The Atlantic Is Worried About What''s Starting To Look Normal

The Atantic, which let's recall is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, #8 on Forbes's 2023 list of the world's richest women, is worried that Trump is starting to look normal:

[W]hat is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing. Donald Trump is filling his administration with “loyalists,” a prerogative that his opponents have grudgingly accepted as his due. Yet he is defining loyalist in maximal terms, including the belief that Trump legitimately won the 2020 election and was justified in his attempt to seize power. The winners are rewriting the history of the insurrection, and their version of history is about to acquire the force of law.

But isn't the election just past a vindication of the view that the 2020 election was "stolen"? Look at the efforts that began almost immediaately after 2020 to drive a stake through Trump's heart, the second impeachment of a lame duck, the January 6 prosecutions, the lawfare, including a specific federal indictment for fomenting the J6 "insurrection" -- all any of those did was keep public attention focused on Trump and eventually boost him in the polls.

Why did there need to be such an effort to establish and re-establish the legitimacy of that election, and why did it never quite accomplish that purpose? For instance, at this point, it isn't controversial to ask what insiders knew of Joe Biden 's cognitive decline and when they knew it. Nancy Pelosi, a leader of the J6 insurrection school of thought, neverthelesss herself blames Biden for waiting too long to drop out of the race.

So when would have been the opportune time for Biden to do this? In June 2024 instead of July? The primaries were already over, and the idea of suddenly holding new ones was never anythng but a chimera. In June 2023, which would have given candidates time to raise money and support for a full primary season? To raise any such question that Joe wasn't fit to serve would have been unthinkable at the time, and Pelosi would have been a chief enforcer.

Would it maybe have been better if someone other than Joe had run in 2020? Maybe, but the consensus was that Joe, "the last politician" able to keep the fraying Mew Deal coalition together one more time, was the only figure who could beat Trump -- but even in 2020, the insiders appear to have been aware that the only way to run Joe was with a basement campaign that kept him out of unscripted events. In other words, the seeds were already planted that something needed to be covered up.

In fact, one of the motly unmentioned subtexts of Trump's 2024 campaign was his ability to thrive in unscripted environments, from the failed Butler assassinaion attempt that produced paradigmatic visuals to hours-long, no-holds-barred podcast interviews. These were, whatever else they may have been, subliminal cues that something wasn't right in 2020. But this all seems to feed The Atlantic's distress:

On Saturday, The New York Times reported that the Trump transition team is asking applicants for high-level positions in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies three questions: which candidate they supported in the past three elections, what they thought about January 6, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. Among the “wrong” answers, applicants say, are conceding that Trump lost the election or that his supporters should not have tried to overturn the result.

Well, at this point, it's more or less accepted that some of Trump's high-level appointments, including William Barr and Mike Pence, didn't serve him well. A remarkable feature of Trump's inner circle is that they learned things during the 2020 election that they put into practice in 2024, like having flying squads of lawyers in place to challenge election-day finagling. It looks like another lesson involved recognizing the need to establish loyalty at the policy level. The Atlantic thinks this is a bug, not a feature:

The purpose of these issue screens is not merely to ensure that Trump benefits from advisers who are committed to his success and wished for it all along. After all, plenty of Republicans voted for Trump multiple times without endorsing his attempted autogolpe. The purpose, rather, is to weed out anybody who dissents from Trump’s conviction that he is entitled to rule regardless of what the Constitution says. Trump believes, not without reason, that his first term was undermined by the insufficient devotion of his underlings, most famously Mike Pence (of “Hang Mike Pence!” fame).

Ezxcept that the US Supreme Court, in Trump v United States,

found that some specific alleged acts [in the January 6 indictmnt] were cleaarly immune from prosecution and others required an analysis of the facts. The majority ruled that Trump's alleged efforts to leverage the Department of Justice in producing alternate slates of electors could not be prosecuted, while remanding decisions on immunity related to Trump's alleged pressuring of the Vice President, state officials, and private individuals to the district court. The court also directed the district court to examine the scope of evidence that could be utilized in the charges against Trump, such as his public comments.

In other words, it was at worst an open legal question whether anything Trump did on January 6 was unconstitutional, but some things were definitely within the scope of his duties, while others required much more analysis. The special prosecutor eventually threw up his hands and requested the case be dismissed. There's nothing that says Trukmp feels he's "entitled to rule regardless of what the Constitution says". Instead, he asked the US Supreme Court to clarify just what the Constitution does say, and it generally supported his position.

The Atlantic is simply unhappy that the Overton Window has shifted.