J6ers

Dictators adore their personal paramilitaries. Mussolini had his Blackshirts, Hitler his SS, Stalin his NKVD, Saddam Hussein his Fedayeen Saddam. A force loyal only to the leader can suppress dissent and execute orders that state institutions might resist. That’s especially terrific when the dictator is still consolidating power and hasn’t yet subordinated all state law enforcement to himself. Even later it’s helpful to maintain a separation between the fanatics, who are ready to do anything at all, and ordinary cops.

Why, on his first day in office, did Trump pardon all the January 6 convicts and defendants, about 1500 people, some of whom brutally attacked Capitol police, many of them members of domestic terrorist groups Oath Keeper and Proud Boys, fourteen of them convicted of seditious conspiracy? The leading answers are one or another version of what I heard Tuesday morning in a NYT video explainer: Trump

• “is trying to show that he is fulfilling a pledge that he had made to people who were arrested essentially in support of him,” and
• “has also been trying for four years to rewrite the history of what took place that day and this helps him to achieve that goal.”

Well, there’s no denying that these are among the reasons, but they’re not the reason we should be most worried about.

The people Trump has pardoned have proved their readiness to break the law, violently, for Donald Trump. They risked physical injury or death in the act itself and severe punishment as a consequence—and that was when they owed him nothing! Now he’s sprung them from prison, canceled the cases against them, and promised retribution against the government officials (now former officials) who took them “hostage.” 

Possibly scarier than the pardonees themselves are the inevitable new recruits, bandwagoners who might not have risked it when they worried that violent sedition could get you mixed up with the law.

The Supreme Court has already placed Trump himself beyond the reach of criminal prosecution. Now Trump, in turn, has used his pardon power to put militants loyal only to him above the law as well.

An expanded J6er group might grow out of Oath Keepers or Proud Boys, but whatever its form, they’d be working for Trump and protected by the implicit promise of pardons. They could help Trump fulfill many of his illegal objectives, even if the court system that he’s already corrupted doesn’t always give him a clean thumbs up. J6ers could also terrorize Trump’s opponents, along with undocumented people and whoever the next scapegoats might be.

Count me not among the doom-sayers. Trump might not aspire to become a Mussolini. He might not even manage to become an Orbán. 

But it’s all still on the table so far, and it’s not an accident.

Best,

David