T H E T R I U M P H O F INDECENCY
Or, the importance of being appalled
BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG
At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed,
humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically
impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th.
Be there, will be wild!”
In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a
33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound affection
for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical
vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the
Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers,
he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows.
The gallows had been erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do,
in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”
“Them worthless fucking shitholes like Jerry Nadler,
fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know,
Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said.
“They don’t need a
jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers
while everybody video tapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”
Dempsey was not an organizer of the
siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted
Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was
certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer
with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head.
Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence
reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was
trying to disarm him.” All told, more than 140 police officers
were injured in the riot, many seriously.
I attended the January 6 rally
on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to
have a country anymore.” Then I walked with the crowd to the
Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re
going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.” What I
remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not,
to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the
assault, and I had stayed near the White House to listen to Trump—but I did
come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical
gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly
remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a
performance of zealous commitment. Later we would learn that these men—some of
whom were Proud Boys— believed that they would actually be arresting members of
Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all
in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the
Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be
grifted.
After the riot, Dempsey returned to
California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty
to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a
dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Six months later, in the summer of
2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a
“day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if
they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025,
shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others
charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection.
(Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys
movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)
Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with
assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using
deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had
received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and
repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was
sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend,
“Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year
sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal
whip.
A day after the pardons were
announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more
than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were
people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be
appropriate.”
Trump had something else to say
during that first press conference of his new
term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” is would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not
last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability
to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky
wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.
I understand that a review—even a
short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive. But
repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew.
So, in brief: Trump has dismantled
America’s foreign aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier
Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he
has encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has
instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a
crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and
idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the
independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on
prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family,
and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has
applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its
unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of
immigrants; he has employed un usually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented
immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge
in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those
are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has
said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants
as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters
“ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of
a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he
has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder
of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the
Democrats the party of “evil.”
Yet, even when weighed against this
stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot
soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was
an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. By
pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that
it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.
The power to pardon is a vestige of
America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an
awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with
self restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.
We have been watching indecency
triumph in the public sphere on and o€ for more than
10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For
reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of
American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by
it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by
me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection
from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental
indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.
In an important essay, Andrew
Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style
and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept
the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a
country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force
it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. “It is one
thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is
indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a
foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration
laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to
cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so
that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted
to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow
be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”
The subject of Trump’s in decency
came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name
the most norm- defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise,
Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier
that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of
indecency. At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his
who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.
Obama, a model of dignified
presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and
Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and
adherence to long- established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s
decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage
boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,”
Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”
We are in a long Lord of the Flies
moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full
of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking
cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military
leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in
particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded
followers —these days can seem infernal. Trump’s term is one quarter over; a
piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going
through hell, keep going.
