This Is The Bad Place

In his first day back in office, amid the bluster Donald Trump threw the rule of law under the bus.

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

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Ever since the 2024 presidential election, I’ve put off penning my thoughts on what Truth and Consequences will look like in the second Trump Era (perhaps it was a stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable, which, as of noon yesterday, is now upon us). I’ve accepted that the next four years will be a non-stop shit show, with little brake on Trump’s worst instincts. But for the good of my mental health, I can’t immerse myself in the never-ending cycle of Trump-created outrage — and I’m sure many of you feel the same way. So I will need to pick my spots — and yesterday was a big one.

Trump’s first day in office was everything I feared … and more!

For MSNBC, I wrote about Trump’s day-one executive orders — on everything from trying to end birthright citizenship and allowing the U.S. military to take over border security to anti-trans initiatives, ending the Biden Administration’s electric vehicle mandate and his absurd call to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

All of these orders are a fitting preview of the next four years — a combination of bluster, symbolism, lawlessness and cruelty that will do little to better the lives of the American people but will give Trump’s supporters a reason to cheer. One can certainly say that many Americans voted for what Trump did on Day One of his second term — and that is, without a doubt, the saddest part of his return to Washington.

Many of these orders will go nowhere, or the courts will block them. As I probably should have clarified in my piece, Executive Orders do not operate outside the law and the Constitution. More enough than not, they are statements of principle and aspirational. Take, for example, Trump’s EO on the so-called electric vehicle mandate, which requires carmakers to produce vehicles that produce significantly lower amounts of greenhouse gases. As I note in the piece, it’s far from clear that he has the authority to do away with this requirement, and even if the Environmental Protection Agency tries to undo it, they will need to go through a lengthy and legal,minefield-laden process of creating a new rule.

Nonetheless, we should not lose sight of the naked lawlessness of Trump’s actions. Ending birthright citizenship would literally revoke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. An executive order delaying the enforcement of a federal ban on TikTok for 75 days is almost as astonishing. The ban went into effect on Sunday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld it, and Trump has no authority to block it … and yet, he’s telling the Department of Justice not to enforce it. The issue here is not just TikTok; it’s that the ban creates huge penalties for media companies and service providers that allow the app to continue to operate. Trump is basically saying that he can provide legal impunity to those third parties (I have my doubts that’s a risk these companies will want to take).

But, beyond the showboating, there are substantive things that Trump can do now that he's president, and one particular Trumpian outrage stands out above all else:

President Donald J. Trump, in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Mr. Trump’s moves amounted to an extraordinary reversal for rioters accused of both low-level, nonviolent offenses and for those who had assaulted police officers.

And they effectively erased years of efforts by federal investigators to seek accountability for the mob assault on the peaceful transfer of presidential power after Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. As part of his pardon order, Mr. Trump also directed the Justice Department to dismiss “all pending indictments” that remained against people facing charges for Jan. 6.

The Justice Department’s investigation into January 6 was the single largest criminal inquiry in American history. As the Times notes, “Investigators spent more than four years obtaining warrants for thousands of cellphones and Google accounts, scrolling through tens of thousands of hours of police body-camera and surveillance camera footage, and running down hundreds of thousands of tips from ordinary citizens.”

The Department of Justice brought charges against more than 1,600 people. More than half of the nearly 1,100 people sentenced for their crimes received jail time. There were prosecutions for breaching the Capitol, assaulting police officers, and even seditious conspiracy. Congress held multiple primetime hearings detailing the attacks that took place that day and Trump’s role in fomenting the violence. With the stroke of a pen, Trump wiped it all out.

With this move, Trump has legitimized political violence in America.

He has made unmistakably clear that attacking democratic institutions and assaulting the police is ok as long as his political supporters do it. It’s a crushing blow to the justice system and the rule of law in America, and it’s the kind of injury from which America will not easily recover — if ever.

It’s bad enough that Trump took this action; what makes it even worse is that the American people ratified it. During the 2024 campaign, Trump left no ambiguity about his plans to pardon those responsible for January 6. Trump repeatedly said he would do it if he won the presidency (and kept his promise). None of that dissuaded millions of Americans from giving him their votes. Spew all the blame you want at Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democratic party, but make no mistake, the American people chose the path we are on with eyes wide open. This time is not like 2016, where voters could at least fall back on the defense that they didn’t know how bad Trump would be. Americans saw Trump in office, and they know everything there is to know about him … and that didn’t stop them from returning him to the Oval Office.

What’s Going On

• Trump’s inaugural address on Monday evening was the most partisan, divisive, and frankly appalling inaugural address I’ve ever heard. It sounded more like a campaign rally than a speech for a solemn occasion. James Fallows takes it apart piece by piece.

• Jim didn’t mention this, but the hypocrisy needed to utter these two sentences in the same speech is impossible to qualify.

  After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.

  "It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,"

  This is a helpful reminder that for Trump and his allies, free expression is a one-way street. Their freedom of expression must be protected; that of their political and cultural rivals, not so much. If anything, their opponents’ freedom of expression is seen as a threat. For anyone familiar with narcissists, this is textbook stuff. They are always the victim, and not only are they devoid of empathy, but when other people express feelings of hurt or pain, it is seen as an attack on them! The GOP under Trump has become a party of narcissistic hurt.

• I won’t defend Joe Biden’s decision to pardon members of his family, just like I wouldn’t defend the pardon he gave to his son Hunter … but I get it. Trump had openly threatened his family with criminal prosecutions, and he wanted to protect them. I’d prefer that Biden focused on upholding basic democratic norms, but it’s not my family in the potential crosshairs of an incoming FBI Director with an “enemies list.”

• Josh Marshall had the best take I’ve seen on Elon Musk’s “Sieg Heil” moment.

  Back in the first Trump presidency, Trump’s critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Trumpers to admit they’d done this or that, to apologize, whatever. This was always a mistake. I don’t need anyone to validate what I saw. I saw it. I don’t care what the explanation is. These are just twisted anti-American degenerates. We know this. Just what level of exuberant disinhibition led Musk to this moment or why this unmistakable gesture came so naturally to him … well, that’s really not my problem. Everyone knows what they saw here.

• I am less confident than Moira Donegan, but I thought her take on yesterday’s inauguration was excellent.

  There is something broken in the soul when such spectacles can no longer shock you. But I confess that they no longer shock me. America is ruled, now, by men who are extremely psychologically transparent: their resentment and greed, their desperate, seeking needfulness, their insecurity and rage at those who provoke it; these things seep off these men, like a stench. They are evil men, and pathetic ones: mentally small, morally ugly. They are relentlessly predictable.

  Here is another prediction: these men will not succeed in all their schemes. They will not deport as many people as they say they will; he will not change the law as much as they pledge to; they will not, cannot, capture the institutions as completely, or bury dissent as successfully. They cannot do everything they aim to do. Because politics is not over; because our institutions are not all collapsed; and because the existing institutions are not the only methods of resistance and refusal.

Musical Interlude