she said.A linked nonprofit group called America First Works is promoting policies that comport with Mr. Trump’s agenda. They include voting rules that make it “hard to cheat,” according to a fact sheet that seems to echo Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which his allies have been relying on to reshape election laws in a manner that could favor Republicans.But the raft of new groups has brought with it some of the drama and infighting that marked Mr. Trump’s campaigns and presidency.A previous iteration of the super PAC behind the Mar-a-Lago forum was replaced after one of its founders, the former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, was accused of sexual misconduct by a donor.That super PAC, which reported $5.6 million in the bank in mid-August, was supplanted by the new PAC, according to a statement announcing the shift in October that said the assets of the old PAC would be transferred to the new one.The statement called the new group “the ONLY Trump-approved super PAC.” More

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      The Capitol Riot Was Inevitable

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      In December 1972, the critic Pauline Kael famously admitted that she’d been living in a political bubble. “I only know one person who voted for Nixon,” she said. “Where they are, I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.” A pithier version of her quote (“I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”) has been used to exemplify liberal insularity ever since, both by conservative pundits and by the kind of centrist journalists who have spent the past several years buzzing in the ears of heartland diner patrons, looking for clues about Donald Trump’s rise.The most important fact about the Trump era, though, can be gleaned simply by examining his vote tallies and approval ratings: At no point in his political career — not a single day — has Mr. Trump enjoyed the support of the majority of the country he governed for four years. And whatever else Jan. 6 might have been, it should be understood first and foremost as an expression of disbelief in — or at least a rejection of — that reality. Rather than accepting, in defeat, that much more of their country lay outside their ken than they’d known, his supporters proclaimed themselves victors and threw a deadly and historic tantrum.The riot was an attack on our institutions, and of course, inflammatory conservative rhetoric and social media bear some of the blame. But our institutions also helped produce that violent outburst by building a sense of entitlement to power within America’s conservative minority.The structural advantages that conservatives enjoy in our electoral system are well known. Twice already this young century, the Republican Party has won the Electoral College and thus the presidency while losing the popular vote. Republicans in the Senate haven’t represented a majority of Americans since the 1990s, yet they’ve controlled the chamber for roughly half of the past 20 years. In 2012 the party kept control of the House even though Democrats won more votes.And as is now painfully clear to Democratic voters, their party faces significant barriers to success in Washington even when it manages to secure full control of government: The supermajority requirement imposed by the Senate filibuster can stall even wildly popular legislation, and Republicans have stacked the judiciary so successfully that the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, an outcome that around 60 percent of the American people oppose, according to several recent polls. Obviously, none of the structural features of our federal system were designed with contemporary politics and the Republican Party in mind. But they are clearly giving a set of Americans who have taken strongly to conservative ideology — rural voters in sparsely populated states in the middle of the country — more power than the rest of the electorate.With these structural advantages in place, it’s not especially difficult to see how the right came to view dramatic political losses, when they do occur, as suspect. If the basic mechanics of the federal system were as fair and balanced as we’re taught they are, the extent and duration of conservative power would reflect the legitimate preferences of most Americans. Democratic victories, by contrast, now seem to the right like underhanded usurpations of the will of the majority — in President Biden’s case, by fraud and foreign voters, and in Barack Obama’s, by a candidate who was himself a foreign imposition on the true American people.But the federal system is neither fair nor balanced. Rather than democratic give and take between two parties that share the burden of winning over the other side, we have one favored party and another whose effortful victories against ever-lengthening odds are conspiratorially framed as the skulduggery of schemers who can win only through fraud and covert plans to import a new electorate. It doesn’t help that Republican advantages partly insulate the party from public reproach; demagogy is more likely to spread among politicians if there are few electoral consequences. This is a recipe for political violence. Jan. 6 wasn’t the first or the deadliest attack to stem from the idea that Democrats are working to force their will on a nonexistent conservative political and cultural majority. We have no reason to expect it will be the last.And while much of the language Republican politicians and commentators use to incite their base seems outwardly extreme, it’s important to remember that what was done on Jan. 6 was done in the name of the Constitution, as most Republican voters now understand it — an eternal compact that keeps power in their rightful hands. Tellingly, during his Jan. 6 rally, Mr. Trump cannily deployed some of the language Democrats have used to decry voting restrictions and foreign interference. “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy,” he said. “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for the integrity of our elections.”The mainstream press has also had a hand in inflating the right’s sense of itself. Habits like the misrepresentation of Republican voters and operatives as swing voters plucked off the street and the constant, reductive blather about political homogeneity on the coasts — despite the fact that there were more Trump voters in New York City in 2016 and 2020 than there were in both Dakotas combined — create distorted impressions of our political landscape. The tendency of journalists to measure the wisdom of policies and rhetoric based on their distance from the preferences of conservative voters only reinforces the idea that it’s fair for politicians, activists and voters on the left to take the reddest parts of the country into account without the right taking a reciprocal interest in what most Americans want.That premise still dominates and constrains strategic thinking within the Democratic Party. A year after the Capitol attack and all the rent garments and tears about the right’s radicalism and the democratic process, the party has failed to deliver promised political reforms, thanks to opposition from pivotal members of its own Senate caucus — Democrats who argue that significantly changing our system would alienate Republicans.Given demographic trends, power in Washington will likely continue accruing to Republicans even if the right doesn’t undertake further efforts to subvert our elections. And to fix the structural biases at work, Democrats would have to either attempt the impossible task of securing broad, bipartisan support for major new amendments to the Constitution — which, it should be said, essentially bars changes to the Senate’s basic design — or pass a set of system-rebalancing workarounds, such as admitting new states ⁠like the District of Columbia. It should never be forgotten that fully enfranchised voters from around the country gathered to stage a riot over their supposedly threatened political rights last January in a city of 700,000 people who don’t have a full vote in Congress.Jan. 6 demonstrated that the choice the country now faces isn’t one between disruptive changes to our political system and a peaceable status quo. To believe otherwise is to indulge the other big lie that drew violence to the Capitol in the first place. The notion that the 18th-century American constitutional order is suited to governance in the 21st is as preposterous and dangerous as anything Mr. Trump has ever uttered. It was the supposedly stabilizing features of our vaunted system that made him president to begin with and incubated the extremism that turned his departure into a crisis.Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of a regular newsletter about American politics. His first book, “The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding,” will be published by Random House.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More