The Dictatorship
Political violence is supposed to repel us. But Trump allies are acclimating to it.
This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 6 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
In 2018, in Coral Gables, Florida, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attended an event for Donna Shalala, a Democratic congressional candidate. In response, the local Republican Party in Miami-Dade County called for a protest of that event.
During that protest, members of the Proud Boys heckled and shouted expletives at Pelosi as she walked inside. That included Enrique Tarrio, the national head of the Proud Boys. At the time, Tarrio lived in South Florida. He now lives in federal prison after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 22 years for trying to overthrow the U.S. government. On Monday, Tarrio’s lawyer wrote to Donald Trump formally asking the president-elect to pardon his client.
Another attendee of that 2018 protest was Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Cabrera, who can be seen on video pounding the door of Shalala’s campaign office. Trump just named Cabrera as his pick to be the next U.S. ambassador to Panama.
We’re supposed to have a sharp line that keeps violent intimidation on one side and politics on the other — never the twain shall meet.
Cabrera defended his conduct, saying he was just exercising his right to protest, but it’s worth remembering that, at the time, Republicans were actually embarrassed by the display. The head of the Miami-Dade Republican Party later apologized for being there. Other Republicans, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, condemned the event.
Just more than six years later, Rubio is about to be nominated to be Trump’s secretary of state, and the guy who pounded on a door to try to scare Pelosi is set to report to him as a U.S. ambassador.
The reason that is repellent, the reason that is repulsive, is because we’re supposed to have a sharp line that keeps violent intimidation on one side and politics on the other — never the twain shall meet.
On Monday, the certification of the 2024 presidential election took place in Washington. It happened, ministerially and ceremonially, like it’s supposed to. That contrasts with what occurred four years ago on Jan. 6 and makes clear the profound difference between the parties.
Had Democrats won the presidential election, many openly expected and prepared for the possibility of Republicans launching a violent revolt. But if Republicans had won, it was expected Democrats would peacefully accept and participate in the transfer of power. When there’s an expectation of violence if one side loses in an electoral contest, then the political parties in that country are no longer competing in democratic terms.
That’s part of what we’re contending with at this moment: How do we ever get back to competition in democratic terms? How do we get the Republicans to no longer see physical force and armed conflict as the way they’re going to get their way?
Well, one big step backward from that as a goal will be Trump’s promised pardons of the people who committed violence in his name that day. The argument now appears to not be about whether Trump will issue pardons to people who took part in the attack on the Capitol, but just how many of them will get the pardon.
That’s led publications as diverse as the HuffPost and The Wall Street Journal editorial page to try to front page the details of the actual crimes for which some of these people were convicted.
“Andrew Taake pepper-sprayed police officers defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and hit one with a metal whip. He is serving 74 months at a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas,” HuffPost reported.
“Christopher Alberts carried a loaded 9 mm pistol onto Capitol grounds that day and hit police officers with a wooden pallet,” the report continued. “He is serving an 84-month sentence at the federal prison in Milan, Michigan.”
Another example from HuffPost: “Steven Cappuccio held his cell phone in his mouth so he could beat an officer using both of his hands, including with the officer’s own baton. He is doing 85 months at the federal prison in Forrest City, Arkansas.”
As the outlet noted, all three of those men will be back on the streets if Trump follows through on his pledge to pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
According to their analysis, “Of those serving a year or more in prison, a full 57% are there following a conviction in cases involving an assault on a police officer. In all, 83% serving a year-or-more were convicted of committing an act of violence.”
This means that, with few exceptions, the only people Trump could release from prison with his pardon power are those who attacked a police officer, possessed weapons or explosives, or were convicted of some other violent felony.
Then there’s the deeply conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page, which published a piece with the headline, “Trump’s Pardon Promise for Jan. 6 Rioters: Does it include the ex-meth trafficker who brought a metal baton and swung it at police?”
After describing some of the actions of these rioters in brutal detail, the editorial board goes on to write, “Pardoning such crimes would contradict Mr. Trump’s support for law and order, and it would send an awful message about his view of the acceptability of political violence done on his behalf.”
Now, I take issue with the Journal’s characterization that Trump has always supported law and order; he’s repeatedly praised violence in his name. But that last line is correct — it would send an awful message.
This Jan. 6, we saw the profound difference between the Democratic Party, offering democratic competition, win or lose, and the Republican Party’s threat of violence.
We saw the profound difference between the Democratic Party, offering democratic competition, win or lose, and the Republican Party’s threat of violence.
Yes, there’s an unnerving, unsettling, fight to remember what actually happened — to be real about how disgusting it all was — while the Trump movement and the Republicans try to say the attack was a bunch of heroes who have been wrongly persecuted for doing nothing wrong.
But there is an instrumental and practical question at hand, too. Which is, what happens to the future of political violence — in the very short term — if the people who committed violence on the president-elect’s behalf are sprung from prison and celebrated as vindicated heroes when Trump takes office again?
The idea that there is permeability between violence and politics, that what is supposed to be civic hallowed ground, is fouled by the rioting and looting we saw take place, in Trump’s name, on Jan. 6, 2021.
That is supposed to repel us and disgust us — indelibly. We are never supposed to acclimate to that. But the Trump side has. And so now, four years later, with just two weeks until Trump is back in power, we must be prepared for what could happen next.
Allison Detzel contributed.
A dozen state attorneys general sued Monday to block Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, citing the harm the megamerger could pose to competition in Hollywood.
The deal would consolidate two powerhouse movie studios, several popular streaming services and the national news networks CBS and BLN into a single company under the purview of the billionaire Trump-aligned Ellison family.
That consolidation, greenlit by the Justice Department’s antitrust division last month, would negatively reshape the production landscape in Hollywood by depriving studios of the blockbuster series they rely on to generate revenue, the state law enforcement officials maintain.
The concerns in the lawsuit echo the “unequivocal opposition” to the merger voiced by thousands of industry professionals in an open letter in April.
In the lawsuit, the states argue the merger would “extinguish competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. and inflict substantial harm on movie theatres, basic cable distributors, and, ultimately, audiences nationwide,” and that it “combines two
of the nation’s five major film distributors, leaving only four to control over 85 percent of all wide-release theatrical films in the United States.”
The state-led challenge poses the most significant legal barrier in the country to that new media landscape becoming reality. The United Kingdom’s antitrust regulator is also considering action.
Consolidation in markets “leads to increased unaffordability, a loss of good paying job opportunities and fewer choices for consumers. It gives too few too much power,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press conference shortly after the lawsuit was filed. “Antitrust enforcement is democracy’s check on oligarchy.”
Paramount said the lawsuit “distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry today.”
The media giant characterized the merger as a means to create a “stronger competitor against dominant streaming and technology platforms who have harmed the market for theatrical exhibition and jobs in the entertainment industry.”
Movie producer David Ellison’s Skydance Media bought Paramount last year after receiving financial backing from his father Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle co-founder and personal friend of President Donald Trump. He then launched a bidding war with Netflix for Warner Bros., which had been put up for auction last year as part of a strategy to manage its $35 billion debt load.
The Ellisons ultimately prevailed over Netflix in February after Warner’s board announced that Paramount Skydance’s offer, which involved $40 billion worth of personal financing from the elder Ellison, was superior to an agreement it had previously struck with Netflix.
The Trump administration’s swift approval of the merger reignited speculation over his personal relationship with Larry Ellison. The deal would put the Ellison family in control of BLN, a news organization the president frequently decries without evidence as “fake news.”
Trump publicly involved himself in the competing Warner Bros. bids last year, saying that it was “imperative” BLN be sold and that its current ownership should not be in charge of the company. The president has since downplayed his personal role in the mergerbut concerns about what the deal could mean for the future of BLN still loom large.
The Trump administration approved the Ellison family’s acquisition of Paramount Globalthe parent company of CBS News, last year after the network agreed to shell out $16 millionto settle a lawsuit Trump brought over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. Trump sought $20 billion in damages over claims that the Harris interview, which aired during the 2024 presidential race, had been deceptively edited, a legal claim that experts said almost certainly would have failed.
With Ellison at the helm, Paramount Skydance also acquired Bari Weiss’ media company, The Free Press, and installed Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS News. Weiss’ control over programming has since raised questions of objectivity and spurred an exodus of many of the network’s most prominent career journalists.
Erum Salam contributed to this report.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.
The Dictatorship
Judge slams Trump-IRS ‘settlement,’ refers attorneys for possible disciplinary actions
By now, Donald Trump has probably grown accustomed to legal setbacks in court, though his case against the IRS has started to backfire in ways the president didn’t see coming. The Associated Press reported:
A federal judge said Monday that President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose” as she referred attorneys for disciplinary actions.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams amounts to a stinging rebuke of the Republican president’s lawsuit, characterizing it as an exercise in self-dealing in which he sued an entity that is effectively under his control.
The basic details of Trump’s IRS lawsuit are likely familiar: During his first term, a contractor leaked his tax returns, and six years later, the president has filed suit against the tax agency, saying he’s entitled to $10 billion in taxpayer funds.
In May, he voluntarily withdrew his own litigationand soon afterward, the administration unveiled his reward for having done so: a compensation fund worth $1.766 billionwhich was quickly condemned by members of both parties as a “slush fund” that would be used to benefit the White House’s political allies.
That bipartisan pushback appears to have forced the president to back off his plans for the fund. And at that point, the case appeared to have run its course: Trump filed a rather preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against his own administration; he then abandoned that case before it could be fully adjudicated; and that was that.
Except, it wasn’t quite that simple, and one of the underlying legal problems persisted: The federal judge in the case, responding to a request filed by 35 former federal judges calling on her to reopen the case, raised serious concerns in late May, ordering Trump and his lawyers to address allegations that he committed fraud on the court.
In a four-page orderWilliams said she intended to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve the dubious case was “premised on deception.” (This same judge, as recently as late April, expressed skepticism about the propriety of the casesince it appeared the president was, for all intents and purposes, both the plaintiff and the defendant.)
More than a month later, she apparently did not like what she discoveredconcluding that Trump and his lawyers acted “in bad faith” and filed a civil suit “for an improper purpose.”
“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” Williams wrote.
The judge also prohibited the parties from even referring to it as a “settlement.”
Just as notably, as CNBC reportedWilliams “referred Trump’s lawyer in the lawsuit, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for consideration on whether Brito should be disciplined in light of the findings in the new order.” The judge also “ordered that a copy of her ruling be mailed to the State Bar of New York, of which Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is a member, as well as to the District of Columbia Bar, of which Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward is a member.”
The developments come just two days before Blanche, Trump’s choice to serve as attorney general, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing.
A spokesperson for the Republican’s legal team said in a written statement, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
The statement made no effort to address allegations of professional misconduct or the fact that Trump’s lawyers just received a brutal smackdown in court.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline, as his temporary replacement in the Senate on Monday, two days after the lawmaker’s sudden passing.
With Darline Graham alongside him, McMaster said she “agreed to serve through tears” in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Graham is nine years her brother’s junior and has never held public office. Her parents died before she reached the age of 14, and her brother later became her legal guardian. She is the Commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, where she has worked for nearly seven years; serves on the state’s Workforce Development Board; and is the president-elect of the National Council of State Agencies for the Blind.
“Lindsey has always been there for me, and now, I will be there for him,” Graham said in her first public remarks after the senator’s death, calling it a “privilege” to temporarily fill his seat.
President Donald Trump wrote on social media earlier Monday that he recommended the Republican governor appoint Graham to serve the remainder of his term, which expires in January.
“This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!” Trump wrote.
Tim Scott, South Carolina’s senior senator, appeared to agreesaying that she would be “a fantastic pick” to serve out the remainder of the senate term.
“After speaking with Darline, there is no one better who understands Lindsey’s love for family, our state, and our country,” Scott wrote in an X post Monday morning.
Appointing the senator’s sister as a neutral placeholder avoids the appearance of favoritism in the special primary later this summer to decide the new Republican nominee for the seat he held for more than two decades.
Trump, who said he spoke with Graham just hours before his death, called him “one of the greatest people and Senators” he has ever known and “a true American Patriot.”
Graham was elected in 2002 and was seeking a fifth term in November. A special primary election will be held Aug. 11 to decide the new Republican nominee, who will likely go on to succeed him in the reliably red state.
Erum Salam reported from New York.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Nnamdi Egwuonwu is a reporter for MS NOW.
- How best to honor Lindsey Graham’s legacy? Republicans are divided.
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- Judge slams Trump-IRS ‘settlement,’ refers attorneys for possible disciplinary actions
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