In a blazing Substack post Tuesday, Harry Litman (no relation) called Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day “a day that will live in infamy.”
And yet, that somehow seems like an understatement.
It’s one thing to be violently attacked by a foreign power. It’s quite another for American democracy, justice, decency and the rule of law to be attacked, and all in the same day, by the president of the United States.
Donald Trump isn’t just back, which is scary enough.
He now thinks — no, he knows — he can get away with nearly anything because four years after inspiring an attempted coup set in the very Capitol where he took the oath Monday, the people elected him president. It defies reason. It defies logic. It makes America second-rate again.
You can call Trump’s return to power a willful amnesia on the part of the voters, but that doesn’t go nearly far enough. I’m not sure of the exact day — it’s another day that should live in infamy, though — when Trump started calling the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists the “J6 hostages.” But his assault on language — to somehow compare those lawbreakers to, say, the Israeli hostages — was yet another assault on truth. No one, Trump said, has ever been treated more shamefully.
Don’t laugh. There’s nothing funny about it.
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It’s not like Elon Musk’s fascist-look-alike salute to the Trump crowd that immediately became a punchline for every late night comic. This is the real thing, from a day that was surreal, yes, but also, and more importantly, all too real. And that Trump seated the Oligarch Bros behind his family on the dais but in front of many of his clown car cabinet nominees tells you how real it is and how badly Trump’s working-class followers and so many others have been suckered.
And my God — if you had the stomach to watch Trump’s speech, you saw Trump, who is otherwise indifferent to religion, say God saved him so that he could, uh, save America — he has used that assault on truth to try to erase January 6 from memory. Because the voters, knowingly or otherwise, said he could.
By electing him because the price of eggs was too high, those who voted for Trump were actually saying they don’t care about January 6, they don’t care about little niceties like democracy, they don’t care about police officers being beaten and stabbed in Trump’s name, they don’t care that Trump’s lies about a rigged election — which he repeated on Monday, of course, making him officially the worst winner in presidential history — set off the firestorm.
They don’t care about the lies, about the latest crypto scam, about the fact that Trump’s inaugural speech was mostly a paean to Trump’s favorite person, himself.
But the rest of us, we must care. We must react. We must be heard. Trump is right about one thing — we are in the midst of a national emergency,
And so, when Trump promised he would pardon those January 6 rioters and insurrectionists, he kept his word for once, and then some. And I wonder who can justify Trump’s position. Just a few days ago, JD Vance, of all people, said it was obvious that Trump wouldn’t pardon those who committed violence that day. Well, not so obvious now.
As you must know, even if you say you’re not following the news, Trump commuted the sentences of those who had been convicted of seditious acts. He gave full pardons to more than 1,500 rioters and insurrectionists, including those who committed violent acts. He pardoned those who hadn’t even been tried yet.
He has put his personal Proud Boys and Oathkeepers militia back on the streets — to stand back and stand by — apparently to render chaos in the name of Trump to do the things that even Trump wouldn’t do himself. The heads of the respective far-right organizations, both sentenced to long prison terms for their help in planning the assault on the Capitol, are already free.
And there’s nothing we can do about it. Presidents have full power of the pardon, meaning the founders never considered that Donald Trump would somebody be one of the presidents.
It’s hard to put into words how awful this is. And it’s hard to put into words how awful the silence — from most Republicans and many timid Democrats — is in response, or in non-response. The Atlantic helpfully put together quotes from Republican leaders in real time from January 6, 2021, in which they condemned everything about that day, calling it “tragic” and “reprehensible” and “evil” and “vile” while many said the perpetrators must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
And now? The first convicted felon to be elected president has given us a lesson on his conception of the rule of law.
So, yes, it was an unprecedented day, in which Trump took the oath of office without putting his hand on the Bible — the joke was that the good book would have burst into flames — but poking his finger in the eyes of millions.
It’s hard to know where to begin, which is the point. Trump flooded the zone with so many executive orders that ranged from the absurd — say, ending birthright citizenship, which is written plainly in the 14th Amendment, so plainly that Trump’s order hasnow been challenged in courts by 18 states, including Colorado — to the frightening, like writing an executive order saying trans people don’t exist.
And by declaring a state of emergency at the border, he can (if the courts let him) use the military to, uh, defend the border. And, away from the border, he will begin his assault on 11 million or more undocumented people living in America. It’s just one more weapon in the Trump arsenal.
It won’t be long — I promise — before Trump takes his legalized form of violence to the streets of Denver and Aurora, which, you’ll remember, he has called a war zone. He also said Venezuelan gangs had taken over Aurora and would soon take over the entire state. At least Colorado voters heard Trump and rejected him at the polls for the third consecutive election. And you can bet that Trump will do what he can to exact vengeance on Colorado and the other proudly blue states.
It’s no wonder that Joe Biden felt the need to issue preemptive pardons for everyone on the January 6 committee, plus a few others that Kash Patel, if he’s ratified to be the new FBI chief, has promised to prosecute. I wasn’t so happy with Biden pardoning his family preemptively, but if he’s scared, he should be. We all should be.
Meanwhile — and I must mention this — Jared Polis willingly attended the inauguration as just one more Polis move to normalize the abnormal and to render Trump’s assault on democracy as just another modest problem to be resolved, but with full respect, of course, for the office of a wildly disrespectful president.
And, yes, Trump will distract us with nonsense about renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali and taking back the Panama Canal and calling on Manifest Destiny to be America’s guiding light. But don’t be distracted. We can’t afford to be distracted.
Look, I know it’s too soon to take all this in. There is far too much to cover in one column. Or, for that matter, in 10 columns.
But you don’t have to sift through every executive action to understand the level of infamy that’s before us.
Or to understand Trump’s implicit promise — one you should be confident he will keep — of officially approved violence yet to come.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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