Mitch McConnell adjusted his glasses.
He peered around the well of the Senate, the place he had called home for more than three decades. Staring back at him on February 13, 2021, was a wall of faces, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Both sides gazed at him with anticipation, mixed with some dread. Not even a month ago, McConnell was the Senate majority leader, but now he had been reduced to leading the minority, a position he despised.
He also hated the man who put him there.
McConnell had privately disliked Donald Trump for years but was willing to make “a deal with the devil,” as he put it with some grim mirth to a handful of select aides and influential Republicans. Trump had been good for the party, the Kentucky senator reasoned, and had paved the way to stack the federal judiciary, not to mention the Supreme Court, with conservative justices. But Trump had overstayed his welcome. McConnell had, without question, hoped that the president would be reelected, yet he expressed some degree of private relief when Trump lost. He knew Joe Biden, a longtime colleague in the Senate. He could work with Joe Biden. He might not have agreed with him on much, but Joe Biden was rational and predictable and they could find some degree of common ground. He could live with Joe Biden being president.
He could not live with losing the Senate. And he blamed Trump for that.
Once the presidential race had been called for Biden, Trump had stopped actively leading the Republican Party. He had vanished into a hole of self-pity and conspiracy theories, surrounding himself with lunatics who claimed the election had been stolen from him, McConnell told confidants. McConnell himself had been willing to indulge Trump for a short time, a move he told others he now regretted, in order to keep Trump motivated to help with Georgia. But the lame-duck president held only one rally in the formerly deep-red state and delivered a lackluster performance mostly centered on his own feeling of grievance. And his constant claims of election fraud, it appeared, motivated some Georgia Republicans to stay home, either out of solidarity with Trump or out of a belief that their votes wouldn’t be counted in what the president had declared would be a sham election. McConnell went on to recognize President-Elect Biden’s victory when the Electoral College met in mid-December.
Stunningly, the Republicans lost both Georgia races. The Senate would be fifty–fifty and, since Vice President Kamala Harris would break any tie vote, it flipped to Democratic control. McConnell was suddenly on his way out of power when the two races were called early on January 6. And hours later, McConnell was being hustled to safety in a secure room at the Capitol when insurrectionists stormed the citadel of democracy to try to keep Trump in power. The violence was a black mark on the nation, and McConnell was a loud voice that night to push the Senate to continue with the certification of Biden’s victory, even though it dragged past 3:00 a.m. “We will not let them win,” he told his GOP colleagues in the moments after the riot.
He commanded the spotlight again that day in February, the final day of Trump’s second impeachment trial, this one for inciting the insurrection. The world was watching.
“January 6 was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like,” McConnell said. “Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president.”
McConnell continued.
“They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth—because he was angry he’d lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”
He stared ahead: “There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”
The chamber was silent. McConnell, though now the Senate minority leader, was poised to be the most powerful Republican in Washington during Biden’s presidency, akin to the leadership role that Nancy Pelosi had harnessed for Democrats the previous four years. And now he was denouncing Trump, holding him responsible, urging the Republican Party to turn the page on the man who for four years had bent it to his whim.
Of course, none of these words really meant anything. Because a few minutes earlier, McConnell had voted to acquit Trump.
The minority leader cited a narrow reason to not convict Trump: an ex-president could not be removed from an office he no longer held. But in reality, McConnell read his caucus: only seven GOP votes were cast to convict the former president while forty-three were for an acquittal. The measure ended fifty-seven to forty-three, falling far short of the sixty-seven needed to find Trump guilty. Banished to Mar-a-Lago, Trump would become the first president to be impeached two times, but the lack of a guilty verdict meant that there would be no prohibition on him seeking federal office—including the White House—yet again.
Even if the measure was doomed to fail, McConnell could have cast his vote for it, giving it more teeth and sending a stronger signal that Trump was not welcome back in Washington. It would have been a total rebuke of the Big Lie that nearly toppled the nation’s democracy. But McConnell chose not to do so, instead opting for a halfway measure that would, he believed, allow him to save public face while also retaining the support of the majority of his caucus as he aimed to keep his leadership role with an eye on regaining the majority in 2022.
Still worried about alienating Trump’s supporters, McConnell would not fully cast out the former president. He still worked in fear, namely in fear of the ex-president’s voters. And then, not even two weeks later, he went a step further when asked in an interview if he would support Trump if he were the party’s presidential pick in 2024.
He didn’t hesitate.
“The nominee of the party? Absolutely.”
In many ways, the effort to ostracize Donald Trump ended right there. In the weeks after the Capitol riot, the moment was there for Republicans to once and for all sever ties with Trump and turn their back on the falsehoods that inspired the insurrection. They chose not to do either. And soon, there were clear signs that Trump’s exile would not last long. And that the power of his lies would only grow stronger and would remain the most powerful force in American politics even after Trump left office.
With startling speed, Trump’s hold over the Republican Party not only was sustained; it tightened. There were a few rebels, but their insurgency was largely crushed. With the new Biden administration’s focus on the dire pandemic, Trump was able to work in the shadows, regaining strength, basking in the unwavering devotion of most rank-and-file Republicans. And when GOP leaders realized they had no choice but to embrace him, Trump demanded loyalty.
And he demanded loyalty to the Big Lie.
For a time, Donald Trump did the unthinkable.
He stayed silent.
When he hurriedly left Washington the morning of January 20, he did so under a shadow of disgrace. Some of his closest allies had seemingly abandoned him, denouncing his words that led to violence. Trump returned to the surprisingly modest living quarters at Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by only a small staff and Secret Service detail. Despite the near-universal rebuke he received for what happened on January 6, Trump did not abandon his claim that the election was stolen. His closest advisers were telling me that Trump was ranting behind closed doors about the impeachment trial, but there was nothing he could do about it. Democrats were hell-bent on making him the first president stained with that stigma twice, and Chuck Schumer was telling anyone who would listen that he thought he could snag enough Republican senator votes to convict and ban Trump from ever holding federal office again.
Trump was nervous that his longtime rival might be right. His small smattering of remaining aides told him otherwise; that, yes, there were cracks in the previously rock-solid loyalty that Republicans had shown him, but not enough for a conviction. They didn’t know, at that time, what McConnell would do, but even if he turned on Trump, they reasoned, it wouldn’t be enough to bring along enough votes to lead to a conviction. But just to be safe, the aides implored Trump to stay quiet. He would survive the vote unless he messed it up. Just be quiet.
For once, he listened. For once, he stayed quiet.
Of course, being off Twitter made that easier. Trump put up a brave face with those to whom he spoke about the social media ban, saying he was “relieved” to not be on it anymore.
“Do you know how many people I’d have to go after?” Trump told one amused visitor. “I’d never get anything else done!”
But privately, he fumed about losing his Twitter account, which he always viewed as the most important way to connect directly with his base. He wasn’t president anymore but, for now, because of his impeachment trial, people were still talking about him incessantly. He hated his loss of ability to shape the coverage, to change a cable chyron with one 280-character burst. He also knew that once the trial ended, much of his immediate relevance would be gone.
His life at Mar-a-Lago was, in many ways, idyllic. He went golfing just about every day, sometimes more than once. The club was beautiful in a somewhat garish way, built by socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post and purchased by Trump for about $10 million in 1985. Much to Trump’s chagrin, it did not quite have beachfront property on the Atlantic, but it became his winter White House, where he’d retreat on numerous weekends and host world leaders (and make money off all the Secret Service and staff who stayed there). Now, he was feted by his club members, a certain slice of conservatives of Palm Beach society, the club’s parking lot filled with expensive cars owned by people with expensive face-lifts. Many evenings, Trump would don a suit or a tux and mingle with guests, often asked to deliver a speech at a microphone that just happened to be there, ready at a moment’s notice if the former president wanted to say something that inevitably would be recorded for a club member’s Instagram account.
Trump miserably followed the impeachment proceedings from Florida, picking up the phone to call allies about the possible Senate vote. He watched with dismay when his defense attorney Bruce Castor of Pennsylvania gave a long-winded and rambling opening statement, all while wearing an ill-fitting, oversize suit. He raged when Republicans, including longtime rivals Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, voted against him. But he kept his mouth shut. And he was acquitted. Trump breathed a sigh of relief. He was heartened by a statement of support from Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, who said the GOP “should not go along” with impeachment. It was far from clear at that moment that he would mount another campaign, but he at least wanted to keep alive the possibility so he could maintain his relevance in the Republican Party.
Despite the condemnation he received from some of his closest allies over the insurrection, it soon became clear that the party was still very much his.
One of the first to come back was Lindsey Graham. Truthfully, he had barely left.
He said he was hopping off the Trump train with an emotional speech in the hours after the Capitol riot but, within days, soon fell back into his usual habit of calling the president. Trump’s anger was elsewhere; he didn’t hold the speech against Graham. The two men had something of a friendship, forged over golf and Graham’s ability to get booked on Fox News. Many in Washington had been puzzled by the relationship; Graham had been close to John McCain, attempting to model his career after the longtime Arizona senator. But as McCain’s health failed, Graham had sidled up to Trump, despite his mentor’s hatred of the president and Graham’s own 2016 campaign condemnations of the celebrity developer. Graham had a penchant for forming deep ties with powerful men, and he took it upon himself to become Trump’s liaison with the Republican Senate. He boasted to friends of his proximity to the president, his aides admitted, but was willing to occasionally break with Trump—particularly on matters of foreign policy—and claimed he had talked the commander in chief out of countless bad decisions.
Graham looked at the political landscape in early 2021 and saw both trouble and an opportunity. The Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, and the Republicans were clearly in disarray in the aftermath of Trump’s collapse. But Graham also knew that it would not be easy going for Biden. The pandemic was raging and vaccines had only just come online. The economy was under tremendous strain. Almost half the population didn’t even recognize Biden as the president. Though things looked dark for the GOP at the moment, the possibility was there, Graham thought, for Democrats to take the blame if things didn’t improve soon—and Republicans could take advantage. But they would need to be unified, he thought. And they would need their leader back.
Graham had given Trump plenty of space to contest the election result. Hell, he told others, he wanted there to be proof of fraud so Trump could stay president. But he didn’t think that happened and felt that it was time to turn the page. He tried to tell Trump that, but the former president wasn’t having it. His focus was solely on seeking revenge on those Republicans who turned on him—particularly McConnell for his condemnation from the Senate floor. Trump seethed that McConnell had abandoned him; Graham replied, “Mitch thinks you cost him Georgia and the majority.”
But Graham knew how to play the game. He went on Fox News that Valentine’s Day night, the day after Trump’s acquittal, to offer a prediction about the ex-president that he hoped—through the magic of cable—would become a reality.
“He’s ready to move on and rebuild the Republican Party,” Graham said.
Trump had been at Mar-a-Lago only a few days when the request came in.
Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House leader, was planning to visit Palm Beach to raise some money and wanted to visit the president on January 28, just a week after Trump had left Washington. Trump had always privately thought McCarthy was “dumb,” per aides, and needy to the point of being annoying. Trump had also, on more than one occasion, mistakenly called the GOP leader “Steve.” McCarthy never corrected him. The two men had not spoken much since McCarthy called him during the insurrection, with rioters just a few hundred feet away, demanding that the president help, demands that Trump had refused.
But McCarthy needed Trump. Paul Ryan had been House Speaker when Trump first took office, but he had retired before the Democrats took control in 2018. McCarthy had just spent two years leading the minority and was prepared to do two more but looked at the Democrats’ margin—just a handful of seats—and saw a real chance to become Speaker if the Republicans took control in 2022. But while historical trends favored Republicans, because the party not in control of the White House tends to pick up seats in the midterms, it would not be easy for McCarthy to herd a disparate group of GOP lawmakers to win a Speaker’s vote. And his biggest concern was the growing number of loyal MAGA representatives, and not just Trump allies like Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes. He also would need to win over the ascendant new members of the Far Right, like Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who were proving remarkably adept at stealing the spotlight and raising money even though their views were considered extremist by many of their Republican peers.
And McCarthy kept looking at one number in particular: the 139 Republicans in the House who voted against certifying Biden’s win on January 6. McCarthy was one of them. They believed the Big Lie. He needed their support. And most of all, he needed Trump’s support. He needed to go kiss the ring.
The result: a deeply awkward photograph. The two men stood together in a gilded sitting room, both in suits, only Trump in a tie. The smiles seemed somewhat forced.
The photo was a curiosity: it was the first image of Trump since he left office. McCarthy was immediately blasted by Democrats on the Hill; Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts denounced him for associating with a “treacherous instigator,” while Representative Ilhan Omar, the progressive from Minnesota, ripped him for spending time with a “loser insurrectionist.” But McCarthy shrugged off the criticism; he got what he wanted. The photograph was the point—and the statement that came with it.
Trump was off Twitter but his newly formed political action committee, Save America PAC, blasted out an email with the image and a statement, which included the line: “President Trump’s popularity has never been stronger than it is today, and his endorsement means more than perhaps any endorsement at any time.”
McCarthy was willing to take the humbling at Mar-a-Lago—he apologized for his heated conversation with Trump on January 6—in order to exact two things. First, he was able to get Trump to commit to helping Republicans, putting to bed the rumors that the former president might be looking to quit the GOP to form his own political party. And, in the statement, Trump promised the House minority leader that he would help Republicans win back a majority in the lower chamber of Congress.
“They worked very well together in the last election and picked up at least 15 seats when most predicted it would be the opposite,” the statement continued. “They will do so again, and the work has already started.”
Trump made no mention of his own loss and stopped short of backing McCarthy’s bid for Speaker. But the GOP leader quickly put out his own statement—notable for using the phrase “President Trump” as if he were still in office—which declared that “Today President Trump committed to helping elect Republicans in the House and Senate in 2022. A Republican majority will listen to our fellow Americans and solve the challenges facing our nation.”
Other Republicans soon began making the trip to south Florida. From the Senate: Rick Scott of Florida, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Mike Lee of Utah, and Rand Paul of Kentucky all paid homage to Trump at Mar-a-Lago during his first few months out of office. Some of the most extreme Republicans in the House were also eager to be received by the former president, including Representatives Greene and Boebert, as well as Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and Matt Gaetz of Florida. For them, elected largely by diehard MAGA supporters, it was imperative to be seen with Trump and then fundraise off the visit.
And as the weeks went by, more mainstream Republicans made the trip too. Minority Whip Steve Scalise, a longtime Trump ally, visited Trump, as did some, like Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who were rumored to have their own eyes on the White House someday. To be sure, there were still some Republicans who were eager, either publicly or privately, to turn the page on the former president. McConnell denounced him. Mike Pence would barely speak to him.
But they were in the minority. The Palm Beach pilgrimages meant something.
Trump had been the dominant figure in Republican politics for nearly six years at this point and nothing was changing. As the GOP looked to combat Biden, its most popular face remained the forty-fifth president. Poll after poll of Republican voters taken in the first months after Trump left office did not reveal a pariah, an ex-president in disgrace. They showed quite the opposite: Trump remained nearly as popular as ever with rank-and-file Republicans. He didn’t need Twitter, he didn’t need to be in office; GOP voters still liked him. GOP lawmakers had to continue to cozy up.
And it wasn’t just that Republican voters liked him. They believed him.
A Washington Post poll taken that April, just three months after the inauguration, revealed just how thoroughly Trump had convinced the Republican Party that the election had been stolen. Only 19 percent of Republicans surveyed then thought that Biden was legitimately elected.
Despite fueling one of the darkest days in American history, the same lie that caused January 6 was still alive and well in the Republican Party.
Joe Biden wouldn’t even say his name.
The new president took office amid a confluence of crises, including a raging pandemic and soaring unemployment. He had made two central promises to voters: that he would get the COVID-19 pandemic under control and that he would restore a sense of faith in government. With an eye on China, Russia, and other rising autocracies, he told the American people that he would earn their trust, that he would demonstrate that democracies could still deliver for their people. It was urgent, he declared, to restore confidence in a system of government that had been so badly strained the past four years—and he wanted them to be able to believe in it again.
That included believing in the office of the president. And Biden felt that so strongly he would almost never say his predecessor’s name.
During a February 2021 town hall in Wisconsin, Biden used the moniker “the former guy” as shorthand for Trump and, among many Democrats, that nickname stuck. Biden didn’t want Trump to be a distraction. But despite the new president’s refusal to name him, Trump shadowed the early days of the young administration. Within hours of taking office, Biden signed executive orders to undo the heart of Trump’s agenda, rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization while repealing the travel ban, revoking the permit for the Keystone Pipeline, and halting construction of the border wall. And he did so, pointedly, while wearing a mask as he sat behind the Resolute Desk, something Trump never did.
He marshaled the forces of government to battle the pandemic, which had fundamentally changed the norms of everyday society and, about a month into Biden’s term, the death toll reached half a million. The president held a moment of silence outside the White House and delivered sunset remarks on the terrible American milestone. A president whose own life has been marked by family tragedy, Biden spoke at the COVID memorial in deeply personal terms, referencing his own losses as he tried to comfort the huge number of Americans whose lives had been forever changed by the pandemic.
“We often hear people described as ordinary Americans. There’s no such thing,” he said. “There’s nothing ordinary about them. The people we lost were extraordinary.
“I know all too well. I know what it’s like to not be there when it happens,” said Biden, who has long addressed grief more powerfully than perhaps any other American public figure. “I know what it’s like when you are there, holding their hands, there’s a look in your eye and they slip away.”
For a nation that had spent nearly a year of the pandemic being gaslighted about its severity, Biden’s words were bracing and, to some, refreshing. Every day, he’d pull out the card tucked in his right jacket pocket, a printed version of his daily schedule. But there were other items printed on it too. Very sad ones.
The card listed the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, which always made him think of his son Beau, whose cancer developed not long after his return from serving in the Middle East. Also on it: the daily numbers of vaccine doses administered, the previous day’s virus deaths, the daily hospitalizations, and the cumulative death toll. The weight of those numbers was seen on his face when, at public events, he would dig it out, squint, and ever-so-slowly read aloud the latest tally of COVID-19 dead.
But there was hope on the horizon. Vaccine distribution was ramping up dramatically, with shots going in arms across the nation. There were pockets of vaccine hesitancy that worried Biden officials, most of them in states that Trump won in 2020 and where citizens had listened to his skepticism about masks and the lethality of the virus. But the White House thought that would eventually fade as the vaccine became familiar and people saw that it was the ticket to returning to their normal lives. On one day in April, more than four million shots were delivered.
Biden leaned hard on his narrow majorities in Congress to pass a COVID relief bill and tangled with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who had managed to be elected three times from one of the reddest states in the union, West Virginia. Manchin had long made clear, first to Harry Reid and now to the new majority leader, Chuck Schumer, that he prided himself on being an independent voice: he’d vote for something “only if I can sell it back home,” he’d repeat over and over. And Manchin, though a reliable Democrat in some areas, was leery of the sweeping relief bill the White House pushed, even after a federal minimum wage hike to fifteen dollars an hour was dropped.
Foreshadowing future fights on other legislative issues, including voting rights, Manchin balked at other provisions as well, believing they were too big. After decades in the Senate, Biden was deferential to his former colleagues, mindful of their convictions and willing to give them the space to make their own decisions. Some of his aides, including new chief of staff Ron Klain, as well as some key Democratic figures like Pelosi, thought at times that Biden gave the upper chamber lawmakers too much space, that he needed to convey more urgency in getting a deal done. Eventually, Biden pushed: a series of urgent calls to Manchin and some last-minute changes got the $1.9 trillion deal done. Not a single Republican lawmaker voted for the measure.
The package was an undeniable triumph for Biden and the first step in what he wanted to be a transformative presidency, one modeled after Democratic predecessors who dramatically expanded the reach of government to confront generational crises. Born soon after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and first running for office in the shadow of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, Biden had long believed in government as an instrument for good. Between the pandemic and the economic carnage it wrought, that philosophy was put to a fundamental test, and Biden’s place in history was in the balance.
Biden chose to ignore the wreckage left by Trump and to have faith that the Republicans—at least some Republicans—would want to work across the aisle to do right by the country. He believed bipartisanship could still exist; he often invoked the Washington of his time in the Senate when Democrats and Republicans would bridge their divides. But that was a Washington before the Tea Party, before birtherism, before Trump, before Helsinki, before January 6. Some of even Biden’s closest aides wondered if that Washington still existed.
White House aides made the following calculation about January 6 and the Big Lie that fueled it: they wouldn’t ignore it but they also wouldn’t tackle it head-on, at least not right away. The caravan of Republican leaders to Mar-a-Lago was noticed but Trump was still largely off the radar, and Biden wanted to ignore him. Moreover, the administration’s top priority was to get as many Americans as possible to take the COVID-19 vaccines, and they were already seeing real hesitancy among Trump voters and didn’t want to alienate them further. That would be the focus, Biden’s aides decided, and the president also wanted to push for a long-overdue grand infrastructure package.
In the administration’s first weeks, some liberal activists began to urge the administration to prioritize a defense of voting rights. A few Democrats, including Jim Clyburn, joined them. But everything was placed on the back burner as the White House grappled with the pandemic.
A potential Republican civil war loomed.
Though Trump remained banned from social media, his voice became louder again as the spring of 2021 dawned. He started doing a few TV interviews again, with some of the usual cast of friendly cable hosts happy to ask him softball questions. His emailed statements, which were also posted on his fledgling website, also came more regularly. They did not, by any measure, carry the influence of his tweets; many news organizations simply ignored them. But they did get traction on the Right, and many Republican lawmakers used them as a gauge to deal with their own base.
And Trump was very clear about something he did not want to see happen.
“Republicans in the House and Senate should not approve the Democrat trap of the January 6 Commission,” he wrote on May 19.
In the wake of the insurrection, a movement grew on Capitol Hill to form a bipartisan January 6 commission, to be modeled after a similar independent panel formed in the aftermath of 9/11 and charged with producing an objective account of what had fueled the day’s violence. A number of congressional committees had already been created to examine some of the security failings that day, but this would have been the first and only one to focus on what incited the violence. This was the proper investigation that the American people deserved, one that would look into what happened at the Capitol and attempt to prevent it from ever happening again.
The commission legislation was a product of cross-party negotiations among leaders of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and it did pick up the support of some Republicans in the lower chamber. Thirty-five GOP House members joined all voting House Democrats to back the creation of a commission, and there were expectations that it would receive enough GOP support in the Senate to bring it to life.
But Trump was adamant that the commission not be created, for it was the one congressional group that would look into the origins of the riot—and it could place the blame at his feet. Some of his loyalists in the Senate, including Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, began to balk at its formation. But the kill shot was delivered by someone who had admonished Trump just three months before but was, yet again, deciding that the political upside was worth it.
Mitch McConnell dismissed the commission as needlessly duplicative of congressional probes—and as a Trojan horse that would help Democrats in next year’s midterm elections. The day before the May 28 vote, he said he would “urge my colleagues to oppose this extraneous layer when the time comes for the Senate to vote.
“I do not believe the additional, extraneous ‘commission’ that Democratic leaders want would uncover crucial new facts or promote healing,” McConnell said.
Republican lawmakers worried they would have to spend much of the 2022 campaign season responding to its revelations about Trump’s behavior while trying to avoid his wrath, when their hope was to make the year about Biden and the Democrats. And there was real concern that the Democrats would wield the commission’s subpoena power to embarrass Trump and key Republicans. The fifty-four-to-thirty-five final tally in the Senate was six votes shy of the sixty needed to avoid a procedural filibuster. The GOP opposition to the measure was not moved by emotional appeals from Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine or from the family of Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer who had suffered two strokes and died a day after he confronted rioters at the insurrection.
“Why would they not want to get to the bottom of such horrific violence?” said Sandra Garza, the late officer’s partner. “It just boggles my mind.”
The defeat of the commission underscored just how much had changed since the early morning hours of January 7, when even some of Trump’s closest allies had stood in the Capitol and repudiated him for causing the violence that had touched them all. Slowly but steadily in the weeks after the insurrection, it was proven that Trump retained his power over the GOP and still planned to wield it over his party to protect his own interests.
In the end, a few Republican senators did vote for the commission: Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio), Mitt Romney (Utah), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), and Susan Collins. They were the usual small group of GOP senators who were willing to defy the ex-president, and they were all used to being on the receiving end of Trump’s ire. McConnell was willing to let the vote go, and he told aides he didn’t see any advantage in punishing the apostates.
The same did not hold true in the House.
Nancy Pelosi wasn’t going to wait any longer.
For months, she had signaled that her preference was a bipartisan, bicameral investigation into the Capitol riots, with Democrats and Republicans from both chambers of Congress working together as they did after the September 11 terror attacks. But after that commission died in the Senate, she vowed to move forward alone.
“January 6 was a day of darkness for our country,” Pelosi said in late June. “Our temple of democracy was attacked by insurrectionists.”
She launched a select bipartisan House committee, which was charged with investigating the root causes of the attack, including white supremacist and extremist groups, as well as Capitol security failures. Pelosi said that she hoped McCarthy would name “responsible” Republicans to be part of this effort, though Democrats quietly fretted that the GOP leader might name right-wing bomb throwers to submarine the commission from within.
McCarthy did just that. Of his five picks to the panel, three had objected to the certification of the 2020 election. One of them, Jim Jordan, was perhaps Trump’s fiercest ally in the House. Another, Jim Banks of Indiana, was McCarthy’s choice to lead the GOP representation on the panel. Pelosi rejected them out of hand, a rare move to deny the minority party’s choices for a committee.
“The unprecedented nature of January 6 demands this unprecedented decision,” she said.
Consulting with Trump, who had pushed for Jordan to be included, McCarthy declared that Pelosi had abused her power and “broken this institution.” And then he pulled all his picks, seemingly leaving the committee without any Republican representation and denying the legitimacy of its claim to be bipartisan and impartial. McCarthy believed he had sabotaged it.
Except there would be a Republican on the committee after all. Because Pelosi named one.
The last name “Cheney” was synonymous with the Republican Party.
Dick Cheney was born in Nebraska before growing up in Wyoming. He made his way to Washington first as a congressional intern, then staffer, then White House aide, rising in the ranks to eventually become chief of staff to President Gerald Ford. He was then elected to Congress, serving for a decade before being named secretary of defense for President George H. W. Bush. A decade later, Bush’s son asked Cheney to oversee the selection process for his vice presidential pick—and Cheney ended up recommending himself.
He was at the White House the morning of September 11, 2001. With the president in Florida and then scrambled in the Midwest skies on Air Force One, Cheney manned the Situation Room. He gave the order to shoot down any rogue planes, including Flight 93 before it was taken down by passengers rebelling against the terrorist hijackers. Dubbed “Darth Vader” by Democrats, he was perceived as a driving force behind George W. Bush’s ill-fated decision to invade Iraq, and he was deeply unpopular when he left office.
The daughter of such a GOP legend, Liz Cheney held several positions in the Bush administration before winning her father’s old congressional seat in 2016. She quickly rose through the ranks and became the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House. A rock-solid conservative, and a definite neocon on foreign policy, she spent the first three years of the Trump administration criticizing his approach to the rest of the globe while still voting for the majority of his agenda.
But she broke with him after the insurrection. She was the first—and only—member of the House leadership to signal that she would vote to impeach him at his second trial. And she didn’t do so simply by casting her ballot or by putting out a short press release. She released a scorching statement that rocked Washington and shook the foundation of the party with which her last name was synonymous.
“The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she wrote in part. “Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not.
“There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
In the end, 10 of the 211 Republicans in the House voted to impeach the president. Though it was by no means a huge number, it was still the most ballots ever cast to impeach a president of the same party. There were a few surprises, including Tom Rice, of a deep-red South Carolina district. Other votes to impeach were expected, including one from Adam Kinzinger, the air force veteran who had been sharply critical of Trump. But it was Cheney, due to her lineage and leadership role, who made the biggest shock wave.
And many in her party would not forgive her for it.
That February, there was an effort to push her out of her leadership role. But despite pressure from Trump, McCarthy did not support the putsch, for fear that it would further splinter his caucus. It was easily defeated, 145 to 61. Cheney was relentless and not shy about her anti-Trump stance, speaking her conscience but also almost daring her fellow Republicans to come after her.
“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it is spreading THE BIG LIE…,” she tweeted in May. This didn’t sit well with many Republicans, who either didn’t want to see a challenge to Trump or felt that Cheney was an unnecessary distraction during a moment when they wanted to keep the focus on Biden and the Democrats. McCarthy declared that he was “fed up” with Cheney and this time supported a move to oust her.
Liz Cheney was removed from her leadership position by a voice vote on May 12, 2021. She was undeterred, saying afterward, “I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”
She honored her word and did not shy away from Pelosi’s request in July that she serve on the January 6 committee, so it would, in fact, be bipartisan. Kinzinger joined a few days later.
“It’s very clear to me, as I’ve said, my oath and my duty is above partisanship,” Cheney said.
The decisions ignited GOP outrage. McCarthy deemed them “Pelosi Republicans” and questioned their loyalty to the GOP. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida even traveled to Wyoming in a search for Republican candidates to primary her. Soon, there would be several. Trump went on the attack, bashing both Cheney and Kinzinger via emailed statements. Traditional GOP donors closed their wallets. Many GOP lawmakers refused to even speak to Cheney if their paths crossed on Capitol Hill.
Trumpism had won. Even a member of Republican royalty was not safe.
The Big Lie had become a litmus test.
For Trump, it wasn’t enough to hold Republicans in his sway. He needed them to express fealty to his false claim that the election had been stolen. And for some in the GOP, that meant a refusal to even say the words that Joe Biden won.
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas appeared on Meet the Press and would concede only that “Joe Biden was sworn into office.” Arizona Republican representative Andy Biggs answered a question from a colleague about who won by saying flatly, “We don’t know,” and adding, “There are a lot of issues with this election that took place.” Nearly a year after the election, the number-two Republican in the House, Steve Scalise, was still parroting Trump’s claims of voting irregularities in swing states.
Cheney’s replacement as the number-three Republican in the House, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, embodied the transformation of the party. A once-moderate Republican who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and was a protégé of former Speaker Paul Ryan, she had morphed into a star of the MAGA universe and a die-hard Trump loyalist. In the spring of 2022, she refused to say Biden was elected lawfully.
Many of those running for office in the wake of 2020 also refused to go there. Glenn Youngkin, who was the surprise winner of the Virginia governor’s race the next year, for months refused to say that Biden was legitimately elected. Five Republicans running for governor of Minnesota all danced around the question during an early 2022 televised debate, with the strongest answer being an acknowledgment that Biden “was certified by Congress as having won the Electoral College.” And in a particularly grim battle for an open Senate seat in Ohio, with the hopefuls desperate for Trump’s endorsement, candidate Bernie Moreno aired an ad in early 2022, more than a year after the insurrection, in which he said, “President Trump says the election was stolen, and he’s right.” One of his opponents, Josh Mandel, went further, saying, “I think Trump won,” and calling for yet another investigation into the results from battleground states.
Fox News also stayed with Trump. Its ratings briefly fell after the insurrection but soon rebounded to lead cable again. Refusing to cede ground to OAN or Newsmax, it skewed further right. It fired the political editor who helped project a Trump loss on Election Night and tossed aside the 7:00 p.m. newscast for another opinion show. And Carlson, the unquestioned top voice at the network, leaned heavier into conspiracy theories on the vaccine and spearheaded a documentary known as Patriot Purge, which falsely suggested the January 6 Capitol riot was a “false flag” operation intended to demonize conservatives.
For Chris Wallace, that was enough. Considered one of the last neutral voices at the network, Wallace battled with Trump in general election debates in both 2016 and 2020. But he found the situation “unsustainable” and, in a March 2022 interview, declared, “I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox.” He left for CNN’s new streaming network. A Quinnipiac poll released in mid-2021 revealed that 85 percent of Republicans wanted candidates for the midterms to mostly agree with Trump—and that two-thirds of the GOP wanted him to run for president again in 2024. No other Republican, in any poll, came close to matching Trump’s support.
It was still his party.
To some Republicans, that was a worry. McConnell and McCarthy had made their compromises. They both realized that they could not fully rebuke Trump if they wanted to accomplish their goals of winning their majorities and becoming majority leader and Speaker, respectively. They took different approaches: McCarthy embraced doing Trump’s bidding, while McConnell kept him at arm’s length and even took moments to criticize the former president and voice support for the work of the House Select Committee investigating January 6.
Naturally, they also generated different responses from Mar-a-Lago.
Trump was unsparing about McConnell, blasting him in dozens of statements, dubbing him “Old Crow,” and calling for his ouster as GOP leader, a move that went nowhere. McConnell had to manage the Trumpists in his caucus, but there were no serious challenges to his power. Moreover, he and his aides began to revel in his reputation for ruthlessness, and the minority leader pointed out that Old Crow was Henry Clay’s favorite brand of Kentucky bourbon. He had a drink at Trump’s expense.
For McCarthy, it was a harder slog. Though he expressed far more deference to Trump, his hold on a leadership position after the midterms was far less ensured; his aides anticipated that he’d have to fend off challenges from within the caucus, including from right-wingers who felt he was insufficiently loyal to Trump. It was deeply frustrating to the California congressman; he had been obedient to Trump for years, but the one call he made on January 6—asking the president to call off the rioters—was perceived as an unforgivable sin. Trump didn’t let McCarthy off the hook either, deliberately refusing to endorse him for Speaker if the GOP took control of the House in November 2022. He wanted him to twist in the wind and privately mused about supporting other candidates for the spot or even making a bid himself (an arcane House rule notes that you don’t have to be a member to be a Speaker, but there was no evidence that Trump really considered it).
And both men had to deal with rising Trumpism in their ranks.
The House and Senate were filled with Trump loyalists, and the former president wanted their numbers to grow. His nascent political operation began endorsing MAGA-style primary candidates for both empty seats and, more worrisomely for GOP leaders, to take on Republican incumbents deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump.
At the top of the list: any Republican who had cast a vote to impeach Trump. Some in the GOP seemed able to shake off the challenge: for instance, Senator Lisa Murkowski had shown resilience before when winning reelection as a write-in in 2010. But not all could. Cheney was faced with a brutal primary war, a battle that became all the more pitched when McCarthy, doing Trump’s bidding, took the extraordinary step in February 2022 of endorsing a primary opponent to a former member of House leadership. Cheney was still able to raise money—including from Democrats and noted Trump critic George W. Bush—but she faced a steep deficit in the polls. She vowed to fight on.
Others did not. Kinzinger announced he would not run again, voicing his unhappiness with the ugliness of politics while adding, “My disappointment in the leaders that don’t lead is huge.” Facing difficult primaries, three of the ten House Republicans who had voted for impeachment also announced they would not run again. And then a fourth, veteran representative Fred Upton of Michigan, announced his retirement in April. As each bowed out, Trump celebrated, keeping a running tally. He targeted governors who he believed had betrayed him as well, those who didn’t honor the Big Lie and had gone ahead with certifying Biden’s win in their states: Brian Kemp of Georgia and Doug Ducey of Arizona became his primary targets.
“Vote them out of office,” Trump declared in yet another emailed statement. “These are two RINO (Republican in Name Only) Republicans who fought against me and the Republican Party harder than any Democrat.”
Moderate Republicans in both chambers—as well as more than two dozen House Democrats, a thirty-year high—announced their retirements, not wanting to risk losing their seats to a fringe candidate or having to spend another two years in Congress pretending not to have seen the latest inflammatory thing Trump uttered.
As Trump’s endorsement became coveted, middle-of-the-road Republicans became an endangered species. The calculations in the two chambers of Congress differed: McConnell needed candidates who could win statewide, an electorate inherently more diverse than one in a particularly homogenous, deep-red congressional district. But some of his moderate options, like Governors Larry Hogan of Maryland and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, opted against leaving statehouses for runs at the Senate. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, some of the top GOP candidates held radical, pro-Trump views. And in Georgia, McConnell hoped to entice David Perdue to run again for his old Senate seat—until Perdue decided instead to embrace Trump’s claims of a stolen election and mount a primary challenge to Governor Brian Kemp. That left McConnell with little choice but to back Trump’s pick for Senate, hometown football star Herschel Walker, whose deeply problematic candidacy included questions about domestic abuse, his financial dealings, and whether or not he even lived in Georgia. In a vivid illustration of the power the former president wielded over the GOP as it faced future elections, Ted Cruz, his onetime critic, tweeted out a photo of his meeting with Walker—at Mar-a-Lago under a portrait of Trump wearing a tennis outfit.
In the House, it was a different dynamic. Thanks to increased political polarization and gerrymandering, there were far fewer competitive seats than in usual cycles. In many districts, one party’s primary was, in essence, the general election. And in deep-red districts, that usually meant the winner was whoever was Trumpier. Yet at the same time, the strategy to nominate more conservative candidates in the swing districts that would likely control the House threatened to backfire, potentially resulting in GOP candidates who would be deemed unpalatable by the broader electorate in November.
Trump’s demands for loyalty within the GOP threatened to hurt Republicans at the ballot box. He was ensuring that the Big Lie was at the center of the next campaign. His insistence on relitigating 2020 could prove a costly distraction as the party tried to focus on 2022. His claims that elections were rife with fraud could keep Republican voters at home again during the midterms.
He didn’t care. He had nearly managed to rig and upend the system to get reelected. Plans were already underway to finish the job the next time.
Trump was eyeing 2024.