Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics, coverage, and consequences of Campaign 2024.
Monday morning, before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th and possibly final president of the United States, Joe Biden hosted him at the White House. "Welcome home," Biden told Trump as he arrived, and then brought him in for tea.
At midday, the Capitol flags were flying at full staff in Trump's honor, on the orders of House Speaker Mike Johnson, interrupting the traditional half-staff memorial that Biden had proclaimed for Jimmy Carter. Inside, in the rotunda, Biden sat and listened as Donald Trump attacked him as a lawless president. "The scales of justice will be rebalanced," Trump declared. "The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end."
Before the day was over, Trump had rebalanced the scales, commuting the sentences of the people convicted of sedition in the Jan. 6 attack, issuing a mass pardon to 1,600 other convicted or indicted participants in the attack, and ordering the Justice Department to drop any future cases. The Supreme Court's gift of presidential immunity to prosecution and personal exemption from the Fourteenth Amendment's insurrection clause now extended, by royal blessing, to the entire mob. The violent attempt to overthrow Joe Biden's election was categorically, entirely legal.
This was what Trump had promised all along, even as people supposed out loud that surely he wouldn't give clemency to the people who had actually beaten police officers with weapons, or who had unquestionably plotted the assault in advance. Trump had to be talking about the people who he believed just got carried away, caught up in their disappointment at how the election went and their hope that it could be turned another way.
No. Trump pardoned the people who tried to steal the election by force because he'd wanted them to steal the election by force. When he told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" in 2020, he wasn't free-associating his way through mangled syntax to get through a tough debate question. He was telling the most brutal elements among his supporters that he was counting on them—that their mutual loyalty was more important than the law, let alone the niceties of American political discourse. There is no such thing as breaking the law if someone does it for Trump.
After eight years of loosening of the Constitution to make room for Trump's desires, the job is complete. It took less than 24 hours for the Constitution to be scattered in pieces on the arena floor where the new president was signing executive orders and tossing pens to the crowd. He declared his intention to revoke the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of birthright citizenship and ordered the attorney general to inflict "conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes," Eighth Amendment be damned, on the federal prisoners whose death sentences Biden had commuted. He likewise threw out Eighth Amendment protections by ordering federal prisons to send trans women to men's facilities and to stop funding gender-affirming treatment.
Meanwhile Senate Republicans, bullied by Trump and Elon Musk into abdicating their power to advise and consent, were advancing Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense out of committee on a 14-13 party-line vote—given cover by an FBI background investigation, reportedly carried out on the Trump team's terms, that didn't include an interview with the woman who'd accused Hegseth of drunkenly raping her. And the poor old emoluments clause, bent to allow Trump to collect cash from foreign governments through his D.C. hotel in his first term, now evidently accommodates the $300 million in unsupervised money—and billions on billions in valuation—that Trump soaked up by issuing a memecoin on his way into office last week. The project was so transparently scammy that the crypto industry, which pumped dark money into his campaign in exchange for his promise to be its regulatory savior, began to panic. They had been hoping for a little finesse.
Instead, they got the spectacle of brute self-interest, right along with everyone else. For all the pundits blankly droning about the will of the people, the Trump mandate is not a mandate of popular support—the general public still despises him, and not even his hand-picked audience in the Rotunda could bounce to its feet for his promises to enforce the gender binary or to reinstate military members who insubordinately refused the COVID-19 vaccine. The campaign version of Trump had to plead ignorance and innocence of the entire policy program that the officeholding version of Trump had racked up for his signing rally. The true Trump mandate was built up over the years, by compliant courts, shameless loyalists, feckless opposition, a wounded press, and a plutocracy that wanted the chance to sink its teeth into the belly of republican self-government: The mandate is if he ever got power again, no one would stop him.
So Biden took his place in the Rotunda, dutifully offering himself as a prop in the pageant of democracy. And Trump used him as a different kind of prop: a representative of the defeated "radical and corrupt establishment," the author of a "horrible betrayal," a leader who had abandoned "the wonderful people of North Carolina" to a hurricane, a director of a program of "government censorship." When Trump took credit, as "a peacemaker and a unifier," for the fact that "as of yesterday, one day before I assumed office, the hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families," Biden and Kamala Harris stood up and clapped with everyone else.
What else could they have done—skipped the ceremony? Mike Pence was there, too, in the same building where the mob had gone hunting for him four years before, to hear Trump declare that "Liberation Day" had arrived. There were norms and traditions to uphold. The question the opposition still can't face, after nine years and counting, is: Who cares? Who are the arbiters who will see the spectacle of politicians honoring etiquette and reward them for it?
Donald Trump's belief that a good loser is a chump is its own confirmation. If you try to be a good loser to Trump, he will make a chump out of you. In the midst of the evening barrage of executive orders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on Bluesky that it was "time to look to the future" and that his chamber "must respond with resolve, bipartisanship, and fidelity to the working and middle class of this country." At Trump's arena event, Elon Musk was already snapping off what neo-Nazis celebrated as a Nazi salute, to the cheering crowd.
