The Capitol insurrection is now Trump’s model for how to carry out his authoritarian agenda in Washington.
Sandy Weir a Trump supporter who was released from prison in February, holds a placard outside the DC Central Detention Facility where some defendants from the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol are being held, in Washington, DC, on January 21, 2025.
(Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images)
Amid the chaos and rubble of President Trump’s assault on the US government, one telling development has received minimal attention. After Trump, under the dimwitted ideological tutelage of Elon Musk, leveled the US Agency for International Development, the lead administrator left standing over the smoldering wreckage was a hard-right federal bureaucrat named Pete Marocco. A former assistant to a chief administrator at the agency, Marocco was ousted from no less than three different executive departments—State, Commerce, and Defense—during Trump’s first term for creating toxic working conditions and visiting retribution on rival staffers.
If Marocco were just another glorified brigand placed atop a government agency, that would make him a standard-issue appointee in this administration. But he brings another crucial selling point to the Trumpian table: He appears to have participated, along with his now-wife, in the attempted January 6 coup. Online sleuths identified the pair entering the US Capitol through a broken window. Marocco was never charged in connection with the insurrection. When the footage tying him to the assault was revealed, he responded with the kind of high dudgeon perfected by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and so many other MAGA figures with (to put it mildly) checkered pasts—decrying what he called “petty smear tactics and desperate personal attacks by politicians with no solutions,” without actually denying his participation in the insurgency.
Marocco’s J6 pedigree matters not just for its outrageousness, but also because it is a leading indicator of the dominant approach adopted by the Trump White House to enact its authoritarian agenda. Far from being an inescapable legal and moral stain on the Trumpified GOP and its far-right supporters, January 6 is the new Republican model for how to get things done in Washington.
January 6, after all, was a giant MAGA vendetta against all traditional constraints on raw executive power, up to and including duly monitored and certified election outcomes. The insurrection’s notional rationale—that the 2020 Biden campaign, in conjunction with a never-specified cabal of state election officials, local vote tabulators, and shadowy foreign voting-machine contractors—was obviously a ginned-up ruse to create the momentum behind the power grab. That’s why, just as obviously, all the alarms over insecure voting machines and corrupt balloting officials vanished as soon as Trump won reelection in the standard fashion last November.
But the larger lesson of January 6 proved to be that even a violent mass insurrection founded on conspiratorial lies can fall under the expansive domain of executive impunity in our decaying constitutional order.
It was entirely fitting that Trump began his second administration by granting pardons or clemency to the 1,500-plus rioters with criminal cases stemming from the assault on the Capitol. His White House proceeded to dismiss Justice Department lawyers who’d worked on special prosecutor Jack Smith’s now-mothballed case against Trump for leading the insurrection, and Trump has threatened the same fate for FBI officials who investigated the coup attempt.
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These maneuvers were more than a Stalinesque exercise in manipulating and falsifying the historical record; they were also precursors to the wide-ranging and ongoing campaign of MAGA pillage that’s now rolling through the federal bureaucracy.
The pretext for Musk’s mandate at the comically misnamed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is just as fanciful and half-assed as the basis of the 2021 “Stop the Steal” uprising—and Musk’s illegal and unconstitutional seizure of payment data at the Treasury Department is in the service of a similarly slapdash effort to override congressionally mandated expenditures and abolish basic government services by following a bullshit priority list generated by an AI server.
Toggle over to the allied effort to root out DEI-inflected speech, destroy government sites meant to help minority groups, and trash racial-sensitivity training throughout federal officialdom; the cruel and unjustified suspension of funding at the National Institutes of Health; the push to raze the Department of Education; the overlapping trans panics now enshrined in government policy; or the blatantly unconstitutional attempt to end birthright citizenship. It’s all the same toxic mythology at the heart of January 6: Shadowy elite forces are denying you, the righteous MAGA acolyte, your fundamental nationalist birthright and abridging your racial-cum-gender purity. They must not merely be scrutinized, but delegitimized and eliminated—in the same way that Congress had to be throttled into overturning the results of the 2020 election, and Mike Pence condemned to be hanged if he didn’t play along.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the mood of militant J6 absolutism is the default setting of the second Trump administration. It finds its purest, and most deeply unhinged, expression in the fulminations of Trump’s centibillionaire consigliere Musk.
In the midst of his controlled demolition of USAID, Musk platformed phony videos about made-up celebrity boondoggle tours financed by the agency, elevated the deranged conspiratorial imaginings of alt-right vlogger Mike Benz, and promoted his own fanciful vision of the agency as a clearinghouse of lethally weaponized wokeness. Musk wrote that USAID was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” and that it was clearly “time for it to die.”
Trump concurred and obliged, declaring that the agency was infested with “radical left lunatics”; in short order, his team at USAID notified nearly all of the agency’s “direct-hire” personnel that they were going on indefinite leave. This left little more than 290 staffers standing, out of a former roster of 14,000 employees in the US and abroad.
Trump’s incoming cabinet is charged with following the same basic playbook, as they root out imaginary thoughtcrimes and lurch into unholy MAGA deviationism throughout the government. Trump’s election is proof positive that January 6 worked—and the insurrection is now the establishment. Just ask Pete Marocco.
Donald Trump’s cruel and chaotic second term is just getting started. In his first month back in office, Trump and his lackey Elon Musk (or is it the other way around?) have proven that nothing is safe from sacrifice at the altar of unchecked power and riches.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
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