The Shame of It All

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, January 24, 2025

 

How many pardoned January 6 rioters will serve in the next Congress?

 

I’d set the over/under at something like 3.5, with an outside chance that there’ll be enough elected to form a small but vibrant House Insurrectionist Caucus. Come January 2027, it’s quite likely that some Capitol Police officer stationed inside the building will feel a flash of recognition as a new congressman passes him in the hall: Isn’t that the guy who bear-sprayed me and clubbed me with a flagpole?

 

Per The Daily Beast, some are already thinking about a future in politics. Convicted seditionist Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, was back on Capitol Hill Wednesday, one day after Donald Trump commuted his 18-year sentence. He told the Wall Street Journal that he hopes to work in Trump’s administration, possibly at, uh, the FBI. Proud Boys chief Enrique Tarrio, reprieved from a 22-year sentence for his own seditionist activity, more modestly imagined himself door-knocking for candidates who represent “the new conservative movement” to which he belongs.

 

If you open your door in the fall of 2026 to find a goon squad of scowling brownshirts on your porch demanding that you accept a campaign flier for the local Republican or else, the smart move is to say “thanks” and accept. Don’t bother calling the cops; if you live in a red state and someone ends up getting hurt, these chuds will just get pardoned again.

 

The more ambitious J6ers are destined to think bigger by running for office themselves, though, and why wouldn’t they? Empowering violent seditionists is an American tradition. No fewer than 63 former Confederates were chosen to serve in the U.S. Senate following the Civil War. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, was named to the Senate by Georgia’s state legislature the year after the war ended but was barred. Undaunted, he successfully ran for the U.S. House in 1873 and held his seat for nearly a decade.

 

Nationalists believe that making America great “again” requires making it more like it used to be, right? Well, it used to be that insurrectionists were rewarded with high office, and so it will be again. “Greatness” is a nuanced concept.

 

Skeptics might remind me at this point that pardoning the J6ers is quite unpopular, as are the J6ers themselves. A CBS News poll published earlier this month found that, even among Republicans, just 30 percent approved of those who forced themselves into the Capitol that day; an equal share strongly disapproved and 40 percent somewhat disapproved. Which, admittedly, doesn’t sound like the makings of a successful congressional candidacy.

 

Just you wait, though.

 

Unpopularity contest.

 

A key early subplot of Trump’s second term is Democrats agonizing over how much to cooperate with the president and his party and how much to resist. “We’re obviously in a bit of disarray,” one Democratic senator bluntly confessed to Semafor. “I don’t think people are really completely sure about what lesson is to be learned in this election.” What goal should liberals set for the coming year?

 

On Wednesday Jonathan Last made it simple for them: Democrats should do everything they can to make Trump less popular. “When a president is popular, nothing sticks and nothing matters,” he wrote. “When a president is unpopular, every stupid, random thing is a catastrophe they have to answer for.” Trump’s political capital won’t begin to erode until the public stops extending him the benefit of the doubt, so job one for the left is do what it can to make that happen.

 

Events might do it for them. Already the price of eggs is on its way up, for instance, not because of Trump’s policies but because bird flu has killed 30 million chickens in the past three months. Even so, fickle American voters aren’t known for being sticklers about cause and effect. If those voters come to believe that candidate Trump sold them some magic beans about controlling the cost of living, disillusionment about him might spread the same way it did about Joe Biden after the collapse of Afghanistan. Biden never recovered. Trump might not either.

 

Egg prices are out of Democrats’ hands—but rubbing Trump’s face in his filthy pardons and commutations for the J6ers is not, Last argued. The out party should showcase the worst of the worst among the insurrectionists in advertising campaigns and make household names of people like David Dempsey, who used “his hands, feet, flag poles, crutches, pepper spray, broken pieces of furniture, and anything else he could get his hands on” to attack police officers, according to prosecutors. If Americans come to think of Dempsey when they think of Trump, the president will be badly damaged.

 

It’s a nice theory. But I don’t buy it and neither does Trump. How else to explain his surreal interest in inviting some of the freed J6ers to the White House?

 

Normally politicians are sensitive about photo ops. Think of the reports you see every midterm cycle about skittish congressmen who are up for reelection in competitive districts avoiding their party’s unpopular president and asking him not to campaign in their backyards. The fastest way to lose popularity in politics is to be seen gladhanding someone who’s already unpopular. Yet the J6ers are unpopular and Trump seems eager to gladhand them.

 

Why? If Last is right that the insurrectionists are a potential liability for him, the last thing he should want to do is saddle himself with that liability by embracing them.

 

But this is where Trump, the most successful con artist who’s ever lived, understands human psychology better than eggheads like Last and I do.

 

Shame and shamelessness.

 

Embracing the J6ers might hurt him a bit in the near term, but it’ll pay off in the long run by reducing the social stigma around them. The way the president will keep them from becoming a political liability isn’t by avoiding them, it’s by doing the opposite—by normalizing them until people hear the name “David Dempsey” and don’t blink.

 

Shamelessness is infectious. If there’s anything profound about Trumpism, it’s that.

 

It’s been said before that shamelessness is Trump’s superpower, but that’s not quite right. His superpower is making a spectacle of his shamelessness to convince Americans who should know better that there isn’t anything to be ashamed of. Students of demagoguery have always marveled at the cunning he displays by not trying to hide his corruption, something I saw firsthand recently in chatting with family about his new memecoin bribery scam. How can it be corrupt, one relative wondered, if he’s doing it out in the open?

 

To a human being prone to normal emotions like shame and remorse, his sheer brazenness is powerful evidence that he sincerely believes he’s done nothing wrong—which in turn is evidence that he really might not have done anything wrong. That’s the essence of his messaging strategy around January 6, one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in U.S. history. Through herculean amounts of shamelessness and gaslighting, never apologizing or betraying any sense of regret, the president and his toadies in right-wing media successfully persuaded millions of swing voters that America’s first-ever coup attempt was either no big deal or some sort of frame-up.

 

If, through sheer shamelessness, you can turn a putsch into what’s functionally a 50-50 issue, you can do anything.

 

So why wouldn’t he continue to follow that strategy with the J6ers? By welcoming them to the White House, he’d be signaling in the boldest way possible that he and they have nothing to be ashamed of. The stigma around them will erode, leading elements of the public that had looked dimly on the insurrection to feel more ambivalent about it. And Republican voters, always so susceptible to Trump’s influence, might at last come to see them as the “patriots” he’s forever claiming they are.

 

By the time some of them run for Congress in 2026, the 70 percent of the GOP that disapproves of pardoning them will have softened considerably. In blood-red House districts, their criminal convictions will be seen as badges of honor, afforded the sort of respect that the right once reserved for military service. I wouldn’t entirely rule out David Dempsey returning to the Capitol, this time as his place of employment.

 

If you want to boil frogs, you have to turn up the heat. That’s what Trump is doing by embracing the J6ers. It might already be working: The latest poll on his decision to grant clemency to insurrectionists has 43 percent in favor, easily the best numbers I’ve ever seen on that question. After the inevitable thumbs-up photo op with Rhodes and Tarrio in the Oval Office, I wouldn’t be surprised if it settles in the high 40s.

 

The end of outrage.

 

You can see why Democrats are at sea right now about how to confront Trump.

 

They’re at sea on policy, spooked by the fact that some of their working-class base defected to the GOP on Election Day. If they pitch a fit over his immigration crackdown, the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, they’ll be seen as the same ol’ open-borders radicals that Americans rejected in November. 

 

But they’re also at sea on how to respond to civic abominations like the J6 pardons. Granted, numerous congressional liberals criticized Trump for that this week, but the tone was muted. “In one fell swoop, he gave cover and a permission structure for political violence in this country,” Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock said of Trump—before pronouncing himself “concerned.” In the president’s first term, Warnock and his colleagues would have been a lot more than “concerned” about him choosing to place political street fighters and paramilitary thugs above the law.

 

I don’t blame Democrats for not leaning into moral outrage this week, though. Why bother? It doesn’t work. Americans don’t share it, or don’t share it enough. The campaign was a referendum on whether the shame of having a president with a coup plot, two impeachments, and four indictments to his record would bother swing voters enough to prefer a lackluster normie Democrat instead. We got our answer.

 

No wonder some of the shriller Trump critics in the media are either calling for détente with the White House or being quietly sidelined. Shrillness has gotten us nowhere. (Although it works okay if you earn a living by writing a daily political newsletter, ahem.) Voters want to give Trump a shot on policy and have been successfully conditioned not to feel ashamed of him, no matter how disgustingly he behaves. If you’re a left-wing officeholder, why howl into the void about it?

 

Even if Democrats had an effective message, it’s an open question at this point whether they could overcome Trump’s propaganda machine and reach Americans in meaningful numbers. An example: Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the 2020 popular vote was three times larger than Trump’s in 2024 but almost twice as many Americans believe Trump won more comfortably than Biden did. That’s what two and a half months of relentless moronic “MOST HISTORIC LANDSLIDE EVER” screeching has done to public opinion.

 

Our politics is increasingly postliberal on policy and already post-shame on leadership: What exactly can Democrats do except pray for the price of eggs to double?

 

Frankly, I wonder if Jonathan Last is right to believe that driving down Trump’s popularity would meaningfully constrain his power as president. He’s term-limited (hopefully!) and clearly intends to govern much more autocratically this time around, having learned the ins and outs of wielding power over his first four years. If pardoning the J6ers really does hurt his approval rating, so what? Are the congressional Republicans who feared in 2021 that they’d be killed if they voted to impeach him going to courageously roadblock his agenda when he’s polling at 43 percent approval instead of 48?

 

The point of the authoritarian project is to treat all constraints on executive power, including public opinion, as illegitimate and to desensitize the public to that fact. Pardoning the J6ers can be understood as another step in the process. If Americans don’t like it, tough. They put him in charge; they’ll learn to live with it.

 

The next riot.

 

I’m convinced that Americans will end up holding Trump to a lower standard morally, ethically, and civically in his second term than they have other presidents, and not just because his infectious shamelessness has numbed them to his outrages.

 

It’s because, unlike in his first term, they knew what they were signing up for. You cannot watch January 6 happen, vote for him four years later, and then huff indignantly when he starts his own crypto Ponzi scheme or cuts off security for a critic who’s under credible threat of being murdered by terrorists. Even if you feel a pang of vestigial embarrassment or disgust about it, you can’t complain without looking like a preposterous rube. Trump is being Trump. What on earth did you expect?

 

So many Americans won’t complain, if only to save face. They’ll rationalize. If he wants to pardon a bunch of insurrectionists and then make them FBI agents or whatever, Trump voters will swallow that bitter pill with a pained smile on their faces and strain for a way to celebrate the taste. “They might turn out to be good agents because they really understand how the justice system works now.”

 

We can (and should) scoff at Trump’s claims that the election gave him a “mandate” on policy given the narrowness of his victory and questionable popular support for key parts of agenda. But a mandate to behave shamelessly? It’s hard to argue that Americans didn’t grant him that.

 

When I read a list of 10 excuses Republicans in Congress have already made for his despicable J6 pardons, then, I’m of two minds about it. On the one hand, the moral depravity required to justify impunity for violent seditionists is so irresponsible in political leadership that it feels like a Rubicon-crossing, even by the loathsome standards of the GOP. After this, I can’t imagine what Republican leaders could or would say to voters in party primaries to discourage them from electing insurrectionists to Congress.

 

Come to think of it, I can’t imagine what they could or would say to condemn the next act of organized violence to serve Trump. If leftists stage a sit-in to obstruct federal immigration officials from detaining some illegal immigrants, and a bunch of Proud Boys show up and stab some of them to death, what’s the Republican take on that? The best we could expect, I think, is some mealy-mouthed both-sides-ism about how violence is bad but civil disobedience is also bad.

 

So, certainly, the cowardice they showed this week by not emphatically denouncing the pardons is reprehensible. But on the other hand: What on earth did you expect?

 

Our problem is not Republicans in Congress or even the Republican in the White House. Our problem, as ever, is the millions of boiled frogs who’ve concluded that shamelessness is a political virtue, not a vice. Blame them for what’s happened, and for what’s to come.