The air raid sirens over Ukrainian cities were incessant.
Russian missiles slammed into a TV tower in Kyiv in the first weeks of war, temporarily disabling some of the nation’s stations while also raining fire onto a nearby Holocaust memorial. At least five people died there, their bodies found smoldering. Rockets pummeled apartment complexes in Kharkiv, entire neighborhoods wiped out, civilians and their homes clearly targeted by Red Army weaponry. The shelling seemed to never stop at Mariupol, all but leveling whole neighborhoods in the southern port city. Russian troops opened fire indiscriminately at vehicles approaching checkpoints near the capital. One Ukrainian man was shot to death on a wooded road, his dog found whimpering beside him.
More than 4,600 miles away, Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, prepared to make an implausible case.
His nation, at Vladimir Putin’s direction, had invaded its neighbor in the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, realizing the war fears the West had held for months. In the fall of 2021, US intelligence noticed the beginning of what became a massive troop buildup near the Ukrainian border. Putin had made no secret of his beliefs that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster and that Ukraine should still be part of Russia. He had invaded before, in 2014, and seized Crimea.
The Biden administration was deeply worried about the possibility of the largest land war in Europe since World War II. A military intervention was not on the table; Ukraine was not a part of NATO, and any scenario in which American and Russian soldiers started shooting at each other put the globe on an apocalyptic path. But in a concerted and highly unusual effort, the White House began loudly warning about Putin’s aggressive behavior. The strategy to take intelligence public in almost real time was crafted by CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and quickly endorsed by the president, who thought the effort might rattle Putin, a former KGB chief known to safeguard his secrets. The move, along with the threat of punishing sanctions, wasn’t viewed as a guaranteed deterrent but a possible mechanism to slow down the Russian leader and perhaps make him reconsider.
Putin went in anyway. He waited for the Winter Olympics in Beijing to end, so as not to offend his Chinese allies, and unleashed a series of increasingly angry speeches with lies about the abuses of Russians living in a pair of separatist territories within Ukraine. Russian tanks began rolling, and the skies above Ukraine filled with rockets. But what many experts thought would be a lightning-fast Russian victory was met with fierce resistance. And as the Russian advance stalled, the world gaped in horror at the atrocities its troops left behind in places like Bucha. Ukrainian civilians slaughtered, women raped, and children executed.
In the first weeks of war, the same Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom Donald Trump had tried to extort for damaging information about Joe Biden’s family emerged as a heroic symbol of national strength. The same defense system, the Javelin missiles, that Trump had threatened to withhold were instrumental in defending Ukraine. The same alliance, NATO, that Trump had tried to undermine banded together and sent weapons to the front, while Europe and the United States unleashed wave after wave of sanctions on Russia. And the same leader, Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump had sided over his own government, was turned into an international pariah.
But Trump also played another role in the war.
Nebenzia took the microphone to denounce a new United Nations resolution that condemned Russia’s invasion and called for an immediate and complete withdrawal of all military forces from Ukraine. Moscow had forcefully rejected the resolution, calling claims that Russian troops were targeting civilians “fake” and saying other countries were hypocritical for supporting it. With the eyes of the world on him, Nebenzia singled out Washington for scorn, declaring that the United States could not be taken seriously on the matter of democracy because it was “where the legitimately elected president of the country was overthrown.”
The ambassador appeared to be talking about Trump, claiming that he was the true president who had been illegally deposed due to election fraud. The headlines screamed. For years, Trump was accused of using Moscow’s talking points. Now, Putin’s people seemed to be using Trump’s to undermine the American criticism of his invasion.
The Big Lie was being used to defend a war.
Trump’s lie about the 2020 election had permeated the international and domestic discourse. Republican congressional campaigns were ramping up with defense of the claim at their centers. Trump continued to step back into the arena, loudly proclaiming that he had won while planting the seeds to successfully overturn the next election. It seemed like a federal push to protect voting rights was the only hope. Democrats were not particularly optimistic. But there was a window and they needed to take advantage of it, even if it ended up being a triumph of politics rather than policy.
As the calendar turned to 2022, Build Back Better had collapsed and was temporarily put on the shelf. Ominous signs were coming from eastern Europe, but Putin was a few weeks away from launching his assault. Democrats were looking for a win, and just as importantly in the minds of many, they wanted to show their base that they were fighting for the issues that mattered most to them. That meant voting rights. After having been on the back burner for much of 2021, the matter was suddenly Washington’s main event in the days before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Civil rights leaders hopped on cable news to keep the pressure on. Chuck Schumer pressed members of his caucus to support filibuster reform. The White House legislative affairs team, once more, set up shop on the other side of the Pennsylvania Avenue. And Biden and a team of aides, including the historian Jon Meacham, put the finishing touches on his Georgia voting rights speech.
Schumer and Democratic leaders turned their public fire on Republicans, painting them as the obstacle to voting reforms. They noted that the last renewal of the Voting Rights Bill was in 2006, when Republican George W. Bush was in office, and it had sailed through with bipartisan support. The only things that had changed, Democrats pointed out, were that a Republican wasn’t in office this time around—and the GOP was in Trump’s sway.
“If the right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, then how can we in good conscience allow for a situation in which the Republican Party can debate and pass voter suppression laws at the State level with only a simple majority vote, but not allow the United States Senate to do the same?” Schumer wrote in a January 13 letter to colleagues. “In the coming days, we will confront this sobering question—together.”
Republicans were nearly uniformly against any federal voting rights legislation. The Freedom to Vote Act had no Republican support in the Senate. The John Lewis bill had one GOP backer: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Mitch McConnell was so opposed that he made an appearance to speak at a Senate Rules committee meeting to attack it, a rare step for a party leader. And he condemned the Democrats’ efforts to change the filibuster rule and their attempt to link the first anniversary of the January 6 riot with the push for voting rights.
“No party that would trash the Senate’s legislation traditions can be trusted to seize control over election laws all across America,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “Nobody who is this desperate to take over our democracy on a one-party basis can be allowed to do it.
“It is beyond distasteful for some of our colleagues to ham-fistedly invoke the January 6th anniversary to advance these aims,” he said.
Even Republicans who occasionally worked across the aisle came out in opposition to the measure. Mitt Romney said the Democrats had “ventured deep into hyperbole and hysteria” in their push to alter the filibuster.
“There is a reasonable chance Republicans will win both houses in Congress and that Donald Trump himself could once again be elected president in 2024,” Romney said on the Senate floor. “Have Democrats thought what it would mean for them, for the Democrat minority to have no power whatsoever?”
But Republicans were not the only problem. On the eve of Biden’s speech, it was far from a sure thing that the Democrats would have enough support within their own party to change the filibuster. Neither Kyrsten Sinema nor Joe Manchin had suggested they were wavering in their opposition, though the West Virginia senator had signaled that he’d listen to the speech with an open mind. But even without a guarantee, Schumer went ahead and scheduled a procedural vote on the two voting rights bills. To make that happen, he used a quirk in the rules to allow floor debate on the bills, both of which had majority support in the fifty–fifty Senate. But advancing the measures to vote on their final passage required sixty senators to break filibusters, which Democrats had no realistic hope of achieving because of Republican opposition. Even if they were to lose, Schumer told others, senators would need “to put their names” on their votes. While that was aimed at Republicans and would create potentially good campaign ad fodder, it could also have the uncomfortable by-product of putting a spotlight on Democrats also not willing to vote to change the filibuster.
Trouble emerged: a number of Georgia civil rights groups announced they would boycott Biden’s speech because they believed that it would produce only words and not actions. And then the White House was left reeling when Stacey Abrams announced that she, too, would be skipping the Atlanta speech, citing unspecified scheduling issues. That was a dubious excuse and bad optics for Biden: Voting rights was Abrams’s signature issue; the president of the United States was coming to her backyard to deliver a speech on that very topic and she was skipping it? Biden gave her cover and said he had no problem with her missing the speech, but it was perceived among many in the Beltway that Abrams, facing voters at year’s end, did not want to be associated with Biden and his low poll numbers. Abrams pointedly refused to reveal the alleged scheduling conflict, but people familiar with the decision said she had decided against attending the speech because she did not want to alienate the boycotting civil rights groups, knowing that she would need their full support that November.
The president took the stage on January 11, 2022, at a consortium of four historically Black colleges and universities with three target audiences for the speech: progressives, who wanted to see him fully committed to their most important issue; swing voters in Georgia, who could decide the fate of the Senate in 2022 and the White House in 2024; and, of course, Senators Manchin and Sinema, to see if they would change their minds about the filibuster.
Biden held nothing back.
He took square aim at his old home, his beloved US Senate, saying its traditions had been “abused.”
“Sadly, the United States Senate, designed to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, has been rendered a shell of its former self,” Biden said.
He offered a full-throated endorsement of “getting rid” of the filibuster for voting rights, though he did not call for its complete elimination. His visit leaned hard on civil rights symbolism: it was held in John Lewis’s old district, and Biden and Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, visited Ebenezer Baptist Church to see Raphael Warnock and pay respects to Dr. King’s crypt. Invoking Trump, Biden told the audience that “the goal of the former president and his allies is to disenfranchise anyone who votes against them.”
And then he went further.
“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?” Biden asked. “At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
Biden had equated opponents of Senate rule changes to slaveholders and drew a sharp line between men who fought for civil rights and those who fought to deny them.
Gasps could be heard in the crowd.
The reaction was predictably partisan. Republicans denounced the speech. Democrats deemed it a needed clarion call on a defining issue. Some pundits wondered if the Bull Connor reference had gone too far. Martin Luther King III, the oldest living son of the civil rights leader, and his wife, Arndrea Waters King, said they’d be “watching closely” to see if the Democrats got anything done. Manchin said Biden had delivered “a good speech” but added nothing further.
Sinema didn’t say anything at all.
The Beast was already running.
The presidential limousine, nicknamed “The Beast,” is a marvel of engineering. It has bulletproof armor, is sealed against a chemical attack, and weighs more than most trucks. It can, for a time, function as the seat of government. For informal trips, like to a golf course or out to dinner or church, presidents use an SUV version. But for official business, it’s the limousine, which projects power and prestige.
And the limo’s engine was already purring the morning of January 13, two days after the president’s Atlanta speech. It was amid a motorcade of vehicles prepared for the short ride on Pennsylvania Avenue, where Biden was to attend a Senate Democratic luncheon at which he planned to ask all fifty members of the caucus to support changing Senate rules just for a carve out to allow voting rights legislation to pass. There was renewed momentum on the issue: the package of voting rights bills had just passed the House. A number of White House aides, and the traveling press pool, were already loaded in their vehicles and waiting for Biden. They planned to leave within minutes.
And then Sinema stood up to deliver a speech on the floor of the Senate.
With a few quick words, she let it be known that Biden could have saved himself the trip. She used the floor speech to once again reiterate her opposition to changing the filibuster, even in a one-time exception for voting rights. Her central argument was that the nation needed more bipartisanship and that a party-line vote to alter the filibuster would do more harm than any good that could come out of voting rights legislation.
“While I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” Sinema said. “We must address the disease itself, the disease of division, to protect our democracy, and it cannot be achieved by one party alone. It cannot be achieved solely by the federal government. The response requires something greater and, yes, more difficult than what the Senate is discussing today.”
The fury from her fellow Democrats was palpable. Sinema had humiliated Biden, by not even giving him time to make his pitch before she pulled the plug on the voting rights efforts. She had given the White House a heads-up as to what she was going to say shortly before she delivered her speech, but that did nothing to calm other members of her party.
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado declared that today’s Senate was not “worthy of defense” and that it was “impossible to argue that this place functions better today than when Joe Biden was here.” And Warnock, so central to the fight, likened this era’s defense of the filibuster to efforts to block laws to end the Jim Crow era in the South.
“I don’t think it was just because there were people who hated Black people,” the Georgia senator said to reporters. “I think that often, in institutions like this, arguments about process and procedure somehow get in the way of seeing people’s humanity.”
But Sinema’s speech delighted another senator with passionate views about the voting rights legislation.
“It was extraordinarily important and she has, with a conspicuous act of political courage, saved the Senate as an institution,” Mitch McConnell said to reporters after the speech.
Despite the embarrassing setback, Biden made the trip and spoke to the caucus. He made little mention of the divisions in the Democrats’ own ranks and instead focused on the Republicans’ obstruction. The mood in the room was somber, several senators told others afterward. Sinema mostly stayed glued to her phone, not making much in the way of eye contact. Later, Manchin put out his own statement opposing any filibuster change, including a carve out for voting rights. White House aides were darkly grateful that he had at least waited until after the president spoke.
Biden looked visibly shell-shocked when he spoke to reporters later that day.
“I don’t know whether we can get this done,” he said. “But one thing is for certain—like every other major civil rights bill that came along, if we miss the first time, we can come back and try a second time.
“But I know one thing: As long as I have a breath in me, as long as I’m in the White House, as long as I’m engaged at all, I’m going to be fighting to change the way these legislatures have moved.”
Biden made one more try that night, hosting both Manchin and Sinema at the White House. Nothing came of it. It was a stinging rebuke for a president who had emphasized his long experience as a senator and his knowledge of how to get things done on Capitol Hill. Schumer delayed the vote, citing an incoming winter storm, meaning that the Democrats missed their Martin Luther King Jr. Day deadline. It was held the following week instead and the Democrats did not have the votes to break the GOP filibuster on the legislation. The voting rights bills were defeated.
The monthlong push on voting rights, culminating in the Georgia speech, had come up empty. Civil rights activists angrily blamed the White House’s legislative sequencing, condemning the decision to place voting rights after other legislative priorities. The GOP-run states were free to keep passing legislation without fear of federal interference. The midterms were not even ten months away.
The Big Lie had helped secure a major victory.
As the battle over voting rights took center stage in the first weeks of 2022, the House of Representatives’ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol continued to work, quietly and steadily.
A new sense of urgency had set in: the committee, from the start, had made clear that its mission was not just to probe what happened during the riot, but to prevent something like that from happening again. With Trump taking big steps back onto the political stage, the members knew their work was vital. If the former president had spurred on the riot, the investigation needed to show that, with clear facts, to make sure the American people realized that Trump was unfit to sit in the Oval Office again.
It had begun its work in the summer of 2021, with a series of intense, headline-grabbing public testimonials from Capitol police officers and other law enforcement who were injured during the riot. Then their work had moved mostly behind closed doors. Subpoenas were issued for the testimony and records from many of the most prominent members of Trump’s inner circle: Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Roger Stone, Stephen Miller, Jeffrey Clark, Jason Miller, Kayleigh McEnany, and more. Some of the biggest names in the bunch, namely Bannon and Meadows, made a public show of refusing. The House voted to hold both Bannon and Meadows in contempt of Congress and sent along criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.
Trump railed against the proceedings constantly. He accused the committee of bias, of being a continuation of the same Democratic “witch hunt” that he claimed had dominated his time in office. He focused his wrath, publicly and privately, on the two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who he felt had betrayed him. The edict was clear from Mar-a-Lago: those in TrumpWorld should not cooperate with the probe.
But not everyone listened. As the committee broadened the scope of its probe, it began looking at midlevel White House aides, career government officials, and others who had been swept up in Trump’s machinations. Many of them testified and handed over their records. Some senior staffers who had since turned on Trump, like communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, did the same. And even those who refused to testify, like Meadows, found their text messages turned over to the committee and, sometimes, distributed to the public.
There were grumblings among some Democrats that the committee was moving too slowly. The political calendar was unrelenting: there would be no appetite for the work to continue into the fall of 2022, weeks before the midterm elections, so it needed to conclude and present its findings well before then. A push was made for public, potentially primetime hearings in June, to better show the American people the committee’s findings. And there was growing impatience among many on the Left, including some in the White House, as to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s slow pace in deciding whether to prosecute those who refused to cooperate.
But some of the documents the committee discovered were breathtaking. A PowerPoint presentation that recommended Trump declare a national security emergency to return himself to office. A document that urged Trump to claim a foreign government like China or Venezuela was trying to interfere with the election, giving him the ability to invoke emergency powers. A memo that outlined the scheme to install alternate electors. A plan later revealed by Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and Giuliani ally, who told investigators that a scheme was concocted—but never utilized—to seize voting machines.
Mike Pence became a particular focal point. He had been at the center of the plan to overturn the election and had held his ground; some in the committee thought he might testify. But Pence opted against. Though in public remarks he continued to insist that he did the right thing on January 6, he was not going to risk his own political future by cooperating with a probe that most in the GOP felt was illegitimate. Some of Pence’s aides, however, did cooperate.
But even without appearances from many of those most intimately involved in the scheme—and many of them would have invoked the Fifth Amendment and not said anything anyway—the committee used reams of documents and files and emails and text messages as it built its case. Trump moved to use executive privilege to block release of records, his lawyers claiming that they should stay shielded even though he was no longer in office. Biden rejected the claim, triggering the release of documents and White House visitor logs from January 6 to be turned over to the committee from the National Archives, where they were sent after Trump left office. An appeals court ruled against Trump. And then, in February 2022, it was discovered that Trump had wrongly absconded to Mar-a-Lago with boxes of documents that should have been sent to the National Archives. Some of them were deemed classified, prompting spasms of outrage from Democrats who remembered what a flashpoint Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information was during the 2016 campaign. Some of this material, too, was sent to the January 6 committee.
And then late one night in early March, a court filing was quietly released that suddenly brought the contours of the shadowy investigation into the light. In the filing, the House committee argued that former president Trump and members of his campaign were part of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results. The language was simple: the committee “has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Criminal conspiracy.
The filing mostly focused on John Eastman, the conservative lawyer, and his plan to overturn the election results, and it made the claim that Trump and his team may have tried to enact “a corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of electoral college ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power,” the committee said in a statement. It was the most direct line yet that the committee had tried to draw connecting Trump, his allies, and potential criminal activity surrounding the election. Three distinct crimes were cited: obstruction of an official proceeding, interfering in election certification, and spreading false information about the results. But determining whether Trump violated criminal law on January 6 would be a complex undertaking, and a tricky calculus emerges when considering charging a former president.
Trump’s lawyers downplayed the filing, and the ex-president railed against it, using his not particularly clever nickname for the congressional body investigating the riot.
“The actual conspiracy to defraud the United States was the Democrats rigging the Election, and the Fake News Media and the Unselect Committee covering it up,” he said. And then he may have tipped his hand about his true concern.
“The Unselect Committee’s sole goal is to try to prevent President Trump, who is leading by large margins in every poll, from running again for president, if I so choose.”
The White House tried to regroup.
After the defeat of the voting rights measures on Capitol Hill, anger rippled through some quarters on the Left. Biden was chastened. Civil rights groups were furious: they felt abandoned, but vowed to fight on.
“Anything short of protecting the right to vote is a death sentence for democracy,” said Derrick Johnson, the NAACP president. “This fight is far from over.”
The weekly White House meeting on voting rights continued, as did efforts within the Democratic campaign arm. They would proceed on two tracks: while the push for overarching federal legislation was not going to be abandoned, there was recognition that it was unlikely to pass in 2022 with the current makeup of the Congress. Other avenues would have to be pursued to safeguard the vote.
Within the White House, there was a mixture of frustration and resignation. Some Biden aides thought that too much was being made of the states’ efforts to change election laws; Republicans had tried this before, a few thought, and would again. Others acknowledged that when Democrats were in power at the state level, their party was also not above efforts, like gerrymandering, to stack the deck. Within the West Wing, there was also some annoyance around how the process had played out, and not just at Sinema and Manchin (although both of them, to be clear, were not exactly beloved at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). There was a lot of second-guessing about HR1, the messaging bill that never stood a chance, because it was so expansive; it gave Republicans an easy target that enabled them to paint all the voting bills—even more modest ones—with the same extremist brush. There also was a sense that if a federal bill had passed, it likely would have been tied up in the courts through the midterms and potentially tossed by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
The focus shifted. First, Democrats needed to repair relations with some in the civil rights community to make sure they would be engaged and motivated in elections going forward. Second, they would need to focus on turnout, to push voters to the polls in such huge numbers that they would be able to withstand the obstacles and legal challenges sure to be put in their paths by the new state laws. Third, they’d need to draw lessons from how local officials and business leaders pushed back against the GOP in states like Arizona and Georgia; they’d need to cultivate other civic-minded individuals and organizations to do the same. And fourth, they’d need to restore the American people’s faith in the election system; polls suggested that the onslaught of rhetoric about rigged elections had led even some Democrats to doubt their trustworthiness.
And attention shifted to a smaller piece of legislation that had a narrow aim: to eliminate the provision by which Trump and his allies tried to have Pence block Biden’s victory.
The vice president’s role in the certification of the results was based in the ambiguously phrased Electoral Count Act of 1887 and barely considered again until Eastman and other Trump advisers concocted the plan to have Pence throw out some states’ electors. The new legislation would eliminate the loopholes and make clear that the vice president’s role was only ceremonial. It picked up support on both sides of the aisle, including from Joe Manchin, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins.
“The peaceful transfer of power shouldn’t require heroes,” Collins wrote in a February 2022 op-ed endorsing the measure.
The White House signaled support for the revision; it was small but necessary. The lack of progress on larger voting rights legislation ate at Biden, who truly feared that the nation’s democracy could slip away if things didn’t change soon. More than most on his staff, he still believed that some Republicans were redeemable. He remembered how Washington used to work. He wasn’t naive; he realized things had changed. But he was dismayed that they had changed this much.
“I still think enough Republicans will stand up and do the right thing,” Biden told a close confidant in early 2022 after the voting rights effort failed. “But I’m less confident than I was a year ago.”
Arizona. Georgia. Iowa. Florida.
The Trump rallies were back. Beginning in the second half of 2021 and accelerating as the political world raced into a midterm year, Trump began hitting the road again as an in-your-face display of his continued sway over the Republican Party. Gone was Air Force One, gone was “YMCA” as the closing song. One other change: for a little while, Trump touted the COVID-19 vaccines and booster shots, only to abandon that take when it was met with indifference and even hostility by some in his crowd. He had created the MAGA monster but he couldn’t always control it.
But so much was the same. Biden was weak, Democrats were socialists who loved crime, Republicans needed to be tough on immigration, and he had won the 2020 election. Yep, he was still at it. In dark and divisive speeches, he continued to rail against his defeat, claiming without evidence that the result had been rigged. And he demanded Republicans toe the same line. In a Texas rally in late January 2022, the state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called out, “Well, we all know who won in 2020, don’t we? Who won?”
No one in the crowd seemed to think it was Joe Biden. At an Arizona rally weeks earlier, Trump was even blunter.
“The Big Lie is a lot of bullshit,” were among the former president’s first words, ones that were greeted with rapturous applause.
“I ran twice and we won twice and we did better the second time. We did much better the second time,” Trump said.
The crowds ate it up. These were the diehards, people who lived their lives safely nestled in a Fox News cocoon. The Big Lie was dogma. The former president mocked Democrats’ concerns about the insurrection and instead continued to repeat claims of election improprieties and that the other party had taken advantage of the pandemic to steal the election with fraudulent mail-in voting.
“Why aren’t they investigating November 3, a rigged and stolen election?” he said. “The people are very angry. They got duped and they found out what happened. The people have to be free to find the answers and if not, they will never trust again and our country will be absolutely decimated.”
At the Texas rally, Trump floated the idea of pardons for the January 6 rioters were he to become president again. He portrayed those who had desecrated the US Capitol as some sort of martyrs, victims of overzealous Democratic persecution. The suggestion was met with rare pushback from Republicans, many of whom seemed to feel that the Capitol riot was one of the very few safe spaces from which to criticize the former president. The story died down after a day or two.
But the attempts to read the tea leaves did not. Did Trump hint that he was going to run for president again in 2024?
Though the presidential race was years away, speculation had already begun about the possible front-runners. Biden would be eighty-one years old on Election Day 2024. During the 2020 campaign, he had privately talked about being a “transition” president, and some aides even briefly considered a pledge that he would serve only one term. But since taking office, he had publicly declared that he planned to run again. Of course, he had to do that: declaring he would not would immediately make him a lame duck and curtail his political clout. Privately, though, many of his closest allies wondered about Biden’s ability to withstand the rigors of another run: the job already seemed to age him, and he wouldn’t be able to campaign from his basement the next time.
And one thing a divided Washington agreed upon: if Biden opted not to run, the Democratic field would not clear for Harris. The vice president had a series of political setbacks and little to show for her role leading the administration’s efforts on immigration and, of course, voting rights. It was an inherently thankless job and she had a tough portfolio. She had undeniable strengths but loads of Democrats would be expected to line up to run against her, including some familiar faces from 2020.
But it was the speculation about Trump’s future that truly ran rampant. There were some Republicans who wished he would stop litigating 2020 and focus on the future, but they largely remained silent. The Big Lie wasn’t going to hurt Trump’s chances at the presidency among Republicans; it might only enhance them. The party remained his. He offered teases and hints about running. One day at his Florida golf course, a passerby asked if he could take a photo with the “forty-fifth president.” Trump smirked and responded, “forty-fifth and forty-seventh.” His new exit song at the end of rallies? A 1966 classic from Sam and Dave whose title was viewed by many as both a hint and a reassuring message to his supporters: “Hold On, I’m Comin’.” Be patient, Trump seemed to be saying. I’ll be back soon.
In private conversations, he would quiz aides and advisers as to the best moment to announce his candidacy, even though he would talk in ambiguous circles and never fully commit to another campaign. He did wonder about his health, and he didn’t want to risk losing twice, although, of course, he wasn’t admitting that he had lost even once. Some of his allies urged him to do so sooner than later, reasoning that declaring might ease his legal jeopardy; it would already be a huge leap to indict a former president, but even more of one to target the front-runner for the GOP nomination.
The swirling multiple investigations were never far from Trump’s mind. Though the January 6 committee’s investigation posed some political peril, the former president was more unnerved by the dueling probes underway in Manhattan—one civil, one criminal—into the Trump Organization, led by the New York State attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney, respectively. He didn’t like the pressure on his business or his family. Neither was certain to bring a case, particularly the Manhattan DA. But he instructed his lawyers to fight.
He waited to decide on 2024. He knew that if he were to jump in, even late, he’d be the overwhelming front-runner for the GOP nomination. He also knew that if he opted not to run, the moment he made that official would be the very moment his clout within the GOP would begin to fade. So, he waited. There was no harm in waiting.
Except to the other Republicans with eyes on the White House. Trump had frozen the field.
The conundrum for the rest of the possible 2024 GOP field was obvious: if someone was to declare a candidacy without waiting for Trump, that person risked alienating the most powerful—and vengeful—voice in the Republican Party. Moreover, they knew their potential opponents were also paying close attention to the degree of loyalty they showed to the former president. Some likely 2024 contenders created campaigns-in-waiting—hiring trusted advisers, meeting with donors, and visiting all-important primary states despite knowing it could all be for nothing if the former president entered the race. But few dared acknowledge that they would plunge ahead if Trump ran.
Some White House hopefuls, like Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, made a trip to Mar-a-Lago and explicitly said they would not run if Trump did. Others, like Florida senator Marco Rubio and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, were slightly more subtle, declaring that if Trump ran, he would be the party’s nominee and would have their support. The list went on: Senators Josh Hawley and Tim Scott also suggested that they would bow out if Trump announced a candidacy.
A few broke ranks. Chris Christie didn’t commit to running but said he would make his eventual decision without factoring in Trump. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former secretary of state, traveled to those key early primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, and refused to rule out a bid.
And in early 2022, a series of polls showed Florida governor Ron DeSantis emerging as Trump’s most potent intraparty contender. This rankled Trump; he had “made DeSantis,” he told others, with an endorsement that had propelled him to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. Plus, Trump was a Florida Man now and he didn’t like the backyard insurgency. Florida was without question the new spiritual home for Trump’s Republican Party; but the state wasn’t big enough for the both of them, Trump thought. DeSantis also toned down some of his formerly fawning rhetoric about Trump and made the political calculation to—somehow—move to the right of Trump on a number of pandemic issues, including fighting local districts over mask mandates in schools, upbraiding a group of high school kids for sporting face coverings as they stood behind him for a photo op, and refusing to say whether he had received a COVID-19 booster shot. Even for Trump, that was too much, and he demanded that everyone should have to say whether they had gotten a booster or not (Trump had). And most galling of all to Trump: DeSantis was no longer showing him the proper deference and refused to proclaim—to say the “magic words,” Trump told associates—that he would not run if the former president did.
And then there was the curious case of Mike Pence.
On Election Day 2020, it would have been hard to imagine that Pence, the epitome of a loyal vice president, would ever cross Trump, and downright unthinkable that he would challenge him for the Republican nomination. But after January 6, their dynamic was irrevocably altered, and Pence began eyeing the terrain in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump was less worried about Pence, who he thought had burned bridges with much of the conservative base for failing to go along with the plan to overturn the election. That still infuriated the former president who, in a classic case of saying the quiet part out loud, all but confessed to his electoral scheme in a statement shortly after the first anniversary of the insurrection, declaring of Pence that, “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”
But as Pence moved to possibly take on his former boss, he continued to defend his decision. His aides scheduled an address to a chapter of the influential conservative group the Federalist Society and previewed to reporters that Pence would take a stand. And he did just that, declaring, “President Trump is wrong.
“I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence told the crowd gathered in Orlando. “The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. And frankly there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
Op-ed boards and media pundits praised Pence for doing the right thing, for affirming his commitment to the rule of law. Tellingly, his comments were met with near silence by the conservative crowd.
But there were roars from another GOP crowd, gathered in that same Florida city three weeks later.
“We did it twice, and we’ll do it again. We’re going to be doing it again a third time.”
It wasn’t quite a declaration of a 2024 run at the White House but it wasn’t far off. Trump, just over a year after allegedly being sent off to political exile, was the star attraction at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual meeting in late February 2022. He wore his familiar blue suit and his trademark red tie; he sported a tan. Maybe he had lost a little weight since the last time many in the audience had seen him. But, really, little had changed. It was his show.
Over the last two decades, CPAC had become a bellwether for where the Republican Party stood. It drew a who’s who of the Right, particularly the Far Right, where GOP donors and activists and superfans gathered to revel in the conservative buzz of the moment. Formerly held in Washington, it too had relocated to Florida to be in line with the current GOP zeitgeist. And the conference held a special significance for Trump: in his first appearance there, back in 2011, he had delivered a speech that electrified the crowd and, to many, was the first sign of his possible political power. The groundwork for his eventual presidency, some of his closest aides believe, was laid in that speech.
His hold over the audience had only grown eleven years later. His speech was the only time the cavernous conference room was full all weekend. Many of the attendees at CPAC believed Trump had been robbed in 2020. He easily won the straw poll asking whom the attendees wanted to be the next nominee, usually a good read on the pulse of the party.
Trump flags hung from right-wing media booths where the former president’s allies and former White House officials talked about “America First” policy, raged against culture war issues, and railed on the Biden administration. Bedazzled MAGA hats and “Trump was right” buttons were spotted everywhere. Supporters ignored other events to try to work their way into a free VIP reception with Trump. The menu? A buffet of his favorite McDonald’s fast-food items.
It felt like a campaign speech, two years before the 2024 primary season was to officially begin. Of course, he launched into the familiar grievance-filled tirade that the election was stolen from him. But he also looked ahead, touching on current events. He slammed the Biden administration’s handling of inflation and the border. And he ignored his own fawning words for Putin to claim that Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine.
And he played to the crowd’s desire for him to run again, at one point declaring, “As your president…” and then stopping to soak in a thunderous ovation. He spoke like a candidate. And he finished his speech just as he had done so many times before.
“We will make America powerful again,” Trump said. “We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again.
“And we will make America great again.”
It was 2016. It was 2020. It was 2024.
Biden was still tinkering with the speech on his ride to the Capitol.
The last time he had made this precise journey, he was dealt a stinging defeat by members of his own party on the push for voting rights. This time, he made the trip to deliver his first State of the Union address, in which he again would rail against Republican efforts to restrict the access to the ballot.
“The most fundamental right in America is the right to vote—and to have it counted,” Biden said. “And it’s under assault. In state after state, new laws have been passed, not only to suppress the vote—we’ve been there before—but to subvert entire elections.”
But in a reflection of the moment’s political reality, Biden didn’t dwell on concrete measures to protect the ballot. He offered only a brief endorsement of federal legislation that had little chance to succeed due to fellow Democrats’ continued opposition to filibuster reform. It was an implicit acknowledgment that the battle for democracy at home had been delivered a setback. This night, though, Biden needed to rally the nation to help defend democracy abroad.
It was not the speech the president and his team had planned to give. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, the topics that had once been front and center—COVID-19, inflation, and economic recovery—took a back seat, in another reflection of a presidency that had been forced to respond to events rather than shape them. He was able to tout his new Supreme Court pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom he had nominated just days before to be the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court. Biden had fulfilled the promise he had made to Jim Clyburn nearly two years before, a promise that had helped lead him to that very moment, in which he addressed the nation as president.
But his focus was the war raging an ocean away. Biden vowed that the United States would emerge from years of division and disease to protect and expand freedoms at home and abroad.
“While it shouldn’t have taken something so terrible for people around the world to see what’s at stake, now everyone sees it clearly,” the president said. “In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.”
The central premise of the Biden presidency was being played out in real time. The United States, he believed, needed to prove that its own government could work so that it could unite with democracies around the globe to push back on rising authoritarianism. Putin may have thought that the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan meant that he had free rein to move in. But he was also clearly inspired by what he saw as the aftermath of Trump’s four years: strained alliances, deep divisions at home, doubts about the integrity of democracy itself. That, too, was a legacy of the Big Lie.
But in the war’s first weeks, the alliances held. Trump praised Putin for being savvy, an assertion briefly amplified by the fringes of the conservative media and movement, only to be drowned out by a number of Republicans who denounced the Russian president as a dictator. At least on matters of Russia, much of the GOP was still willing to defy the former president. But Trump hovered over the war, with Western allies uncertain if they could count on America to continue to stand with them after the next election.
Biden delivered his speech against the backdrop of a pandemic that ignored borders and had touched every corner of the globe for the past two years. It came a year after an insurrection, the aftershocks still felt. Trump was back, inflation was rising, trust in government sinking. Biden had been in Washington a long time, had achieved the pinnacle of power, had been tasked with steering the nation through an unimaginable series of crises. But he still thought of himself as a guy from Wilmington, a guy who understood average Americans, a guy who talked plainly and made sense. He knew Americans were tired and frustrated, that the nation was divided as it had been few times before. He knew harder times could lie ahead.
It was not a time for soaring rhetoric. It was a time for a simple message, one that acknowledged the hard times but offered reassurance, that still believed that the experiment that was American democracy, though battered, would not fall. He delivered that message midway through his speech.
“I know the news about what’s happening can seem alarming,” Biden said.
“But I want you to know that we are going to be okay.” The nation hoped he was right.
The Big Lie was born in 2016. Over the next six years, the man who gave it life used it to undermine the nation’s faith in its civic institutions and in the process of democracy itself. It had, via cable news, corrupted viewers and inspired dictators. It was faithfully repeated by political allies who were afraid of Trump and his followers. It was used to justify an abuse of power and the workings of government. It had challenged Democrats to battle among themselves to protect the ballot. It inspired an insurrection at the US Capitol, posing the greatest threat to the republic itself since the Civil War.
And it lives on.
It dominated the Trump White House and shaped Biden’s presidency. It was used to justify restricting access to the ballot and put the battle for voting rights center stage again. It hovered over the Democratic agenda and posed as a litmus test for Republicans. It was a defining issue for the 2022 midterms and, no matter who is on the ballot, will be for the 2024 presidential campaign. It threatened to undermine Americans’ faith in every election going forward.
The Big Lie was now officially doctrine within the Republican Party.
The Republican National Committee held its annual winter meeting in Salt Lake City in February 2022 and made clear, in no uncertain terms, who was the leader of the party. The GOP censured Cheney and Kinzinger, the Republicans who had most loudly attacked Trump and his lies, condemning them specifically for being part of the January 6 committee, which, the party said, was participating in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
Legitimate. Political. Discourse.
The Capitol riot, an explosion of violence at the most sacred space in American democracy, was now being explained away as a form of legitimate political discourse. A fatal insurrection was being rationalized and justified. There was some pushback, as a few Republicans objected to the language. And after the vote, party leaders aimed to clarify the resolution, saying it did not apply to the mob that stormed the Capitol.
But that wasn’t true. The censure was carefully negotiated in private among party members and made no distinction between the rioters and anything else that happened on January 6. The language was enshrined in official party policy. It was the strongest effort yet to minimize Trump’s actions in the moments before the insurrection. Republicans had forcefully—and officially—turned on two of their own for daring to condemn what Trump did.
Coming just over a year after the insurrection, the censure in many ways completed the GOP’s journey. The Republican Party had allowed itself to be hijacked by Trump, tethering itself to him to fulfill its agenda while turning a blind eye to his tumult and lies. And in just twelve months’ time, party leaders had gone from condemning the Capitol attack, and Trump himself, to downplaying it, and finally to coming to terms with it.
It was now part of the Republican Party’s core belief: the actions and lies that led to the insurrection, and the violence itself, were acceptable.
The Big Lie was who they were.