The Trump Effect

 

“The Trump Effect”: On Deal-Making and Credit-Claiming in Trump 2.0

The once and future President is back to wielding leverage like a club, in the Middle East and on Capitol Hill.

 

By Susan B. Glasser

January 16, 2025

 

The long-awaited, painstakingly negotiated deal for a hostage swap and ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas had not even been formally announced, on Wednesday, when Donald Trump claimed credit for it. “This EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November,” the once and future President declared on social media. “We have achieved so much without even being in the White House.” Minutes later, Trump’s incoming national-security adviser, Mike Waltz, seized on the boss’s statement in his own social-media post: it was, he said, proof of “The Trump Effect.” In an appearance on Fox News, Waltz elaborated, attributing the breakthrough to Trump’s repeated threats of “HELL TO PAY” if Hamas did not agree to release the hostages before he returned to office. “They believed President Trump when he said there would be all hell to pay, and any deal that was on the table would only get worse once he was in office.”

There was, of course, more than a bit of Trumpian bluster to it all, and not just because Trump and Waltz failed to mention Joe Biden, who had publicly outlined the deal’s terms back in May and who had spent the months since lobbying to make it happen. Waltz could barely contain his glee at the idea that there might soon be split-screen images of American and Israeli hostages being reunited with their families as Trump is being inaugurated, on Monday—an explicit echo of the dramatic scene from 1981, when the modern G.O.P.’s hero, Ronald Reagan, was sworn into office on the same day that Iran finally released the American hostages whose long captivity had helped seal Jimmy Carter’s electoral defeat. The prospect of a “Reagan moment,” as Waltz put it, was no doubt a big part of the deal’s appeal for Trump, who invariably speaks of his victories in sweeping historic terms.

To the extent that the Trump Effect was real—and, in my view, it absolutely was—the warring party most subject to Trump’s threats was not Hamas but Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Over the weekend, Trump had dispatched his new envoy for the Middle East, his billionaire friend and golf partner Steve Witkoff, to personally pressure Netanyahu into accepting the deal—over the objections of Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition partners—and Witkoff has been working side by side this week with Biden’s lead negotiator, Brett McGurk, in the marathon sessions that led up to the announcement. On Thursday, I spoke with a source who has been closely involved in the hostage talks. “I give a lot of credit to Trump and his people, because they’re the ones putting the hammer on Bibi on this,” he told me. “The thing that pushed Bibi over the threshold of agreeing to coöperate was actually Trump and his people sending very clear messages that that’s the expectation of the incoming President and that there will be consequences if Israel fails to reach a deal.”

Bottom of Form

The Trump Effect in the Middle East, in other words, is not that dissimilar to the Trump Effect we’ve seen here in Washington, where Trump has spent years demonstrating what political leverage can produce in the hands of someone willing to wield it like a club. All week on Capitol Hill, Republican members of Congress have been giving a master class in what this means in practice. On Tuesday, at a hearing for Trump’s embattled nominee for Secretary of Defense, the longtime Fox News host Pete Hegseth, G.O.P. senators who had initially voiced concerns about Hegseth’s past misbehavior were embarrassingly eager to accept his excuses for it. When Hegseth promised to abandon views that he has promoted for years, such as rejecting combat roles for women in the military, his testimony sounded about as credible as all those conservative Supreme Court appointees who claimed they were open-minded about Roe v. Wade only to win confirmation and swiftly vote to overturn it. But the Republican senators accepted Hegseth’s statements anyway, with a credulousness whose cringey-ness seemed to be the point: they have learned by now that Trump demands not just fealty but humiliating public displays of it. Soon after the hearing, Joni Ernst, the Republican senator from Iowa, announced that she would vote to confirm Hegseth—Ernst who, back in November, made the mistake of loudly touting her skepticism, as a combat veteran and a survivor of sexual assault, about a nominee accused of rape who was described by his own mother, in 2018, as a man who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.” Was it really just Hegseth’s outraged denials and the fact that his mother later recanted her words that proved so persuasive to Ernst?

A month ago, Hegseth and several other of Trump’s nominees, including his Russia-promoting choice for director of National Intelligence, his vaccine-skeptic choice for Health and Human Services Secretary, and his conspiracy-theorizing choice for F.B.I. director, appeared to face at least the possibility of tough confirmation battles. But now, amid an intense pressure campaign waged in public and private by Trump and his allies—including Elon Musk vowing to finance primary challenges against Republicans who don’t go along with Trump’s nominees—it’s likely that all of them will get through. Bullying, accompanied by threats from the world’s richest man, is the Trump Effect in unvarnished form.

Another striking example of Trump as a politician whose default setting is to lean hardest on his own conservative allies—whether Netanyahu abroad or Republicans at home—came just hours after he claimed credit for the ceasefire in the Middle East. In a move that shocked and surprised many Republican members, House Speaker Mike Johnson fired the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Ohio Republican Mike Turner. Turner swiftly disclosed to CBS News’ Margaret Brennan the rationale that he had heard from Johnson: “concerns from Mar-a-Lago.” One of the loudest complaints about Turner among the MAGA faithful has been his support for Ukraine in its war against Russia—and his public criticism of a faction within his own party that he called pro-Russia. Johnson has the most tenuous hold possible on his Speakership, which gives Trump incredible leverage over him. How telling that Turner’s head is what Trump apparently chose to ask for.

Yet the ouster of Turner could come with adverse consequences, too. Some of it is simple political math: in the House, Johnson’s margin of control is so thin that he can little afford to lose a vote on anything. What if Turner quits voting for the Party line? Or quits Congress outright? More substantively, Turner is far from the only Republican member of Congress who remains committed to Ukraine’s defense—a reminder that the G.O.P. is deeply divided over many of Trump’s signature policy issues. On China, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, used his confirmation hearing on Wednesday to stress that China remains an almost existential-level threat to the United States; in 2022, he was one of the leading senators to introduce legislation calling for the Chinese-owned app TikTok to be banned from the U.S. Rubio and other China hawks in the Administration, though, will have to combat Trump’s own instincts for accommodation—symbolized by Trump’s election-season flip-flop from supporting a TikTok ban to seeking to halt it. On Wednesday, after Rubio’s confirmation hearing, the Times reported that Trump had invited TikTok’s C.E.O. to sit as an honored guest at his upcoming Inauguration.

Even the Israel ceasefire deal that Trump was so eager to tout this week is not the uncomplicated political win he would like it to be. In Washington, Senator Tom Cotton blamed “lame duck” Biden for trying to “cram down a bad deal on Israel”—right around the same time that Trump was taking credit for it. Cotton is a studiously loyal Trump acolyte, which makes his comment so revealing. Trump, in the end, has never fully embraced many of the ideological causes that motivate many of his backers in Congress, whether it’s supporting Israel as an article of faith or wanting to ban abortion nationwide; his ideology is the ideology of racking up wins for himself. There’s also the question of what, for Trump, actually constitutes a win: Let’s not forget all the times in the first Trump Administration that the President announced some sweeping, world-historic deal only to see it fail to materialize. Remember him tweeting, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” after his hype-filled Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un in 2018?

“The Trump Effect” is a great tagline for an incoming Administration whose leader is perhaps the biggest braggart ever to serve as President of the United States. But remember this as Trump returns to the White House a few days from now: his bottomless desire for credit means there is always the chance he’ll end up serving someone else’s bottom line. ♦

 

We Deserve Piece of Crap Pete Hegseth

 

David Brooks

We Deserve Pete Hegseth

Jan. 15, 2025

 

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

First let me hit you with some realities:

• The secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, has said that the West is not prepared for the challenges that will come over the next five years and that it’s time to “shift to a wartime mind-set.” Kori Schake, who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that while World War III has not begun, “a world war is approaching.”
• Recent American defense strategy has been based on the optimistic assumption that we will have to fight only one war at a time. But the closer cooperation between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea make a coordinated attack more likely, meaning we may have to fight three or four regional wars simultaneously.
• The weak U.S. industrial base has hollowed out American resilience. China’s shipbuilding industry has a capacity more than 230 times that of the United States. When experts recently conducted war games with China, the United States ran out of long-range anti-ship missiles within three to seven days.
• The Chinese are building gigantic amphibious landing craft of the sort they would use for an invasion of Taiwan. They have developed a powerful microwave weapon that has the intensity of a nuclear explosion and can disrupt or destroy electronic components of our weapons systems. H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, recently said, “I think China is laying the groundwork for a first-strike nuclear capability against the United States.”
• In 2023, the RAND Corporation issued a report on U.S. military “power and influence.” Here’s how it opened: “The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available to accomplish those tasks.”

Now, if you are holding a hearing for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues. Or you might come up with other serious questions: How do drones change war-fighting? How will artificial intelligence alter the nature of combat? How do we shift from a defense policy built around counterterrorism to a policy built around nation-state warfare? If you’re a Democrat trying to sink a nomination, you would think you’d want to ask substantive questions on life-or-death issues like these in order to expose the nominee’s ignorance and unpreparedness.

But did this happen at the Pete Hegseth hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee this week? If you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearing, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.

We do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing — by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.

Pete Hegseth is of course the living, breathing embodiment of this culture. The world is on fire and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the military. I went through high school trying to bluff my way through class after doing none of the reading, and in Hegseth, I recognize a master of the craft. During the hearing Hegseth repeatedly said he was going to defend the meritocracy. In what kind of meritocracy is being a Fox TV host preparation for being secretary of defense? Maybe in the one Caligula fancied when he contemplated making his horse a consul.

Several Republican senators were happy to play along with the woke-military game. In addition, Senator Kevin Cramer used his precious question time to praise Hegseth for having the courage to use the words “Jesus Christ.” (If we had used this logic during World War II, Father Fulton Sheen would have commanded the D-Day invasion.) I’ve also learned that mentioning climate change in a Republican gathering is like throwing a side of bacon into an Orthodox minyan — they react with great offense.

Hegseth is in no danger of rising to the level of mediocrity, but next to some of his Democratic questioners, he looked like Carl von Clausewitz. Democrats played their own culture war games. Especially early in the hearing their main obsession was women in combat. (Like everybody in my social class, I support women in combat, but I don’t think it’s as important an issue as failure to deter World War III.)

Senator Elizabeth Warren submitted over 30 pages of written questions to Hegseth before the hearing. They had to do with things like drinking, accusations of sexual assault, threats to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and veterans benefits. I have enormous respect for Warren, but she didn’t show much interest in topics like how to deter and fight a war — which are kind of central to the purview of this committee.

Senator Tim Kaine tried to play the moral disqualification game, dwelling on Hegseth’s various adulteries. With Democrats’ having failed to defeat Donald Trump with this strategy, I admire their capacity for persistent losing.

The hearing got better as it went along and more junior senators got to speak. Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent, asking substantive questions: If the president ordered you, would you order troops to shoot protesters in the legs? Would you follow an order to use the military for mass deportations? Senator Tammy Duckworth was outstanding, too, asking about the big responsibilities of the job: Does Hegseth know anything about the ongoing international negotiations? Does he know which countries are in the ASEAN bloc? (The answers are no and no.)

The lesson for Democrats over the next four years is clear: Don’t fly into moral outrage every day. Focus on Trumpian incompetence.

Overall, Republicans were the more serious party at the hearing. The committee chairman, Senator Roger Wicker, did note that we live in the most dangerous security environment since World War II. Senator Tim Sheehy did mention shipbuilding. Senator Ted Budd did ask about warplanes. Senator Eric Schmitt did ask about drones.

But, as you can kind of tell, I finished watching the hearing sick to my stomach. I also came away thinking that we need to come up with a better way to think about expertise. Hegseth’s core populist conviction — repeated ad nauseam — is that the grunts on the ground know what they are doing and the pencil-necked geeks in air-conditioned offices just write nonsense regulations that get in the way. The man wasted years at Princeton and Harvard when he could have learned everything he knows by watching that Colonel Jessup speech at the end of “A Few Good Men.”

We don’t want to live in a populist paradise in which expertise is suspect and ignorance a sign of virtue. Nor do we want to live in an elitist world in which technocrats try to rule the world. As the political scientist James C. Scott showed, technocrats are too abstracted from reality to even see what is going on.

We need to settle upon a place where experts are respected and inform decision-making, but civilians make the ultimate calls. In a healthy democracy people revere great learning on substantive issues; they understand the world is too complex to be captured in bite-size slogans; but they also appreciate the wisdom that comes from concrete experience and know that most hard calls have to be made in light of the deeply held values that have made America what it is.

All of this has been corrupted by the war for short attention spans. In the 19th century we had the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Today it would be the Lincoln-Douglas TikTok wars followed by “Three Takeaways From the Lincoln-Douglas Debates” followed by a panel of pundits (like me) analyzing whether Stephen Douglas helped himself with swing voters in DuPage County.

Can this kind of country prevail in a global conflict of systems? Maybe, but maybe not.

Republicans in my state are trying to overturn an election. Gee, who gave them that id

 

Republicans in my state are trying to overturn an election. Gee, who gave them that idea?

	By Frank Bruni

Nothing should be shocking after Jan. 6, 2021, when an American president’s scheming to overturn the legitimate results of a fair election culminated in the bloody breaching of the Capitol. Still, I’m aghast at the audacity of what Republicans here in North Carolina are up to.

They are following in their leader’s footsteps and trying to steal an election. And if such an effort no longer seems as strange and sinister as it did before Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene and took a torch to whatever scruples still existed, that’s all the more reason to examine it closely. We need to be clear about where things stand. With an election denier about to move back into the White House and his disciples emboldened, our democracy is in danger. That’s the moral of the North Carolina story. It’s much, much bigger than this state.

The details: On Nov. 5, a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court was up for grabs, and the first official vote count showed that Allison Riggs, one of two Democrats among the court’s seven justices, had won re-election by a slim margin. Her Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin, demanded recounts. All in all, three separate counts gave Riggs a victory by slightly over 700 votes.

Which, in a properly functioning democracy with candidates and elected officials who put civic order and basic decency above their rapacity for power, would be the end of it. Hah. Griffin won’t concede. He continues to contest the result, which is being litigated simultaneously in state and federal courts. There won’t be any resolution for weeks.

The nature of his complaint is especially insidious. Griffin and the North Carolina Republican Party, which supports him, aren’t producing evidence of voter fraud or a botched count. They’re disputing the legitimacy of more than 60,000 ballots, principally because the registration forms of many of the voters who cast them lack either a driver’s license or Social Security number, as law requires.

But that doesn’t mean the voters did anything wrong. Some of them may have registered before that information became mandatory in 2004. Long after that point, North Carolina routinely accepted registration forms without it. It’s also possible that voters provided it but that it’s not present in the state database because of administrative error or faulty record keeping.

The bottom line is that most or all of these voters had no reason to believe there was any issue with their status or their ballots, and they aren’t being accused of malfeasance. They’re just pawns in Republicans’ last-ditch bid to reverse Griffin’s defeat however possible.

“It’s inexcusable,” Heath Clay, a Republican city councilman in Summerfield, N.C., whose ballot is among those 60,000, said in a recent article in The Times by Eduardo Medina and Michael Wines. He in fact voted for Griffin but accepts that North Carolinians “have spoken” and that Griffin lost, and he considers Griffin’s attempt to invalidate his and others’ ballots “a direct attack on the voters.”

Clay’s appearance on the list of voters whose ballots are in dispute demonstrates that Griffin and his Republican allies can’t even be certain that a new count subtracting those votes would benefit them. But many of those votes were cast with mailed ballots, and mailed ballots generally favored Riggs.

Last week, the Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked state election officials from certifying Riggs’s victory, thus keeping alive the possibility that Griffin could join their ranks and give them a 6-to-1 advantage over Democrats, versus the current 5-to-2. That increases the chances of Republican control of the court for many years.

Which matters not only in principle but also in practice: The court’s Republican majority has abetted Republican lawmakers’ aggressive gerrymandering of North Carolina, whose current U.S. House delegation, for example, contradicts the state’s political complexion. Although North Carolina has roughly equal numbers of registered Republicans and registered Democrats and just elected a Democratic governor, Josh Stein, by a nearly 15-point margin, it has only four Democrats among its 14 members of the House. It’s in some ways a paradigm of unrepresentative democracy.

And of Republican ruthlessness. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Andrew Dunn, a conservative who has worked as a Republican strategist and now produces a political newsletter in which he recently wrote: “I’ve spent years pushing back against the left’s tendency to go scorched earth in their rhetoric against N.C. Republicans. Everything is a ‘state of emergency,’ or ‘threat to democracy’ or ‘war’ on a beloved institution. Most of the time, it’s dishonest nonsense. Not this time.”

Dunn added that the North Carolina Supreme Court would destroy its credibility if it rewarded Griffin’s machinations.

Perhaps one of its own five Republican justices, Richard Dietz, agrees. In a dissent from his colleagues’ ruling that Griffin’s complaint should be heard, he wrote: “Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief.”

And incredible distrust of, and disgust with, the whole system. Except “incredible” isn’t the right adjective. I’m outraged without being the least bit surprised, and I’m almost sure of this: The fight over Riggs’s court seat is less anomaly than omen.

Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing was a sham

 

Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing was a sham

Tuesday’s hearing was supposed to be a chance to examine Hegseth’s qualifications and character to be Defense secretary, but it was a preen-fest for senators who clearly didn’t care about the assignment.

By  S. E. Cupp

 

  Jan 15, 2025, 2:37pm CST

Oh, how far we’ve fallen.

On Tuesday, the Senate began its confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet, starting with one of his more controversial picks, “Fox & Friends Weekend” host Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary.

The roughly four-hour performance was an utter waste of time, having accomplished nearly nothing, save the embarrassment it cast on the whole of American politics today, which seems to be in a race to continually lower our standards.

It goes without saying that Hegseth is unqualified to oversee a department of 3 million people and a budget of $850 billion. But you’d suppose qualified candidates would at least have experience running giant organizations. He does not.

His character is also in question, having been accused of drinking on the job and of sexual assault — which he denies — and having admitted to infidelity. Character should matter in every post, but especially in one overseeing national security.

The hearing was supposed to be an opportunity to cross-examine Hegseth on those two points — qualification and character — not to embarrass him, but to arrive at a conclusion about his readiness and suitability for the very important job he’s up for.

Instead, it was a preen-fest for senators who clearly did not understand, or care about, the assignment.

No one is surprised that Republicans asked Hegseth no hard questions, but that’s an indictment of the state of affairs in and of itself.

It was just as much the duty of GOP senators to suss out Hegseth’s qualifications as it was of Democrats, but instead they performed various acts of self-aggrandizement, Trump worship, and gaslighting.

They spoon-fed Hegseth statements-disguised-as-questions meant to flatter him and Trump, or to dunk on the left and wokeism.

“Fill that place with drunks, cheaters and incompetents”

After Democratic Michigan Sen. Gary Peters insisted Hegseth couldn’t get elected CEO by a board of directors, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin decided the best counter was to … agree, and throw Congress under the bus.

“There’s a lot of senators here I wouldn’t have on my board because there’s no qualifications except your age, and you’ve got to be living in the state and you’re a citizen of the United States to be a senator,” he said. "[Y]our qualifications aren’t any better. You guys aren’t any more qualified to be the senator than I’m qualified to be the senator, except we’re lucky enough to be here.”

From that bizarre self-own, he excused Hegseth’s drinking on the job (despite Hegseth insisting those were anonymous smears) and his infidelity by asking, “How many senators have showed up drunk to vote at night? Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign from their job? And then how many senators do you know have gotten a divorce before cheating on their wives? Did you ask them to step down? No, but it’s for show.”

So, for those playing at home, the GOP’s argument for confirming Hegseth is:

“This place is full of drunks, cheaters and incompetents, so let’s fill that place with drunks, cheaters, and incompetents, too.”

This, at a hearing in which Hegseth and Republicans are insisting with a straight face that it’s woke Democrats who are lowering the standards at Defense.

Over on the left, the performances weren’t much better. It seemed the main point for Democrats was to try to embarrass Hegseth. Of course, Trump means never having to say you’re sorry, and the new right doesn’t get embarrassed anymore.

So Hegseth deftly and defiantly filibustered and dodged Democrats’ statements-disguised-as-questions, and they let him, over and over again, content, it seems, just to make their preening points for cameras.

While all parties obsessed over quotas and affirmative action inside the military, there were very few questions about actual policy or what Hegseth knows about the job. Where were questions about Syria, Iran, Yemen or Saudi Arabia?

As Mark Cuban put it on Bluesky:

“I’m sorry but the Dems are ridiculously bad at their Hegspeth [sic] questions. IMO, if you want to prove someone is incompetent, you ask them the hardest strategic questions they will have to know to succeed at the job.”

Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., was similarly unimpressed:

“Honestly, the Dems questions today for Hegseth seemed weak, and they let him get away with too much. They need to do better.”

The system has totally broken down — Republicans shirked their responsibilities and Democrats botched theirs. Hegseth, meanwhile, exploited both to cruise to certain confirmation.

There’s literally no point to any of this Kabuki theater, and with every passing minute it seems we keep lowering our standards. If character and qualifications don’t matter anymore, what does?

 

Trump trying to rewrite history in battle to bury Smith report, legal experts say

 

Trump trying to rewrite history in battle to bury Smith report, legal experts say

Ex-prosecutors alarmed by attempt to hide 2020 election subversion effort and by pledge to pardon January 6 rioters

Peter Stone in Washington

Wed 15 Jan 2025 08.00 EST

Share

Donald Trump’s desperate legal battles to block a damaging special counsel report about his efforts to subvert his 2020 election loss and his sentencing for a 34-count felony conviction in New York ultimately failed, but former prosecutors say they nevertheless reveal his continual disdain for the rule of law and his penchant for rewriting history.

One area where that may imminently play out, as Trump prepares to return to the White House, is with his repeated pledge to issue “major pardons” to participants in the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol in Washington.

Trump and many of his allies have repeatedly sought to rewrite the events of January 6 as merely an enthusiastic protest by patriots, rather than an attempt to prevent Joe Biden’s legitimate election win being certified, underscoring Trump’s aversion to truth telling about the insurrection, critics say.00

With Trump poised to take office, his lawyers scrambled in vain – and lost – an appeal to the supreme court – to stop a New York judge from sentencing him on 10 January with no penalty for falsifying records to hide $130,000 in hush-money payments in 2016 to a porn star who alleged an affair with him, making Trump the first felon to be elected president.

Trump’s lawyers have spent days battling aggressively in the courts – with some success thus far – to halt the release of a two-part report by the special counsel Jack Smith detailing federal charges relating to Trump’s moves to thwart his 2020 defeat, and charges that Trump improperly took a large cache of classified documents with him after he left office.

A Florida federal judge appointed by Trump blocked the release of Smith’s report on both federal cases for days, but on Monday dropped her objections to the justice department releasing Smith’s report on Trump’s drive to overturn his 2020 defeat.

The department’s Tuesday release of that report dealt a major rebuke to the incoming president. Smith stressed that his office remained “fully behind” the prosecution’s merits, and its belief that it would have won the case if it went to trial as originally intended last year.

Although the 137-page report contained few new details, it provided a strong historical account of Smith’s two-year investigation, which included grand-jury testimony from over 55 witnesses and voluntary interviews with more than 250 individuals, and stressed Trump’s multiple attempts to illegally thwart his loss.

The report highlighted Trump’s repeated promotion of “demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false” assertions about his 2020 election loss, which were integral to Trump’s pressure tactics and which helped fuel the January 6 attack.

Smith stressed that “but for Mr Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial”.

Trump, who has repeatedly denied all the charges, condemned Smith at 2am on Tuesday on Truth Social as a “lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the election”.

The case was slated for trial last year but short-circuited by a much criticized supreme court ruling that barred prosecutions for a president’s “official acts”. It was dropped after Trump’s election victory, since sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted.

The justice department’s release of the election subversion report by Smith, who resigned – as was expected – as special counsel on Friday, days before Trump takes office, is seen by legal experts as important for the historical record by summing up the election subversion case against Trump.

On another legal battleground, Trump has pledged that in his “first hour” in office he will make “major pardons” for some of the 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists – who he has called “patriots” – charged in the Capitol attack, despite strong concerns from legal experts that such pardons would hurt the criminal justice system. According to the US justice department, about 1,000 people have pleaded guilty to felonies or misdemeanors.

Legal critics worry, too, about potential violence and damage to the rule of law spurred by Trump’s drumbeat of dangerous threats to exact revenge against political foes, including Smith and the former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who led a House panel’s hearings into the Capitol attack.

Trump has repeatedly called the federal and New York cases against him “witch-hunts” and examples of “lawfare” that he portrays in conspiratorial terms as politically driven by Democrats.

But ex-prosecutors and legal scholars say Trump’s legal gymnastics to block his sentencing and Smith’s election subversion report, plus his promised pardons and talk of revenge, undermine the rule of law and are desperate attempts to rewrite history to avoid public stigmas.

“It is often said that we are a nation of laws and not men,” said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor for Michigan’s eastern district who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “Trump seems to want us to be a nation of one man – Trump.”

McQuade added that what happens with “pardons for the Jan[uary] 6 defendants, Smith’s report on Trump’s retention of classified documents, and Trump’s call for revenge prosecutions will reveal whether the rule of law maintains its integrity”.

McQuade cautioned: “By promising to pardon the Jan[uary] 6 defendants and framing as wrongdoers the law enforcement officials who investigated him, Trump is attempting to rewrite history. As his former attorney general, William Barr, so cynically put it: ‘History is written by the winners.’”

Other former prosecutors concur that Trump has a long track record of retaliating against political critics.

“Trump’s narcissism compels him to attack anything or any person who portrays him negatively,” said Ty Cobb, a former justice department official who worked as a White House counsel during Trump’s first term. “Trump is all for transparency when it comes to the conduct of his enemies, but obstructs transparency in any form when it applies to him.”

Other justice department veterans have raised concerns about the dangers to the judicial system posed by Trump’s drive to block the release of Smith’s report and his New York sentencing.

“We shouldn’t be surprised at the unrelenting efforts by Trump to escape accountability for his conviction in the New York case,” said the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich. “That is what he does. But it is nothing short of mortifying that he came within one supreme court justice of nullifying the New York verdict.”

Bromwich said that the release of Smith’s election subversion report is “a pale substitute for a public trial, but a form of political and historical accountability”. Ironically, he noted that a few of Trump’s lawyers who “tried to bury the report of the special counsel” have been tapped by Trump for top posts in his justice department, where their jobs “will be to defend the special counsel regulations. Their arguments should be an interesting line of questioning during their confirmation hearings.”

Critics notwithstanding, Trump has launched withering personal and political attacks against the New York judge who sentenced him, and against Smith.

Although Juan Merchan only sentenced Trump to “unconditional discharge” with no jail time or probation, and allowed him to appear remotely at the hearing, Trump trashed the whole case against him.

“It was done to damage my reputation so I would lose the election, and obviously that didn’t work,” Trump said.

A week earlier, when Merchan announced the 10 January sentencing date, Trump lashed out, calling him “corrupt”, on his Truth Social platform, despite recent strong public warnings from the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, who, without mentioning Trump, decried mounting threats against judges and the judicial system.

And in apocalyptic fashion, Trump said the judge’s decision to sentence him “would be the end of the presidency as we know it”.

In a similarly conspiratorial and false vein before the release of Smith’s election subversion report, Trump attacked him on Truth Social last weekend, writing that “deranged Jack Smith was fired today by the DoJ”. Trump later endorsed and expanded an online post stating Smith should be “disbarred” and “ indicted”.

Such attacks have prompted legal critics to sound more alarms about Trump’s repeated threats to seek retribution against his political foes and to issue large-scale pardons when he assumes the presidency.

“It is a fundamental principle of our criminal justice system that we do not prosecute for the purpose of retribution,” said the former federal judge John Jones, who is now the president of Dickinson College. “Nor should charges be brought selectively,” stressing that these are “bedrock precepts”.

Likewise, Jones defended the fairness of the legal system that has led to 1,500 convictions and guilty pleas by January 6 defendants.

“Those who were prosecuted were given almost excessive due process,” he said, adding that blanket pardons would “signal to future insurrectionists that they can engage in violence impeding the operation of the government with impunity”.

Legal watchdogs, too, are concerned about Trump’s promised pardons.

“President Trump’s plan to pardon the January 6 attackers signals his intent to abuse his power. Pardoning loyalists for political violence is an action of an autocrat serving his own ends,” said Adav Noti, the executive director of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center.

Similarly, Bromwich warned of serious fallout if Trump “follows through on his pledge to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists, including those who assaulted police officers. If he does, it will be the most consequential abuse of the pardon power in American history.

“All the work of prosecutors, agents, judges and juries who were involved in those legitimate prosecutions will be for nought. Justice department officials who stand for the rule of law should do everything in their power to prevent it.”

The former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman, who now is a law professor at Columbia University, said he saw public benefits with Trump’s sentencing and the release of Smith’s election subversion report.

Richman said both “will be markers for history. Trump is now a convicted felon, the first to serve as president. And Smith’s report has laid out an account of criminal wrongdoing that only Trump’s successful delaying tactics prevented Smith from having a chance to prove up in court. Whether these are just time capsules or small moves toward accountability remains to be seen.”