The Morning Dispatch: Trump Doubles Down on January 6 Role

Happy Wednesday! If Punxsutawney Phil doesn’t see his shadow when he emerges in a few minutes, it means governors and mayors around the country will withdraw their mask mandates six weeks early.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday that U.S. job openings remained near record highs at the end of December, when there were 10.9 million unfilled jobs nationwide. The quits rate—the percentage of workers who quit their job during the month—was 2.9 percent, down slightly from 3 percent in November but also near record highs. (Reminder: The TMD Deputy Editor position is one of those 10.9 million job openings—apply here!)

• Speaking at a joint press conference with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the United States “basically ignored” Russia’s security demands—guarantees on NATO expansion, ruling out weapons deployments near Russian borders, etc.—in the written communication delivered to Moscow last week. He accused the Biden administration of using Ukraine as a “tool” to “hinder the development of Russia,” but added that he hopes dialogue will continue so the two sides can “find a solution.”

• The Biden administration sent deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology Anne Neuberger to NATO’s headquarters in Belgium on Tuesday to brief allies on what White House officials see as likely Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine.

• Treasury Department data released yesterday show the U.S. national debt surpassed $30 trillion for the first time on Monday. Nearly $7 trillion of that debt has accrued over the past two years, as Congress doled out trillions of dollars to keep the economy afloat through the pandemic.

• New National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data released Tuesday found approximately 31,720 people died in motor vehicle crashes from January through September 2021, a 12 percent increase over the same nine-month period in 2020 and the highest such number since 2006.

• Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico suffered a stroke last week, his chief of staff announced on Tuesday. The 49-year-old is currently recovering at the hospital and is “expected to make a full recovery,” but it’s unclear when he will be able to return to the evenly divided Senate.

• Former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit against the National Football League, Miami Dolphins, New York Giants, and Denver Broncos on Tuesday, alleging teams set up “sham” job interviews with him only to abide by the NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to consider at least one minority head coaching candidate during senior hiring processes. The teams and the NFL denied the allegations.

Yes, It Was an Attempted Coup

All things considered, former President Donald Trump has kept a pretty low profile since leaving office last year. Robbed of his favorite direct communication tool, Twitter, he’s mostly been relegated to sending out tweet-like press releases, making occasional appearances on favored media channels, and airing his grievances to a rotating cast of the faithful at Mar-a-Lago.

But in recent weeks, with midterm season approaching and President Joe Biden looking more vulnerable than ever in the polls, Trump has hit the road again, returning to the freewheeling rallies that were once his bread and butter. As he’s done so, one particular complaint has loomed large in his statements and monologues: That the real crime that took place on January 6, 2021 was that his attempts to stay in office were thwarted.

“If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had ‘absolutely no right’ to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?” Trump said in a statement on Sunday, referring to a bipartisan effort to update the Electoral Count Act. “Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”

It’s a remarkable statement on several levels. The comments make clear that Trump wanted – that Trump expected – Vice President Mike Pence to “change the outcome” of the presidential election, to “overturn” the results of the contest, and to single-handedly override the more than 155 million votes cast to choose the country’s next leader. Those stunning remarks came one day after the former president floated the idea of pardoning the hundreds of people charged with crimes related to the Capitol break-in on January 6. “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” he said at a rally in Conroe, Texas. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”

And on Monday night, The New York Times reported Trump had a more direct role in the post-election period than previously known in the creation of draft executive orders instructing various federal departments, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department, to seize voting machines in key swing states. 

There is no longer any disputing what the former president was working to accomplish in the weeks between November 3rd and the end of his term: Trump was trying to remain in office despite having lost the election.  

Elected Republicans were once again asked for their reaction to Trump’s behavior and several offered gentle criticism. “I would not be in favor of shortening any of the sentences for any of the people who pleaded guilty to crimes,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday. On ABC News’ “This Week,” Sen. Susan Collins said she didn’t think Trump “should have made that pledge to do pardons.” Sen. Lindsey Graham labeled the former president’s remarks “inappropriate” on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” adding he doesn’t “want to reinforce that defiling the Capitol was OK.” Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether he agreed with Trump’s dangling of pardons, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu seemed taken aback: “Of course not, oh, my goodness, no.”

But apart from Graham—whom Trump unceremoniously labeled a “RINO” last night despite years of loyalty—that crew is fairly unrepresentative of the GOP’s relationship with its standard bearer. Comments from GOP Sens. Mike Braun of Indiana and John Thune of South Dakota paint a more illustrative picture. 

“I didn’t really think much about it,” Braun told CNN. “Because he says a lot of things at the rallies that I don’t know if he means it or not.”

“I’m very much of the view that [Mike Pence] didn’t have that authority,” Thune said Monday. “But you know, I mean, there’s nothing any of us are going to do to control what the former president does on it, on that and other issues.” (Yesterday, Thune praised former acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli for not going along with Trump’s push to seize voting machines.)

And then both pledged to support Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024. Sen. Collins said it’s “very unlikely” she would, but didn’t rule out the possibility.

This sort of thing used to happen all the time. In the Trump years—both when he was first campaigning and throughout his time in office—barely a month went by without the president doing or saying something wildly controversial that, in another era, would be considered beyond the pale. Before too long, that outrageous thing was just another star in the GOP’s cultural constellation.

Some thought January 6 might be different. When Biden had clinched the win weeks before, after all, many respectable Republicans had given themselves permission to ignore the president’s increasingly unhinged ranting about a rigged election by taking solace in a comfortable thought: It doesn’t matter now. The guy will get his day in court, and then he’ll go. The immortal quote from an anonymous Republican official: “What is the downside [of] humoring him for this little bit of time?”

Well, they discovered the downside on January 6, when a whipped up group of protesters marched from Trump’s speech denouncing the election as a fraud to the Capitol. A subset of those protesters turned rioters, bursting through police lines, sacking the U.S. Capitol, and sending the lawmakers who had gathered to certify the election running for cover. They discovered the downside when Trump hemmed and hawed for hours instead of calling off the siege, and then, afterward, jeered in a tweet that “these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

For most Trump-skeptical GOP officials—there are more than you think—the plan is simply to hope the former president slowly loses relevance in the lead-up to 2024 without Trump-skeptical GOP officials having to personally do much to accelerate that process. The political graveyard is full of Republicans who spoke out against Trump, only for their words to rebound off Teflon Don and hurt their own careers.

If you squint, there are some signs this wait-him-out approach could be working. A late-January poll from the Republican firm Echelon Insights found the percentage of GOP voters wanting Trump to run in 2024 fell from 74 percent in December to 62 percent this month. Just 54 percent of such voters believe Trump should “remain the leader of the Republican Party.” There are even some grumblings among base voters that Trump has become part of the dreaded “Establishment,” touting the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines developed during his presidency and, in some instances, endorsing incumbents and more electable GOP primary candidates instead of more popular right-wing insurgents. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has reportedly refused to rule out running against the man who helped him win his race in 2018.

But several other would-be top contenders have made such a pledge, and 50-to-70 percent of the vote would lock down a contested GOP primary—especially a fractured one—very early on in the process. Trump reported having more than $120 million in political cash on hand at the end of 2021, and he vows to be a force in this year’s midterms, further shaping the direction of the party that would be tasked with nominating him two years later.

“Look, if Donald Trump is going to run for president in 2024, he’ll be the Republican nominee,” Sen. Marco Rubio said last month. “And of course I would support him in that.” Graham has repeatedly said that he hopes Trump runs again.

And yet, the case against Trump has grown indisputably stronger since the night of January 6, when Graham famously called it quits, saying he had finally had enough of the guy. News reports and testimony before the Select Committee have revealed both the seriousness of Trump’s attempt to actually steal the election, and the remarkable extent of his indifference to the carnage at the Capitol as the violence was ongoing: “The committee has firsthand testimony now that he was sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office, watching the attack on television as the assault on the Capitol occurred,” Rep. Liz Cheney said last month. “We have firsthand testimony that his daughter Ivanka went in, at least twice, to ask him to ‘please stop this violence.’”

But the last year has also seen an onslaught of right-wing-media rationalization and confusion of what actually took place on January 6, from early false reports of the Capitol rioters actually being left-wing Antifa interlopers, to baseless allegations last summer that the whole thing had been incited by the FBI, to the latest attempts to pivot away from the event itself to focus on the supposedly disproportionate punishments facing those charged with crimes. The cumulative effect of all this has been to muddy the waters enough for January 6 to stop being an occasion of shame for the political right at large—and for many Republicans to slip back into their go-along-to-get-along Trump-coping habits.

Worth Your Time

• Late last night, Axios’ Jonathan Swan and Hans Nichols reported on leaked notes from a White House Situation Room meeting the day before Kabul fell in Afghanistan. “[The notes] shed new light on just how unprepared the Biden administration was to evacuate Afghan nationals who’d helped the United States in its 20-year war against the Taliban,” they write. “The meeting notes highlight how many crucial actions the Biden administration was deciding at the last minute—just hours before Kabul would fall and former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani would flee his palace in a helicopter. … Mark Jacobson, deputy NATO representative in Afghanistan during the Obama administration, told Axios: ‘That so much planning, prioritizing and addressing of key questions had not been completed, even as Kabul was about to fall, underscores the absence of adequate interagency planning.’”

• Despite the Biden administration’s disastrous handling of Afghanistan, Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius has been pleasantly surprised by the White House’s approach to Russia and Ukraine. And he’s not alone: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised the administration last week for “moving in the right direction” on the issue. “Putin may have hoped to exploit what he saw as Biden’s political weakness, but Biden’s difficulties instead seemed to stiffen his backbone,” Ignatius writes. “After the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and a freefall in the polls, Biden couldn’t afford to be seen as the congenial compromiser Putin probably expected. Biden chose tough policies and stuck to them. And he made the NATO alliance, scorned by his predecessor Donald Trump, the cornerstone of his policy. … Putin is determined to stop what he has called the ‘anti-Russian project.’ He made a huge gamble that the West would back down in Ukraine. The big surprise for Putin is that he has met an unwavering adversary in Biden—a garrulous, genial career politician who, in this confrontation, has been surprisingly resolute.”

• Josh Barro’s latest Very Serious newsletter touches on the “disconnect” between dissatisfaction with the economy and generally positive economic data that we discussed last week. “The pandemic has worsened the experience of being a worker or a consumer in ways that aren’t captured in the data, but that rightly affect public perceptions of whether the economy is working,” he writes. “Longer wait times for products and services, workers having to wear masks all day, angry customers losing it at workers more often—this is all part of the economic experience and people don’t like it. And it’s not effectively counted in the economic data. Even before headline inflation went through the roof last year, there was a lot of arguing about whether we were experiencing ‘hidden inflation’ because COVID was impairing the quality of products and services. … How do you adjust airfares for the fact that beverage service is cut back and you have to wear a mask through the whole flight? Is the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracking whether restaurants are serving your meals with plastic utensils, or not giving you paper menus, or requiring you to place your whole order at once? These deteriorations in the consumer experience generally aren’t counted in the inflation data, but people notice them as consumers and aren’t happy.”

• There were hints over the weekend that it was coming, but future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady officially announced his retirement Tuesday morning. In a piece for The Ringer, Kevin Clark tries to capture just how much the Patriot (and Buc) meant to the sport. “There is no neat summation of Brady’s impact in the NFL, because he meant so many things to so many different people: He crushed dreams for 30 teams, made them possible for two, got dozens of people better jobs, and served to make everyone else in football look a little worse compared to him,” he writes. “No one did the little things better in a sport that is about the little things. Every story you heard about Brady’s work ethic was eventually proved true. About his summer workouts in which he’d curse himself for being an inch off his target from 20 yards away, unable to be calmed down by friends who’d tell him it’s, uh, not a real game. … The reason you can’t imagine football without Brady is because it doesn’t exist. Tomorrow starts something very different, a world in which Brady can make no more changes to football as a player. The changes he’s already made will last a lifetime.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• In Tuesday’s French Press (🔒), David breaks our national conversation into three distinct categories: cancel culture, conditioning culture, and conversation culture. “Cancel culture gets all the headlines,” he writes, but conditioning culture—seeking to inflict negative consequences on those whose speech one despises—is far more common. “Conversation culture is the better way. As a matter of law, I have a right to use my voice to try to cancel. I have a right to use my voice to try to condition. But I should choose to use my voice to converse.”

• This week’s Sweep features Sarah on issue polling and the latest campaign fundraising numbers, and Andrew on the impact Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health could have on state legislature races later this year. “We are now to the point where campaigns are raising so much money that the returns on every dollar after a certain point are negligible,” Sarah writes. “There is an amount of money necessary to compete in any district, but there is also an amount so high that going above it won’t bring any more votes.”

• In yesterday’s Uphill, Haley revisits Congress’ latest efforts to undercut the Chinese government and boost American competitiveness. “Tucked into the measure is a section that would bring the tensions closer to American consumers’ doorsteps: further tariffs on shipments from China,” she writes. “The change could impact hundreds of millions of packages each year, touching both finished goods and industries that source smaller components from China.”

• On the site today, Jonah covers Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s skillful handling of Putin’s aggression, economics professor Brian Albrecht digs into legislation aimed at Big Tech, and Audrey reviews how pro-impeachment House Republicans’ fundraising efforts are faring. 

Let Us Know

He’s almost certainly not the most athletic, but do you consider Tom Brady to be the most accomplished athlete of your lifetime? If not him, who?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).