Trump’s ‘January Seventh Test’ of loyalty
Donald Trump is building his new administration. Downplaying the
insurrection will be a litmus test.
November 12, 2024 at 6:17 p.m. EST
President-elect Donald Trump has made
it no secret that loyalty will be his chief criterion in putting together his
incoming administration.
His early picks, however, suggest he has a specific
standard of fealty — one that ensures that those around him will not check his
worst and most dangerous impulses.
Clearing that bar are those who, after Trump incited his
supporters to overturn his 2020 election defeat by storming the Capitol building on Jan.
6, 2021, minimized his responsibility for the bloody siege. If they
managed to stomach what Trump did that day, it should be assumed they would not
stand in the way of any further trampling of democratic norms that the
returning president might order.
We don’t know yet who he will name to a number of top jobs,
including defense secretary and attorney general. But it is already clear that
Trump will demand subservience, especially in law enforcement, foreign policy
and national security, where he often felt thwarted by his own appointees
during his first term.
The president-elect has granted some indulgences. Sen.
Marco Rubio (R-Florida), now reported to be the selection for secretary of
state, waged a bitter campaign against Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination,
branding him a “con artist” unfit for the Oval Office.
Rubio’s transformation since then, though, has been a
marvel.
Although he had initially called the rampage
at the Capitol “one of the saddest days in our history” and “a national
embarrassment,” by a year later, Rubio was scoring an A on the January Seventh
Test. When Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell referred to what happened as
a “violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful
transfer of power after a legitimately certified election,” the Florida senator
insisted that “riot” was the more accurate word to use. “There was no way they
were going to overthrow the government,” Rubio said.
It sounded like another way of saying that since it didn’t
work, it was not such a big deal.
But that wasn’t as egregious as what then-Rep. Lee Zeldin
of New York, Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, said on the very day of the attack.
“This isn’t just about the president of the United States,” he declared. “This
is about people on the left and their double standards.”
The true culprits for the violence, Zeldin suggested, were
“rogue state actors.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York), whom the incoming
president plans to install as this country’s representative to the United
Nations, is another shape-shifting former Trump skeptic who now echoes his use of the term “hostages” to
refer to those sentenced to prison for their roles in the Capitol attack.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Florida), who is set to become national
security adviser, took issue with Trump’s description of Jan. 6 as a “day of
love,” I’ll give him that. But he also said Democratic comparisons of the
attack to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor were “insane.”
Some of these choices, it should be noted, are not as
disturbing as others Trump might have made. The hawkish Rubio, for instance, is
a stronger pick and less of a MAGA sycophant than, say, former acting director
of national intelligence Richard Grenell, who campaigned hard to be the
nation’s chief diplomat.
But we have learned that the inside story of Trump’s first
stint in the White House was one in which those around him acted as guardrails
at critical moments — when, for instance, he raised the possibility of
firing Patriot missiles into Mexico to take out drug cartels and then making it
look as if another country were responsible. It fell to his stunned defense
secretary, Mark T. Esper, to inform the commander in chief that the idea was
ludicrous.
In his memoir about his time in the Trump administration,
Esper also recalled that the president wanted to put 10,000 active-duty troops
on the streets of Washington in 2020 to deal with the demonstrations against
police brutality that followed the killing of George Floyd. Referring to the
protesters, Trump asked Esper: “Can’t you just shoot them?”
Esper was one of five defense secretaries to serve during
Trump’s first term. Standing up to the president on questions like that got him fired. But it could
have been worse. Trump has gone so far as to say that his onetime chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, should be tried for treason — a
crime punishable by execution.
Give Trump this much, though: People who agree to serve in this administration have
been put on notice of exactly what it is that they are signing up for.
