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Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a credible threat to return to the White House, the guardrails that seemed to restrain him in his first term—political, legal, psychic—have collapsed with astonishing speed. His nominees are sailing through their confirmation hearings, including some who are underqualified and ideologically extreme.
Pete Hegseth, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, was initially considered one of his most endangered nominees. But after the MAGA movement organized a campaign to threaten Republicans who expressed reservations about Hegseth’s fitness, criticism dried up quickly. “We gave the Senate an attitude adjustment,” Mike Davis, a Republican operative known for his florid threats to lock up Trump’s political targets, told Politico.
Since winning a second presidential term, Donald Trump has made a curious pivot to a kind of performative imperialism. Immediately after November’s election, he began musing about acquiring Greenland from Denmark, which has no interest whatsoever in parting with the territory. His menacing gestures began to escalate. Trump has started taunting Canada by referring to its prime minister as a “governor” and vaguely threatening annexation.
Now that the election is over, Donald Trump has returned to one of his most cherished pastimes: filing nuisance lawsuits. Abusing the legal system was a key precept of Trump’s decades-long career as a celebrity business tycoon, and he kept it up, out of habit or perhaps enjoyment, during his first term as president.
The newest round of litigation is different. Trump has broadened his targets to include not just reporters and commentators but pollsters.
When Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, in 2017, I was about to drive my daughter and some of her friends to a soccer tryout. I remember that the news came moments before we left; once we arrived, I sat on a bench next to the soccer field, scrolling through incredulous and fearful reactions on Twitter. The news was widely considered akin to Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, one of the most odious scandals in American history.
A very strange disjuncture has opened up in Washington between the serene mood and the alarming developments that are under way. The surface is calm because the Republican presidential candidate won the election, and Democrats, the only one of the two major parties committed on principle to upholding the legitimacy of election results, conceded defeat and are cooperating in the peaceful transition of power.
When President Joe Biden was running for a second term as president, he repeatedly ruled out granting a pardon to his son Hunter, who has pleaded guilty to tax fraud and lying on a form to purchase a gun. “He was very clear, very upfront, obviously very definitive,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of one of his many promises to this effect.
Biden professed a willingness to abide by the results of the justice system as a matter of principle.
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For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government.