By Jeffrey Goldberg
Tuesday, January 06, 2026
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 fucking 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 videotapes 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.” This 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 unusually 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 off 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 indecency 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment