The Jan. 6 Report: A Summary with Some Analysis | Title 42 Might Be Nixed | Anti-Semitism in 2022 Feels Different, and more

Experience makes it plain that Trump will just keep going on dismissing the committee’s work, this, deflecting, denying, lashing out at his accusers, even if it means that he will end his days howling in a bare and echoing room. It matters little that the report shows that even members of his innermost circle, from his Attorney General to his daughter, know the depths of his vainglorious delusions. He will not repent. He will not change. But the importance of the committee’s report has far less to do with the spectacle of Trump’s unravelling. Its importance resides in the establishment of a historical record, the depth of its evidence, the story it tells of a deliberate, coördinated assault on American democracy that could easily have ended with the kidnapping or assassination of senior elected officials, the emboldenment of extremist groups and militias, and, above all, a stolen election, a coup.

Jan. 6 Committee issues Final Report, Suggests Banning Trump from Office  (Amy Gardner, Rosalind S. Helderman and Jacqueline Alemany, Washington Post)
The House committee’s advice came as part of an 800-plus page report that marks the culmination of its 18-month investigation

Among the proposals: reform of the Electoral Count Act to clarify that a vice president has no authority to reject electoral slates submitted by the states; wholesale expansion of federal law enforcement agencies’ scrutiny of extremist groups, including white nationalists and violent anti-government groups; and designation of the counting of electoral votes by Congress every four years as a “National Special Security Event,” like inaugurals and State of the Union addresses.

The Biggest Takeaway from the January 6 Report  (Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic)
The congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection delivered a comprehensive and compelling case for the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump and his closest allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
But the committee zoomed in so tightly on the culpability of Trump and his inner circle that it largely cropped out the dozens of other state and federal Republican officials who supported or enabled the president’s multifaceted, months-long plot. The committee downplayed the involvement of the legion of local Republican officials who enlisted as fake electors and said almost nothing about the dozens of congressional Republicans who supported Trump’s efforts—even to the point, in one case, of urging him to declare “Marshall Law” to overturn the result.

Donald Trump’s Infamous 187 Minutes  (William Saletan, The Bulwark)
A timeline drawn from the Jan. 6th Committee report makes clear that he wasn’t just dithering as the Capitol was attacked—he was rooting for the mob.
The January 6th Report Takeaway: Trump Incited the Riot  (Amanda Carpenter, The Bulwark)

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How the Worst Fears for Democracy Were Averted in 2022  (Charles Homans, Jazmine Ulloa and Blake Hounshell, New York Times)
A precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate broke with its own voting history to reject openly extremist Republican candidates — at least partly out of concern for the health of the political system.

Arizona Judge Rejects Kari Lake’s Effort to Overturn Her Election Loss (Alexandra Berzon and Charles Homans, New York Times))
Kari Lake, a Republican who was defeated by Katie Hobbs in the Arizona governor’s race, had made false election claims the centerpiece of her campaign.

Antisemitism Isn’t New. So Why Did 2022 Feel Different?  (Marin Cogan, Vox) To consider it one way, there was nothing particularly new or notable about antisemitism in the United States in 2022. After all, to be Jewish in the United States during the last five years has meant being confronted with evidence of the hatred lurking in our neighbors’ hearts.

But it wasn’t just the rise in antisemitic attacks that made this year feel different. It’s what happened in our culture: Against the backdrop of violence, different strains of anti-Jewish bigotry converged thanks to one of the country’s most powerful tastemakers, whose words were seized upon by eager hate-mongers and then disseminated through social media. The result was a sum greater than its parts.

Demagoguery in America  (Emily Pears, National Affairs)
The specter of the demagogue stands as the greatest threat to democracy. Yet somehow most commentators only spot demagogues in the party they oppose, and can only see threats to democracy on the opposite side of the aisle. So what is a demagogue? And what threat might one pose in the distinct circumstances of our time and place?
Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, flurries of think pieces warning that Trump was a demagogue, or pointing to the value of upholding norms in the face of demagoguery, appeared regularly in media outlets. This prompted a narrower but no less intense genre of responses insisting that Trump’s leadership was not demagogic, or that a little demagoguery now and again might be required to preserve our individual liberty.
After January 6, 2021, such essays became scarce. For people who had deemed Trump a threat to democracy from the start, the point had been proven — the attempted coup was evidence enough. Opinion pieces decrying Trump’s seeming stranglehold on the Republican Party today tend to point to Trump, the man, as the problem. Talk of demagoguery as a more general phenomenon has all but ceased.
But the threat of demagoguery is bigger than Donald Trump. If we treat him as exceptional, we will learn none of the important lessons about the dangers that demagoguery poses to our democracy. Americans may well have a Trump problem, but we also have a far greater demagogue problem, which reaches beyond one person or one party. Protecting democracy from future demagogues will require us to zoom out from our focus on Trump and to re-engage with broader theories of democracy, populism, and institutionalism. The next master of the masses (and there will be another) won’t look like Trump or act like Trump. To properly defend democracy against demagoguery, we need a deeper, ongoing analysis of the threat demagoguery poses to the American regime and the tools available to address it.
All of that would be easier if we had a clear, up-to-date, readily available definition of demagoguery in the American context. Unfortunately, we do not. Crafting an objective definition — or at least one that allows us to identify demagogues among our own co-partisans as easily as we identify them among the opposition — poses a further challenge.