Black Marks

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, June 12, 2026

 

There’s no such thing as a dignified Republican in 2026, but there are ways for Republicans to make less of a spectacle of their indignity. And so I offer this advice to John Cornyn, Thom Tillis, and others in Congress whose careers will end this year because they ran afoul of la grande orange:

 

Say nothing. Better to be silent in defeat than find the “courage” to speak up against the president only after you no longer risk a primary challenge by doing so.

 

“If he would do that to me, he would do that to anybody,” Cornyn complained to the New York Times this week about Donald Trump’s decision to endorse his Republican challenger in Texas. “There’s never going to be good enough for him, other than 100 percent, you know, slavish adherence to whatever he wants.” That’s true—as has been obvious even to young children for the last 10 years.

 

For Cornyn to object to it now means he’s either extremely unobservant or he spent the last decade timidly biting his tongue as his party devolved into a fascist personality cult. I don’t think he’s unobservant.

 

It got worse. When asked whether retiring senators like him now feel more emboldened to oppose Trump on legislative matters, he referred the Times to the president’s famous (and incorrect) remark to Volodymyr Zelensky about not having any “cards” against Russia. “We’ve got some cards to play,” Cornyn boasted.

 

That’s also true. Just last week, he and his colleagues had a major card to play when $70 billion in funding for ICE came to the floor. And they … didn’t play it.

 

Tillis warned beforehand that he wouldn’t support the bill unless it included language blocking the president’s taxpayer-money slush fund for MAGA criminals. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had assured the Senate that the fund wouldn’t move forward, but Tillis didn’t trust him, quite sensibly. The senator wanted to kill the program officially, so he offered an amendment to the ICE bill that would have converted the slush fund into an “anti-fraud” fund.

 

The amendment failed. Whereupon Tillis—and card-playin’ John Cornyn, who’s also criticized the fund—voted for the ICE bill anyway.

 

Particularly when they know, or should know, that he’s going to embarrass them further by resurrecting the slush fund that they foolishly neglected to kill. The president has entered “legacy mode,” you see, and in his case “legacy mode” means rewriting history to reframe the worst things he’s ever done as ackshually good.

 

Whitewash.

 

It will not surprise you to learn that Blanche lied by omission to senators when he said the slush fund wouldn’t move forward. That might be technically true, according to The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick, in the sense that the original mechanism for paying out money to criminals will change. But have no doubt: The Trump administration still intends to see to it that those criminals get rich.

 

I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated.

 

…

 

Officials told me that those who believe they were victims of a weaponized government may ultimately need to file lawsuits so they can then receive settlements from a previously established Justice Department fund. Suing the government is not a new idea. But typically the government looks for ways to defend itself; in this case, officials are exploring proposals to facilitate litigation and to expedite payments without requiring an expensive and lengthy process that might draw attention. One former DOJ official told me that discussions are happening about how to provide legal support at scale to those who want to file lawsuits. “They’ll sue, and they’ll settle,” the former official said of the plan.

 

Instead of a dedicated “anti-weaponization fund” handing out millions to January 6 degenerates like candy on Halloween, there’ll be a pseudo-adversarial process in which each degenerate will need to file a formal legal complaint to receive his candy. (Assuming it survives a court challenge, of course.) Thank Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who did nothing to prevent this heist when they had the chance.

 

The fund isn’t the only way that Trump is trying to rehabilitate the insurrection, though—or, amazingly, the most outrageous. The WSJ reported Thursday that the White House is discussing whether to lean on House Republicans to pass a resolution that would purport to “void” his two first-term impeachments.

 

It was a cockamamie idea when the GOP first considered it in 2023, and it is more cockamamie now. Legally, it would be meaningless, as there’s no constitutional mechanism to unimpeach someone. Politically, it would be idiotic, reminding voters that Trump has always been unfit for the presidency when they’re already down on him. And for what? The measure will probably fail on the floor, which would have the effect of “ratifying” the impeachments instead of voiding them.

 

And electorally it could be poisonous. If there’s any way for the president to signal more clearly to voters that he doesn’t give a rip about the cost of living, goading his toadies in Congress into revisiting his first-term grudges as gas approaches $5 per gallon would be it. One of the better Republican arguments against electing Democrats this fall is that the left will use its time in power to focus on all things Trump rather than improve Americans’ lives. What’s left of that argument if the GOP spends the home stretch of the midterm campaign doing the same thing?

 

The icing on the cake is that “voiding” Trump’s impeachments is destined to be about as popular as the slush fund is. One recent poll found 52 percent of Republicans—not Americans, but members of the president’s own party—oppose giving taxpayer cash to people who believe the government was “weaponized” against them. We might expect a bit more support than that on the right for trying to unimpeach the ringleader of the January 6 coup plot, but it’ll be a bottomless pit of contempt among Democrats and independents.

 

So why, with an election less than five months away, would Trump bother?

 

The WSJ knows. “The effort to ‘expunge’ Trump’s impeachments fits with a wider campaign to erase black marks on his record,” the paper noted. “His lawyers are trying to overturn his criminal conviction for falsifying records to cover up hush money paid to a porn star, and they are seeking to reverse unfavorable civil rulings.”

 

The president will be 80 years old on Sunday. The end is approaching, and not just the end of his term. He has many “black marks” and he knows it, and that legacy clearly occupies more of his mental bandwidth than, say, his party’s electoral chances this fall. What can he do about it?

 

“Try being a better person and a better president?” you might say. Sure, but if he knew how to do that—or was willing to—he would have done it already. Besides, the die is already cast.

 

I think he’s doing what any strongman would instinctively do in his predicament. He’s trying to brute-force a better legacy for himself by abusing his power to whitewash his sins from the public consciousness.

 

Moral ambivalence.

 

I’ve always thought Trump was lucky in one sense to be an American and unlucky in another. He had the good fortune to live his life in a country that worships wealth, celebrity, showmanship, and crude machismo, and he took full advantage. But he had the bad fortune to be born an authoritarian demagogue within a constitutional system that still somewhat limits his ability to rule as he’d like.

 

The tyrants in China whose methods he admires so much can suppress public awareness of their own “black marks” to a degree that the First Amendment would never permit him to do. The president’s interest in “voiding” his impeachments reflects the same Orwellian impulse to write events out of history that reflect badly on him, but the hard fact remains that he can’t memory-hole January 6.

 

So what he’s doing instead is using executive authority to try to create moral uncertainty around it, aiming to turn a “black mark” into something that posterity will view as closer to gray. He pardoned the insurrectionists, then moved to remunerate them with the slush fund, and now wants the House to absolve him of wrongdoing for his gross dereliction of duty in trying to overturn the 2020 election. All of that is an attempt to manufacture moral sanction, attesting to the righteousness of what he and others did.

 

He can’t memory-hole what happened—although God knows, he’s tried—but he can perhaps turn January 6 into something about which future generations feel ambivalent, an event whose obscenity is deemed debatable.

 

And in a way, if he succeeds, it’ll be an appropriate legacy for him. Trumpism is an alternate morality more so than it is a political program, or so I’ve always believed. The president’s most enduring influence on American politics won’t be the border wall or his idiotic tariffs but the idea, as I wrote last month, that “whether an action is right or wrong, good or evil, depends entirely on whether one benefits from it or not.” Fighting to a long-term draw along those lines in public opinion about a violent coup plot would be a supreme triumph for his worldview.

 

Whether a “black mark” is black is ultimately a matter of whether it’s to your advantage to think so. Who says postmodernism is left-wing?

 

There are other, more mundane reasons for Trump wanting to expunge January 6 from the public record. On some level he’s probably driven by a simple pigheaded impulse to “win” an argument that he’s been having for five years. He seems to think, with some justification, that he can talk anyone into believing anything, including himself. His “rigged election” mania may be a case of a master bullsh-tter chasing his white whale, aiming to prove that there’s no reality so big that he can’t harpoon it through sheer mendacious determination.

 

He’s also likely motivated by the opportunities this subject presents to impose new loyalty tests on Republicans. Postliberals are forever obsessed with sniffing out heretics, as purging conscientious people from their ranks is the only way to achieve the degree of absolute ruthlessness they’re convinced they need to overcome their political enemies. “Expunge the impeachments” and “support the slush fund” are easy ways to smoke out non-sociopaths like Cornyn and Tillis and clear a path for better-qualified candidates like Ken Paxton.

 

I’d imagine that Trump is also keen to humiliate Congress and the Justice Department, the arms of the government that sought to hold him accountable after the insurrection, by enlisting them to whitewash his “black marks” now. He doesn’t need them to do so, strictly speaking: Nothing’s stopping him from declaring his two impeachments “void” (as preposterous as that would be) or from paying the January 6ers out of the billions of dollars he’s made by turning the presidency into a racket.

 

But doing things that way wouldn’t exact “retribution” on two entities that made a spectacle of his disgrace after his coup attempt. He’s turned both of them into laughingstocks over the past 16 months; roping them into undoing his impeachments and cutting checks to criminals they prosecuted would be a sort of coup de grace, a master stroke in the postliberal campaign to denigrate liberal institutions and destroy public confidence in them.

 

Still, though, I think this is mostly about Trump’s legacy.

 

Black and gilt.

 

The “black marks” he’s seeking to erase strike me as the flip side of the gilt fixtures he’s smeared across the Oval Office’s walls, not to mention the more grandiose vanity projects in which he’s engaged around the capital. Both are coping mechanisms for the public’s obvious buyer’s remorse about his presidency.

 

As the president’s anxiety about his governing legacy deepens, he seems to be compensating by imposing a permanent physical legacy for himself on his surroundings, including the money in people’s wallets. Recognizing perhaps that he’s doomed to be remembered for a failed war in Iran, a new inflation crisis, and a 2026 midterm wipeout, he may be trying to “balance” all of it by adding regal touches (new ballroom! victory arch!) to the landscape that might also cause him to be remembered fondly—even grandly—in certain respects.

 

He’s aiming for ambivalence instead of vilification, same as with January 6.

 

Last week Politico sifted through his Truth Social posts during May—a period in which the United States was at war, mind you—and discovered that “the president broached planned renovations to Washington 80 times last month, more than the combined number of posts he made about election integrity, immigration or crime in U.S. cities.” He posted about Iran 68 times … and about “images and iconography” 77 times, by comparison.

 

That’s an odd set of priorities for a man who still has more than half of his term left to govern, but really no odder than him wanting to revisit his two first-term impeachments or reimagine the insurrection as some sort of Alamo for super-patriots who deserve to be rewarded with American tax dollars. The president seems to be engaged in a sort of postliberal version of the serenity prayer: Forced to accept certain things he cannot change, like a 40 percent job approval and Iran’s refusal to capitulate, he’s going to be bold about changing the things he can.

 

The Oval Office decor. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. Public opinion about whether he was right in 2021 to try to overthrow the incoming duly elected government of the United States.

 

Turning black marks into gray ones and papering over civic squalor with gilt claptrap: A mixed legacy is the best a man can hope for who was both lucky and unlucky to have been born an American. Trump is doing his best.