Nikki Haley, who has announced her candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, speaking a CPAC on March 3, 2023, in National Harbor, Md.(AP)
Bye-bye, Larry Hogan. On Sunday, the former Maryland governor finally answered a question nobody was asking, except maybe his family: No, he will not challenge Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
“I did give it serious consideration, and I talked to people everywhere, and I talked to my family and it was a tough decision,” the comparative centrist told CBS. Hogan’s departure is only a minor news story, but it raises two big questions about the 2024 GOP field.
First, Hogan rightly fears that a crowded primary could have the result it did in 2016: splitting the field among career politicians and clearing a lane for Trump. Others share that concern. But they do not share his frank account of what the Jan.6 insurrection represented for the party, and for Trump.
“It was an insurrection. It was the worst assault on democracy in our country’s history,” he recently told a Maryland reporter.
And anybody who says “it was tourists” or “protests” is not being honest or they’re delusional. Because there’s no question about what happened on Jan. 6.…
Mike Pence is in the basement of the Capitol. They were threatening his life. And the president just sat there and did nothing to even protect his own vice president who had been so loyal for the whole four years. He didn’t care about members of Congress being threatened, the law enforcement officers who were being attacked, and he let it continue to go on.…
I was taking actions all day, for hours, while the president sat in the White House doing nothing. And I’m the next-door governor. Why is it up to me to save the Capitol? But it was. It’s unreal.
Hogan is an ally of Pence’s and is considered likely to endorse him if he does make a run. But the former governor has far sharper words for Trump, and other riot-supporting Republicans, than the man does whose life was endangered.
And what Hogan calls the “the worst assault on democracy in our country’s history” 2024 contender Nikki Haley merely calls “a sad day for America.” Like a lot of prominent Republicans, she went on record the day after the insurrection and told fellow Republicans that “Trump’s actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.”
Maybe the biggest coward is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who published a book last week designed to introduce him to GOP primary voters. While he praises Trump for his “star power,” there’s not a single mention of January 6 in the entire tome.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised here. For a lot of us, January 6 was a before-and-after day, after which you can’t look away from the rot and corruption we’ve tolerated for too many decades—all the hate, all the violence and all the guns. The doublespeak. The birther jokes about Barack Obama. The barely suppressed white rage at his presidency.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
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But I thought January 6 would resonate, and maybe even make change, because Republicans were threatened too. Capitol rioters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” not just “Where”s Nancy?” Faux-insurrectionist Senator Josh Hawley was later seen hauling ass to safety from the rioters he’d once cheered on. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and then–House minority leader Kevin McCarthy were rightly afraid for their lives. But you know how it is: The sense of danger fades. The potential for consequences does too. McCarthy told his caucus he was going to advise the president to resign; instead, he went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his… ring. And everything went back to normal.
So now, polls are showing that two years after the riot, the percentage of Americans who care about it is declining. Among Republicans, the share who fault Trump supporters for invading the Capitol has fallen from 74 percent just afterward to 43 percent, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. Two years ago, only 9 percent of Americans supported the carnage; two years later, 20 percent do.
Trump’s own approach to January 6 was seen in all its carny glory at last week’s Conservative Political Action Committee gathering. It was Trump’s show. Micki Witthoeft, the mother of protester Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed breaking down a Capitol door, shared a stage with Donald Trump Jr. A breakout session titled “True Stories of January 6: The Prosecuted Speak” drew a standing-room-only crowd. “I am your retribution,” the former president told the assorted sad sacks.
“I can tell you that just interacting with a lot of the activists here, there is concern that the violations of protocol and civil rights around the January 6 issue haven’t gotten sufficient attention from the Congress, and that’s really a matter for us in the House majority more so than 2024 candidates,” Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said on the sidelines of CPAC.
Good luck with that, Matt.
Two years ago, failed 2016 candidate and former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker said the events of January 6 deserved condemnation. Now, he says going after Trump is “a huge risk,” telling Politico that “nobody cares.” I’m not sure anyone’s taking political advice from Walker. But the extent to which this has become a nonevent for the GOP should frighten all of us.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.