At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, furious—posted the next message on Twitter: “Statistically unattainable to have misplaced the 2020 Election. Huge protest in D.C. on January sixth. Be there, can be wild!”
In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with a number of felony convictions and a profound affection for the president, answered the decision. On January 6, sporting a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey got here to the Capitol. Shortly earlier than he assaulted a number of law enforcement officials, he shared his views in an interview given whereas standing close to a gallows. The gallows had been erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s phrases, “the fitting factor.”
“Them nugatory fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all these items of rubbish, you realize, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these items of shit,” Dempsey mentioned. “They don’t want a jail cell. They should grasp from these motherfuckers whereas all people videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”
Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, however he was one in all its most energetic members. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was sure in that second that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted one other police officer with a metallic crutch, cracking his protecting defend and slicing his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted different officers with damaged items of furnishings, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one level, he attacked a fellow rioter who was attempting to disarm him.” All instructed, greater than 140 law enforcement officials have been injured within the riot, many severely.
I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipseat which Trump instructed his supporters, “In case you don’t combat like hell, you’re not going to have a rustic anymore.” Then I walked with the gang to the Capitol. One lady, a QAnon adherent wearing a cat costume, instructed me, “We’re going to cease the steal. If Pence isn’t going to cease it, we now have to.”
What I bear in mind very nicely about that day was my very own failure of creativeness. I didn’t, to my information, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself on the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed close to the White Home to hearken to Trump—however I did come throughout a minimum of a dozen or extra protesters wearing related tactical gear or sporting physique armor, lots of them carrying flex-cuffs. I significantly bear in mind these plastic cuffs, however I understood them solely as a efficiency of zealous dedication. Later we’d be taught that these males—a few of whom have been Proud Boys—believed that they might truly be arresting members of Congress in protection of the Structure. I interviewed one in all them. “It’s all within the Bible,” he mentioned. “All the pieces is predicted. Donald Trump is within the Bible.” Grifters couldn’t exist, in fact, with out a inhabitants primed to be grifted.
After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, the place he was ultimately arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded responsible to 2 felony counts of assaulting an officer with a harmful weapon. He was sentenced to twenty years in jail.
Six months later, in the summertime of 2024, Trump, who would come to explain the January 6 rebel as a “day of affection,” mentioned that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, however solely “in the event that they’re harmless.” Dempsey was not harmless, however on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses associated to the Capitol rebel. (Fourteen folks, primarily senior figures within the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys actions, noticed their sentences commuted however didn’t obtain pardons.)
Of the 1,500 or so offenders who obtained pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing law enforcement officials, and 170 had been accused of utilizing lethal weapons within the siege. Amongst these pardoned have been Peter Schwartz, who had obtained a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at law enforcement officials 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 despatched a textual content message to a good friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who obtained a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metallic whip.
A day after the pardons have been introduced, Trump mentioned in a press convention, “I’m a good friend of police, greater than any president who’s been in workplace.” He went on to explain the rioters. “These have been folks that truly love our nation, so we thought a pardon could be acceptable.”
Trump had one thing else to say throughout that first press convention of his new time period: “I feel we’re going to do issues that folks can be shocked at.” This might change into true, however sadly, shock doesn’t final. Right here is the emblematic inside wrestle of our age: to protect the power to be shocked. “Man grows used to every little thing, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that can be a curse.
I perceive {that a} evaluation—even a brief and partial evaluation—of the previous 12 months might sound dismally repetitive. However repetition ensures that we bear in mind, and maybe even expertise shock anew.
So, in short: Trump has dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, constructed by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans contaminated with HIV; he has inspired the USA army to commit battle crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a campaign in opposition to vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Division; he has waged pitiless battle on prosecutors, FBI brokers, and others who beforehand investigated him, his household, and his pals; he has solid near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to satisfy 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 assaults on varied teams of immigrants; he has employed unusually merciless ways in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have dedicated just one crime—illegally searching for refuge in a rustic that they believed represented the dream of a greater life. These are a number of the actions Trump has taken. Listed here are a number of of the issues he has mentioned since returning to workplace: He has referred to immigrants as “rubbish”; he has referred to as a feminine reporter “piggy” and different reporters “ugly,” “silly,” “horrible,” and “nasty”; he has urged that the homicide of a Saudi journalist by his nation’s authorities was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “severely retarded”; he has blamed the homicide of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has referred to as the Democrats the celebration of “evil.”
But, even when weighed in opposition to this gorgeous file of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot troopers represents the bottom second of this presidency to this point, as a result of it was an act not solely of bare despotism but additionally of outlandish hypocrisy. By pardoning these criminals, he uncovered a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of regulation and order. The reality is the alternative.
The facility to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence previous. It’s an unchecked monarchical energy, an superior energy, and subsequently it needs to be bestowed solely on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most necessary, primary decency.
We now have been watching indecency triumph within the public sphere on and off for greater than 10 years now, because the second Trump insulted John McCain’s battle file. For causes which might be fairly presumably too insufferable to ponder, a big group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they have been truly aroused by it—and our politics haven’t been the identical. A lot has been mentioned, together with by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from actuality, however not almost sufficient has been mentioned about his basic indecency, the attribute that undergirds every little thing he says and does.
In an necessary essay, Andrew Sullivan famous this previous fall that Trump’s indecency is complete in fashion and substance. “It’s one factor to be a realist in international coverage, to just accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it’s merely indecent to deal with a rustic, Ukraine, invaded by one other, Russia, because the precise aggressor and pressure it to just accept a settlement on the invader’s phrases,” Sullivan wrote. “It’s one factor to seek out and arrest unlawful immigrants; it’s indecent to mock and mock them, and ship them with no due course of to a international gulag the place torture is routine. It’s one factor to implement immigration legal guidelines; it’s one other to make use of masked, nameless males to do it. It’s one factor to chop international assist; it’s merely indecent to take action abruptly and irrationally in order that tens of 1000’s of youngsters will needlessly die. We now have slowly adjusted to this fully new tradition from the highest, maybe within the hope that it’s going to by some means be sated quickly—however then new indecencies occur.”
The topic of Trump’s indecency got here up in a dialog I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I requested him to call probably the most norm-defying act of his successor to this point. Considerably to my shock, Obama talked about Trump’s speech on the Boy Scouts’ Nationwide Jamboree earlier that 12 months. This look has been largely forgotten, but it surely was a competition of indecency. At one level, Trump instructed the scouts a few rich good friend of his who, he urged, did unmentionable issues on his yacht.
Obama, a mannequin of dignified presidential habits (similar to almost all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the significance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent efficiency. “You’ll be able to stand in entrance of tens of 1000’s of teenage boys and encourage them to be good residents and be useful to their moms,” Obama mentioned, “or you may go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”
We’re in a protracted Lord of the Flies second, led by a person who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “stuffed with cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many individuals—authorities scientists searching for cures for illnesses; FBI brokers investigating corruption and terrorism; army leaders attempting to protect respect for the foundations of warfare; and, specifically, law enforcement officials who have been brutalized by Trump’s military of deluded followers—as of late can appear infernal. Trump’s time period is one-quarter over; a chunk of recommendation usually attributed to Churchill has it greatest: While you’re going by hell, hold going.
This text seems within the February 2026 print version with the headline “The Triumph of Indecency.”
