WASHINGTON — Americans who believe in democracy will have to work even harder in the coming years, as the man who tried to overturn the 2020 election he lost returns the White House this month, advocates warned Thursday.
“Trump has already demonstrated that he will behave as an autocrat once he’s in office,” said Tom Joscelyn, a longtime counterterrorism adviser who served on the staff of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.
“He will abuse the power of the bully pulpit. He will abuse the powers of the presidency. He willl abuse the powers of the executive branch,” Joscelyn added.
Joscelyn was among the Trump critics affiliated with two groups, State Democracy Defenders Action and the Defend Democracy Project, who spoke to reporters ahead of the fourth anniversary of the day that Trump’s coup attempt culminated in a violent attack by a mob of his followers.
Trump, who at the urging of his White House staff and lawyers denounced the attack the following day in a prepared speech, has over the years come to push a fictional account of Jan. 6 — one in which the 2,000 or so people who stormed the Capitol, including hundreds who assaulted police officers, committed no crimes. Trump has said he will pardon them all, although he has sometimes hedged about pardoning those convicted of the most violence.
Trump has even tapped Kash Patel, a former aide who has spread the unfounded conspiracy theory that the FBI instigated the violence on Jan. 6, to run the bureau during Trump’s second term.
“Those kinds of conspiracy theories have no place with nominees,” said Norm Eisen, a former White House lawyer under former President Barack Obama who worked with the House on Trump’s first impeachment in 2020.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to a HuffPost query.
Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent and now a lecturer at Yale University, said the FBI is a particularly dangerous place for someone like Patel because it has far-reaching investigative powers with few outside checks. “It doesn’t take much for a president to declare somebody — a group of people, an organization — as a national security threat,” she said.
She pointed out that even its hiring standards are set internally, and Trump and Patel could eliminate existing requirements and replace them with whatever they wanted. “Theoretically speaking, I think all of these Jan. 6 people could be pardoned and then handed a badge and a gun,” she said.
Trump himself was impeached by the House for inciting the attack a week later, though too few Republican senators joined Democrats of finding him guilty of inciting insurrection — a finding that would’ve let the chamber ban him from federal office for life. Trump was later indicted by Justice Department prosecutors for his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6. They dismissed the case after Trump won the presidency in November, citing guidelines that prevent the prosecution of a sitting president.
A Georgia prosecution of Trump based on his efforts to overturn his election loss in that state is tied up in pre-trial appeals, but even if that case goes forward, Trump would be able to postpone proceedings until he is no longer president.
Despite all this, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who worked on the coup attempt impeachment, told reporters Thursday that he continues to have faith American democracy will endure.
“Democracy is a dynamic process, and we will survive this hit too. We will survive this outrageous sucker punch to the gut that we got,” he said. “The Constitution, in its brilliance, always has another election around the corner, and we are going to be fighting.”
