No matter how much has changed over the past decade, one thing remains true: Saturday Night Live never brings in Dave Chappelle for a filler episode. The comedian has now hosted the show four times in just more than eight years, each stint coming on the heels of a pivotal election. Last night, in the SNL installment preceding President-Elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, Chappelle opened his monologue by detailing his attempts to turn down the daunting gig this time around. The SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels had apparently tried persuading Chappelle to again take the stage following the 2024 presidential election; Chappelle spent the several weeks prior to and after Trump’s reelection rejecting the offer. He eventually relented, he said, so that “I could just get rid of all these old Trump jokes and start fresh.”
That lead-in suggested that Chappelle might spend the rest of his set revisiting familiar comedic territory. But where Chappelle has previously doubled down on his right to offend, he instead used the moment to lay the groundwork for sharp, wide-ranging commentary. “The moment I said yes, L.A. burst into flames,” he quipped, following up with the kind of posturing that audiences have come to expect from him: He acknowledged that it’s too soon to laugh about the wildfires still ravaging Southern California, then threw the camera a mischievous wink. The veteran comic knows where the line is, he seemed to be saying, and revels in crossing it simply because he can. In a marked contrast to his earlier SNL appearances, though—including his one in 2022, for which he received criticism for perceived anti-Semitic remarks—the comedian seemed mellower. And not only did Chappelle demonstrate an interest in unity, but he also offered viewers an unexpected and sincere-sounding plea for compassion.
Chappelle wrapped his nearly 20-minute act with a direct appeal to the divided country and its incoming president. He ended with a timely anecdote about connecting with others amid deeply entrenched conflicts. Chappelle said that in the mid-aughts, after walking away from his eponymous hit show, he spent some time soul-searching in the Middle East. The comedian recalled that the late former President Jimmy Carter flew to Israel during that period; Carter was there to promote his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. Chappelle described Carter’s insistence on then going “to the Palestinian territory” despite the Israeli government saying it would be too dangerous. “I will never forget the images of a former American president walking with little to no security while thousands of Palestinians were cheering him on, and when I saw that picture, it brought tears to my eyes,” he said.
He continued:
The presidency is no place for petty people, so Donald Trump—I know you watch the show—man, remember, whether people voted for you or not, they’re all counting on you, whether they like you or not. They’re all counting on you. The whole world is counting on you. And I mean this when I say this: Good luck. Please, do better next time. Please, all of us, do better next time. Do not forget your humanity. And please, have empathy for displaced people, whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine.
Last night’s call to presidential action was a stark departure from Chappelle’s earlier comments about Trump during the comic’s SNL debut, in an awkward, unsettling episode following Hillary Clinton’s defeat in November 2016. Chappelle stole the show with a monologue (and a Chris Rock–assisted skit) that conveyed his lack of surprise at Trump’s ascendancy. But Chappelle ended on a more serious note. He waxed poetic about the hopefulness he felt after seeing a sea of Black faces at a party held in the Obama White House: “So, in that spirit, I’m wishing Donald Trump luck,” he said. “And I’m going to give him a chance, and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one too.” A few months later, the comic reportedly said he regretted being “the first guy on TV to say, ‘Give Trump a chance.’”
Chappelle deployed his trademark barbed humor to further thoughtful ends last night—even when he wasn’t talking about Trump. After running through a list of famous friends who lost their homes in the L.A. fires, the comic mocked the replies he’d seen on videos of the blazes. “Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, it serves these celebrities right. I hope their houses burned down,’” he said. “You see that? That right there—that’s why I hate poor people.” Chappelle then took a drag from his cigarette, waited for the audience to finish laughing, and got to the real punch line: “’Cause they can’t see past their own pain.” The comic went on to emphasize the country’s glaring economic inequality while expressing concern for people outside his own wealthy milieu. He spoke about the working-class families that found out the week of the fires that their fire-insurance coverage had been revoked; when he seemingly misspoke by saying “health insurance,” Chappelle suggested that Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, could help either way. It was a grim joke, one that telegraphed his understanding that many Americans feel exploited by both industries—and reminded viewers that he can still bring people’s experiences into his comedy.
Of course, Chappelle was still himself, throwing in a handful of musings about how scary it is to be famous right now and making a cringe-worthy comparison between West Hollywood and Sodom. A later sketch also saw him revisiting some of Chappelle’s Show’s mostmemorable (and outrageous) characters. But the stand-up never took the lazy, condescending tack that’s made him divisive among critics in recent years. (Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer, which premiered on Netflix last month, kicks off with a lengthy segment that rehashes his stalest material.) Chappelle instead drew on his experiences of living in the Midwest—something he also did, to compelling effect, when he hosted SNL after the 2020 presidential election. From this personal angle, he sought to elucidate the similarities between demographics that look wildly different at first glance. It didn’t always work perfectly, then or now, but it felt refreshingly human.
The mood of a Donald Trump rally typically follows a downhill trajectory, beginning with hot pretzels and Andrew Lloyd Webber and concluding with grievances aired and retribution promised. But last night at Capital One Arena, the mood was jubilant all the way through.
This was Trump’s final rally before his triumphant return to the White House, and like high schoolers facing the promise of a lightly supervised all-night lock-in, attendees were giddy with anticipation. Fans dressed in Uncle Sam hats and scarlet peacoats crammed into the arena, which was lit up in shades of red and royal blue. Each rally-goer I spoke with was looking forward to something different from the next Trump presidency. “They’re doing a nice big raid up in Chicago, and I’m excited about that,” Will Matthews, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me, referring to yet-unconfirmed rumors about where Trump’s promised mass deportations will begin. Jenny Heinl, who wore a PROUD J6ER sweatshirt, told me that she was eager “to hear about the pardons.”
The message across MAGA world was clear: The next four years are going to be big. “Everyone in our country will prosper; every family will thrive,” Trump promised last night. Speaking before him, Stephen Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, predicted that America is “now at the dawn of our greatest victory.” Earlier in the day, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the host of the War Room podcast, had hosted a brunch on Capitol Hill. He’d dubbed the event “The Beginning of History,” and, for better or worse, it was.
Throughout yesterday’s rain and snow in Washington, D.C., Trump’s supporters held tight to their joy. “I can’t believe we’re in!” I heard a woman shout to a friend as they dashed through the arena doors. The preceding few days had been bewildering. Citing the low temperatures, the Trump transition team announced on Friday that the inauguration would be moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. A mad scramble ensued for the very limited supply of new tickets. In the end, a few fans will still get to watch in person. Most of them, though, will be right back at Capital One for an inauguration watch party.
One group of Trump fans had carpooled together from Canada to attend the inauguration, and wore matching red sweatshirts reading MAPLE SYRUP MAGA. They were disappointed about the venue change—14 degrees is not cold, the Canadians insisted—but they were still happy they’d made the trip. “If Trump hadn’t been elected,” Mary, who had come from St. Catharines, Ontario, and asked to use only her first name, told me, there would be more and more “woke bullshit.” For Mary and her friends, Trump’s reelection means that there will instead be an end to the fentanyl crisis, tighter border security, and a stronger example for other Western countries.
Sharon Stevenson, from Cartersville, Georgia, had joined a caravan of dozens of Georgians traveling to the rally, and had waited in line for more than seven hours to get inside the arena. The effort, she assured me, was “100 percent worth it.” Stevenson and her friends were eager to lay out their expectations for Trump. “The biggest thing for me is to investigate all the fraud,” she said. The “stolen election,” the January 6 “massacre”—“it’s going to come out under this administration.” Her friend, Anita Stewart from Suwanee, Georgia, told me that her priority was health, and that she was particularly excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m looking forward to hopefully no more commercials for drugs!” Plus affordable groceries, she said—and cheap gas.
With a wish list so long and expectations so immense, one wonders how Trump’s supporters will respond if the about-to-be president doesn’t meet them all. When I asked Stevenson that question, she smiled and shook her head. “Promises made, promises kept,” she said. “If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump.”
During the roughly three hours before the headliner took the stage, his supporters ate chicken fingers and posed for the Jumbotron camera as it swung around the arena. They bowed their heads when the hosts of the MAGA favorite Girls Gone Bible podcast asked God to bless Trump, and sang along as the musician Kid Rock performed a mini concert, including his 2022 single “We the People,” featuring a brand-new lyric in honor of the inauguration: “Straighten up, sucker, ’cause Daddy’s home.”
The political pronouncements really got going at about 4 p.m., starting with Miller, who received a hero’s welcome from the crowd and said that Trump’s win represented “the triumph of the everyday citizen over a corrupt system.” (As he spoke, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, was on X announcing the launch of a meme coin to match her husband’s new one, a development that turned the family into crypto-billionaires over the weekend.) Later, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host turned MAGA podcaster, hailed “the goodness that is about to rain down” under Trump’s leadership. And Donald Trump Jr., fresh from his recent mission to Greenland, affirmed that the next four years will be his father’s “pièce de résistance.”
When at last Trump arrived onstage, he was greeted ecstatically as the embodiment of his allies’ declarations and his followers’ dreams. He teased his plans to sign nearly 100 executive orders today, including what he has described as a “joint venture” with the parent company of TikTok and a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. “You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he predicted. Before welcoming the Village People to join him onstage for an exuberant rendition of “YMCA,” Trump ran through a list of additional priorities to come: the largest deportation operation in American history, lower taxes, higher wages, and an end to overseas wars. “The American people have given us their trust,” Trump declared, “and in return we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”
On March 4, 1857, James Buchanan was sworn in as the 15th president of the United States, at the first presidential-inauguration ceremony to ever be photographed. John Wood, who worked as the photographer for the Architect of the Capitol, was present on that day to take the photo above. The image captured crowds of onlookers standing outside the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol—which was still under construction at the time. The foreground area was actually a stone yard that had been covered with boards and used as a platform for spectators. The photograph’s exposure time, about four seconds, meant that any people who were moving ended up looking a bit blurry.
Buchanan’s was the nation’s 18th inauguration ceremony, documented by this single photograph taken nearly 168 years ago. Contrast that with the many thousands of photographs that will be taken today of the 60th presidential-inauguration ceremony, the second swearing-in of Donald Trump.
Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable. According to Carnegie, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency partly because his campaign manager addressed voters by their names. The Steel King, Andrew Carnegie (no relation), reportedly secured business deals by naming companies after at least one competitor and a would-be buyer, and maintained employee morale by calling his factory workers by their first name. “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”
By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia. People who feel it most severely might avoid addressing anyone by their name under any circumstance. For others, alexinomia is strongest around those they are closest to. For example, I don’t have trouble with most names, but when my sister and I are alone together, saying her name can feel odd and embarrassing, as if I’m spilling a secret, even though I’ve been saying her name for nearly 25 years. Some people can’t bring themselves to say the name of their wife or boyfriend or best friend—it can feel too vulnerable, too formal, or too plain awkward. Dale Carnegie was onto something: Names have a kind of power. How we use or avoid them can be a surprising window into the nature of our relationships and how we try to shape them.
The social function of names in Western society is, in many ways, an outlier. In many cultures, saying someone else’s given name is disrespectful, especially if they have higher status than you. Even your siblings, parents, and spouse might never utter your name to you. Opting for relationship terms (auntie) or unrelated nicknames (little cabbage) is the default. Meanwhile, American salespeople are trained to say customers’ names over and over again. It’s also a common tactic for building rapport in business pitches, during telemarketing calls, and on first dates.
Western norms can make sidestepping names a source of distress. For years, Thomas Ditye, a psychologist at Sigmund Freud Private University, in Vienna, and his colleague Lisa Welleschik listened as their clients described their struggles to say others’ names. In the 2023 study that coined the term alexinomia, Ditye and his colleagues interviewed 13 German-speaking women who found the phenomenon relatable. One woman told him that she couldn’t say her classmates’ names when she was younger, and after she met her husband, the issue became more pronounced. “Even to this day, it’s still difficult for me to address him by name; I always say ‘you’ or ‘hey,’ things like that,” she said. In a study published last year, Ditye and his colleagues searched online English-language discussion forums and found hundreds of posts in which men and women from around the world described how saying names made them feel weird. The team has also created an alexinomia questionnaire, with prompts that include “Saying the name of someone I like makes me feel exposed” and “I prefer using nicknames with my friends and family in order to avoid using names.”
Names are a special feature of conversation in part because they’re almost always optional. When an element of a conversation isn’t grammatically necessary, its use is likely socially meaningful, Steven Clayman, a sociology professor at UCLA, told me. Clayman has studied broadcast-news journalists’ use of names in interviews, and found that saying someone’s name could signal—without saying so directly—that you’re speaking from the heart. But the implications of name-saying can shift depending on what’s happening at the moment someone says a name and who’s saying it; we all know that if your mom uses your name, it usually means you’re in trouble. Even changing where in the sentence the name falls can emphasize disagreement or make a statement more adversarial. “Shayla, you need to take a look at this” can sound much friendlier than “You need to take a look at this, Shayla.” And, of course, when someone says your name excessively, they sound like an alien pretending to be a human. “It may be that folks with alexinomia have this gut intuition, which is correct, that to use a name is to take a stand, to do something—and maybe something you didn’t intend,” Clayman said. Another person could misinterpret you saying their name as a sign of closeness or hostility. Why not just avoid the issue?
In his case studies and review of internet forums, Ditye noticed that many people mentioned tripping up on the names of those they were most intimate with—like me, with my sister. This might sound counterintuitive, but saying the names of people already close to us can feel “too personal, too emotional, to a degree that it’s unpleasant,” Ditye told me, even more so than saying the name of a stranger. Perhaps the stakes are higher with those we love, or the intimacy is exaggerated. People on the forums agreed that avoiding loved ones’ names was a way to manage closeness, but sometimes in the opposite way. “I think this is pretty common among close couples,” one person wrote. “It’s a good thing.” Using a name with your nearest and dearest can feel impersonal, like you’re a used car salesman trying to close a deal. If I say my boyfriend’s name, it does seem both too formal and too revealing. But if I use his nickname—Squint—I feel less awkward.
Alexinomia is a mostly harmless quirk of the human experience. (It can cause problems in rare cases, Ditye told me, if, say, you can’t call out a loved one’s name when they’re walking into traffic.) Still, if you avoid saying the names of those closest to you, it can skew their perception of how you feel about them. One of Ditye’s study participants shared that her husband was upset by her inability to say his name. It made him feel unloved.
As Dale Carnegie wrote, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Pushing through the discomfort and simply saying their name every now and then can remind your loved ones that you care. By saying someone else’s name, even when it’s awkward, you’ll be offering a bit of yourself at the same time.
No constitutional scholar or judge has ever questioned the American right to skip a spouse’s annoying work thing. Has anyone ever had a good time at one of these horrible events? You’re clutching your little plastic cup of wine (Sheila knows so much about wine!) while you get shuffled along like an oddity—Look, it’s Mike’s wife! Nobody wants to talk with you, and you don’t want to talk with them. They want to drink wine and talk about work, and you want to drink wine and watch Severance.
Sometimes it’s a minefield because you have to pretend you don’t already know a whole lot about these people. You’d happily eviscerate a few of them if you could be your authentic self. But you have to be like a Rose Bowl float, wheeled around in mild weather and emanating impersonal goodwill. Don’t ever make me do that again, you say in the car on the way home.
So when Michelle Obama announced that she would be skipping Donald Trump’s inauguration today, I thought, Good move. I bet Barack’s not crazy about going either, but he’s on the place mats and gets a pension, so he probably has to play ball. The corner of the internet occupied by insufficiently-hinged Michelle Obama haters thought they had some red meat. The norms! The traditions! The continuity of government! But they were robbed of a win when reminded that neither Donald nor Melania Trump attended the last inauguration.
There had to be some way for the brain trust to work this to its advantage. But how? And just like that a theory, a possibility—no, a probability—arose: Because Michelle hadn’t attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral either, she must be trying to avoid … her own husband. What are the chances of those two running into each other anywhere else? The pieces fell quickly into place. Carter’s corpse was at the funeral but won’t be at the inauguration, so that can’t be what she’s trying to avoid. George W. Bush was at the funeral and will be at the inauguration, but Michelle and W. kind of like each other. Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi will surely be at the inauguration, but they weren’t at the funeral—are you seeing a pattern? The Daily Mail even hinted that someone had come between husband and wife: Jennifer Aniston.
I suspect that the Obamas’ marriage is fine, and Michelle Obama can’t stand Donald Trump and doesn’t want to be anywhere near him. She went to his first inauguration because she had to, but if your spouse has been at a different company for the past eight years, you’re certainly not required to show up at the old home week of the damned. To disrespect her right to stay home is to disrespect your own right not to spend your Saturday playing mini golf with your own Pete Hegseth when you could go to Costco or sleep in a tangle of warm blankets. Let it enter the work-life lexicon: The next time you get approached with one of these grisly invitations, tell your mate that you’re going to have to pull a Michelle Obama, and then put your feet up, enjoy your normal blood pressure, and fill three hours of your life any way you see fit.
Four years ago, scores of police officers were attacked only yards away from where Donald Trump will swear to defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the duties of his office. The scene, in the words of one officer, was “a non-stop barrage” with “weapons and things being thrown, and pepper spray, and you name it … You could hear them yelling. You could hear them, screams and moans, and everything else.” One officer later said that he was certain he would die the moment he entered the crowd: “You know, you’re getting pushed, kicked, you know, people are throwing metal bats at you and all that stuff. I was like, yeah, this is fucking it.”
All of this happened because Trump, according to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, could not accept his loss in the 2020 election, and so he tried on January 6, 2021, to “direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.” The crowd that attacked the Capitol, Smith wrote, “was filled with Mr. Trump’s supporters, as made clear by their Trump shirts, signs, and flags,” and they “violently attacked the law enforcement officers attempting to secure the building.”
The ensuing riot was one of the worst days for law enforcement since 9/11. More than 140 officers were injured on January 6, but we know only the names of some of the most famous victims of the mob, such as Officers Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell, Harry Dunn, and others who have testified to Congress or given interviews. Their injuries were severe. Fanone was beaten to the point of a concussion and a heart attack; Gonell was attacked by more than 40 rioters and assaulted with his own riot shield. He has since undergone multiple surgeries and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In his campaign for reelection, the man who conjured this violence against his own government—and then stood by as police from multiple jurisdictions were attacked—portrayed himself as the guardian of law and order. (One of the themes of the 2024 GOP convention was “Make America Safe Again.”) This strategy worked: Trump yet again nabbed the endorsement of the National Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP vice president, Joe Gamaldi, said in November that police see Trump’s victory as a mandate from voters who are “tired of all the chaos and disorder we’re seeing in our streets. We are tired of the ‘defund the police’ talk, and basically we’re just tired of the crap.”
The new president’s supporters may be tired of what they mistakenly believe is a rise in crime in the streets, but they’ve memory-holed Trump’s willingness to throw a swarm of raging insurrectionists against the same police forces that will be protecting him at today’s inauguration. Nothing, however, should be allowed to erase the truth that the party of law and order is now led by not only a convicted felon, but one who callously looked on as outnumbered police officers did battle for hours to protect the lives of the members of the United States Congress.
I understand the anger that some police officers feel when the public assumes that they’re all corrupt bullies, potential killers no better than the men involved in the ghastly 2020 murder of George Floyd. My father and brother were both police officers (Dad in the 1950s, and my brother from the 1960s to the 1980s). Our next-door neighbor when I was a boy was a police officer, and I grew up among cops in my small New England city. Most of them became “law and order” Republican voters when Richard Nixon was able to turn riots—including the mess at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—into a campaign issue.
Trump has done the same through his three presidential campaigns, depicting America as a lawless hellhole. At least Nixon, however, had the advantage of pointing to the other party, and to his political opponents, as the source of danger to Americans and their armed protectors. Trump has managed to erase from millions of minds the fact that the people who attacked the police on January 6 were his own supporters, acting on what they believed were his wishes.
“I would like to see January 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11,” the conservative writer George Will said in 2021, “because it was that scale of a shock to the system.” But like so many of Trump’s outrages and scandals, the attack on the Capitol has faded into the noise of the 2024 campaign. Trump today will likely thunder on about the return of law and order and swear to make America’s streets safer, but American voters, no matter their party, should remember what actually happened to dozens of police officers because of Trump’s own actions.
Police officers at the Capitol were being attacked with an assortment of weapons—bear spray, flagpoles, even their own equipment. (“My helmet came down and felt like someone was on top of me and I couldn’t see anything,” the Capitol Police officer Winston Pingeon told ABC News in an October 2024 interview. “And I remember just thinking, I have to protect my gun, because they stole my baton.”) During all of this, Trump, as usual, was tweeting: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order-respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!” Meanwhile, the mob pressed on. One officer recounted that rioters dragged him into the crowd, where they beat and tased him while yelling things such as “I got one!” and “Kill him with his gun!”
Trump now refers to many of the rioters who have been convicted and jailed as “hostages.” He has promised to pardon some of them upon taking office. “Most likely, I’ll do it very quickly,” he said on Meet the Press last month, adding that “those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look. But, you know, if somebody was radical, crazy.”
The once and future president seems to have a forgiving definition of radical. On the campaign trail, he lauded a choir formed by some of the jailed insurrectionists. He even lent them his voice; their song, “Justice for All,” includes Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Trump regularly played it at his rallies. “Our people love those people,” Trump said last May.
Four of this “J6 Prison Choir” were charged with assaulting a law-enforcement officer. One rioter, Julian Khater, had already pleaded guilty to assaulting multiple officers before the song was recorded. He was sentenced to almost six years in prison. Another choir member, Shane Jenkins, was also sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of seven felonies and two misdemeanors, including throwing makeshift weapons at the police. “I have murder in my heart and head,” he wrote to an associate in the weeks after the riot, according to the Justice Department.
Trump has described January 6 as “a day of love.” The police who were there know better. Many of them live with physical and psychological scars. Four of them committed suicide within a year. “Tell me again how you support the police and law and order when all these things are happening?” Gonell asked last spring.
Safely back in the White House, Trump will never have to answer that question. But every time he and other elected Republicans claim to be the party of law and order, Americans should remember the day that the 47th president was willing to sacrifice the men and women of the thin blue line on the altar of his own ambitions.
Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.
That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master. According to its website, the foundation promotes yoga meditation to achieve spiritual and physical enlightenment, but Butler, well known for his fervent and graphic sermons about the evils of gay sex, does not appear to tolerate dissent from his followers. Some former devotees have called the secretive group a cult.
Other than raw ambition, Gabbard’s adherence to Butler’s foundation has been the only perceptible through line in her switchbacking, two-decade political career. First there was an astonishingly quick leap from enigmatic state lawmaker to national Democratic Party leader; then came Gabbard’s almost-as-quick falling-out with the party establishment; there followed an inscrutable congressional record, including a seemingly inexplicable visit with a Middle East dictator; after that was Gabbard’s stint as a Fox News media darling, and finally her rebirth as a MAGA Republican, nominated to be America’s next spymaster.
While Gabbard awaits a confirmation hearing, even senators in Trump’s party seem concerned about her suitability. Maybe they should be: Democrats figured out the hard way that they couldn’t rely on Gabbard; Republicans may soon learn the same.
To understand how Gabbard ended up in the middle of such a strange ideological Venn diagram, it helps to know about her early years. Born in American Samoa, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where she was homeschooled and spent time surfing in the blue waves off Oahu. Her father, Mike, is now a Democratic state senator, but he’s done a bit of his own party-flipping; during Gabbard’s childhood, Mike was an independent, and later switched to the Republican Party, after leading Hawaii’s movement against same-sex marriage. He launched a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii and hosted a radio show titled Let’sTalk Straight Hawaii. In 1998, Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.
The Gabbard family was—and, according to several Hawaii residents and people familiar with the group, still is—devoted to Butler and his foundation. “The belief system was [Butler’s] interpretation of the Hare Krishna belief system, plus Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever else,” Lalita Mann, a former disciple of Butler’s, told me. Fraternizing with outsiders was frowned upon, Mann said; complete obedience was expected: “To offend him would be offending God.” Gabbard’s own aunt once described the group as “the alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”
Butler had an appetite for temporal as well as spiritual power. Gabbard, a smart, good-looking girl from a political family, always appealed to him, Mann and Anita Van Duyn, another defector from the group, told me. Butler described Gabbard as a stellar pupil of his teaching. In her teens, Gabbard reportedly attended a school run by Butler’s followers in the Philippines. “He always wanted someone to be high up in the federal government” to direct the culture toward godliness, Van Duyn told me. Trump’s team rejected this characterization. “This is a targeted hit on her faith, fomenting Hinduphobia,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, told me. “The repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and her loyalty to our country are not only false smears; they are bigoted as well.” (Gabbard herself did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
The Science of Identity Foundation leader was not the only person to see Gabbard’s appeal. The people I interviewed described the surfer cum mixed-martial-arts aficionado as shy but warm. She has a rich, low voice, and always greets people with a friendly “Aloha.” Her demeanor helps explain how quickly she rocketed to political success from a young age. She chooses her words carefully, and listens intently, often seeming like the most mature person in a room, even when she is one of the youngest. “She cocks her head, and she pulls you in” to the “Tulsi hug,” one Hawaii Democrat told me. “It’s very mesmerizing.” Gabbard, in other words, has charisma. And she has always made it count.
In 2002, soon after she married her first husband, Gabbard dropped out of community college and ran for a seat in the Hawaii state House. In that race, and in others that followed, a swarm of volunteers associated with Butler’s group would descend on the district to knock on doors and pass out yard signs, according to someone who worked with Gabbard’s campaign in those early days, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Back then, Gabbard shared her father’s views on same-sex marriage and opposed abortion rights, two positions that were—particularly in recent years—politically risky in solid-blue Hawaii. But she was clearly struggling to form her ideology, the former campaign colleague said, and determine a political identity of her own.
After one term in office, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and went to Iraq as part of a medical unit, the first of two Middle East deployments. After her return, she and her husband divorced. In 2010, she ran successfully for a seat on the Honolulu city council. “She was as ambitious as you could possibly be,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague told me. And she was respected. Gabbard was racking up experiences, fleshing out her political résumé. Congress was next for Gabbard, and everybody knew it.
In the fall of 2011, something happened that shocked politicians in Hawaii. EMILY’s List, the national organization whose goal is to elect pro-abortion-rights women to Congress, announced that it was backing Gabbard. To political observers, it didn’t make sense. Gabbard had a D behind her name, but was she really a Democrat? Behind the scenes, EMILY’s List was wondering the same thing. Although her position on abortion had evolved in ways acceptable to the organization, Gabbard was still iffy on same-sex marriage. Her answers on the EMILY’s List application had made its leaders uneasy, one former staffer told me, and that staffer was asked to call Gabbard for clarification. During their conversation, Gabbard said she didn’t want the government involved in marriage. The staffer pointed out that the government was already involved in heterosexual marriage, so it wouldn’t be fair to deny the same access to gay couples. Gabbard seemed not to have considered this, the staffer told me, and after only a few minutes on the phone, Gabbard declared that her position had changed. Politicians typically do some finagling to secure the support of special-interest groups, but this was different.
“I’ve never had another conversation like that,” said the staffer, who still works in Democratic politics but asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “She was willing to do or say whatever. It was like she had absolutely no moral compass.” I heard the same sentiment from numerous people who have worked with Gabbard, both in Hawaii and at the federal level.
Gabbard’s leftward journey was well under way. Her second Middle East deployment, to Kuwait, had inspired a “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues, she told Honolulu Civil Beat in 2012, adding, “I’m not my dad. I’m me.” By the time she got to Congress, in 2013, Democrats had embraced her like a long-lost friend. Gabbard was celebrated as the first Hindu member of Congress and was eagerly welcomed in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging star,” and House leaders gave her a seat on the prominent Armed Forces Committee. She was, to use a more contemporary comparison, AOC before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“There was this initial huge fascination with Gabbard” inside the party, a former Democratic House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about his time working closely with Gabbard, told me. President Barack Obama himself lobbied for Gabbard to get a vice chairmanship on the Democratic National Committee, its former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told me. The Florida lawmaker hesitated at first. “I was warned early on that she was close to extremists in Hawaii,” Wasserman Schultz told me, referring to anti-gay activists. Still, she gave Gabbard the benefit of the doubt.
Gabbard proved popular among the other freshmen. “She was funny, she was engaging,” a former House colleague and friend of Gabbard’s, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me. She ran around with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Representatives Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; some of them met for CrossFit in the mornings.
But the congressional crush on Gabbard fizzled almost as quickly as it began. Wasserman Schultz told me that the DNC had a hard time getting Gabbard to show up for meetings or conference calls. When a House vote against employment discrimination came up, Gabbard was difficult to pin down, Wasserman Schultz said—even though, as a DNC vice chair, she should have been “the easiest ‘yes’ in the caucus.”
Gabbard seemed eager to stand out in a different way. She took to sitting on the Republican side of the House chamber. Despite her DNC perch, she voted with Republicans to condemn the Obama administration for not alerting Congress about a prisoner exchange with the Taliban in 2014, and the next year criticized the Democratic president’s reluctance to refer to Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists.”
The representative from Hawaii was not facing a tough reelection, so none of these positions made sense to her fellow Democrats. Some suggested that she was a rare independent thinker in Congress; others identified in her a less virtuous strain of opportunism. Gabbard had “masked herself as a progressive to gain power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. After all, voters in Hawaii almost never elect Republicans to Congress.
Others pointed to deeper forces. “I think something happened around 2013,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague from Hawaii told me, pointing out that, at the time, several of her original congressional staffers resigned, and Gabbard replaced them with people affiliated with the Science of Identity Foundation. In 2015, Gabbard married Abraham Williams, the son of her office manager, both of whom, the colleague told me, were involved in the group. The couple’s Oahu wedding was attended by several members of Congress, including then–House Whip Steny Hoyer, as well as a representative from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. It seemed as though Butler’s group had reeled her back in, the campaign colleague said. He remembers thinking, “I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”
During the 2016 Democratic primary, Gabbard resigned from the DNC and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president because, she said, Hillary Clinton was too hawkish. Sanders-aligned progressives appreciated her support, especially because the Vermont senator had just been shellacked in South Carolina. On the trail, Gabbard spoke confidently about anti-interventionism, climate change, and Medicare for All. “I couldn’t think of an issue then where we had any degree of separation,” Larry Cohen, a union leader and the chair of the pro-Sanders progressive group Our Revolution, told me.
But, in 2017, Gabbard made a move that stumped her new progressive friends, as well as most everyone else: She flew to Syria, in the middle of its civil war, and twice met with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had by then already killed hundreds of his own people using chemical weapons, and who clung to power thanks to aid from Vladimir Putin. The original plan, according to a former staffer for Gabbard, had been to meet with everyday Syrians and “bear witness.” But as The Washington Postreported today, the trip’s actual itinerary deviated dramatically from the one that had been approved by the House Ethics Committee. The meetings with Assad had not been in the plan, and even Gabbard’s staffer, like others on her team, did not know about them until after they’d happened. “You fucked us,” the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to speak about confidential matters, remembers telling Gabbard later. “The reason you told us you were going on this trip will never come up again. It will only ever be about you meeting with Assad.”
For D.C. institutionalists, Gabbard’s conversations with Assad broke a long-standing convention that members of Congress do not conduct freelance foreign policy. But many also saw the trip as an unforgivable swerve toward autocracy.
Outside the Washington scene, Gabbard’s independence and charisma still counted. When Gabbard ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she could still muster an enthusiastic if motley alliance of progressives, libertarians, and conservative Hindus. She also did well among the kind of people who are fond of saying that all politicians are corrupt and neither political party is good for America. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast that year.
Despite that glowing endorsement, Gabbard never scored above single digits in the contest, and dropped out of the race in March 2020. In the years that followed, she would pop up now and again with new and surprising takes. In December 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports, plus two pieces of anti-abortion legislation. In 2021, she left Congress altogether. The next year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she blamed President Joe Biden and NATO for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Then she turned up as a featured speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
At a late-summer conference in Michigan last year, Gabbard announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for president. She completed her political migration in October at a MAGA rally in North Carolina, when she said that she was joining the Republican Party. She praised Trump for transforming the GOP into “the party of the people and the party of peace.” Her message was that she hadn’t left the Democrats; they had left her. “People evolve on politics all the time,” the former House colleague and friend told me. “But that’s a long way from saying Hey, the party went too far to embracing Donald Trump.”
Gabbard’s instincts are those of a “moth to a flame of power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. And Trump’s flame is burning brightly again. But in Gabbard’s dogged pursuit of power, or at least of proximity to power, others see the influence not of a new guru, but of the old one: Butler. “She’s his loyal servant,” Van Duyn, the Science of Identity Foundation defector, said, and Gabbard regards him as “possessing infallible authority.” Van Duyn also told me that she has sent letters to several Democratic lawmakers, asking them to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI because she fears that sensitive intelligence “can and will be communicated to her guru.”
Each of the current and former Democratic lawmakers I spoke with for this story had concerns about the Gabbard-Butler relationship. “There are some very tough questions that need to be asked,” Representative Jill Tokuda, Democrat of Hawaii, told me. “Who’s really calling the shots when it comes to what Tulsi Gabbard believes?”
Butler, who is now in his late 70s and reportedly living in a beachfront home in Kailua, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Jeannie Bishop, the foundation’s president, disputed the accounts of people whom the group considers to be “propagating misconceptions,” and accused the media of “fomenting” Hinduphobia. (Butler’s foundation, along with a collection of 50 Hindu groups, sent out a press release last week blasting recent media coverage as “Hinduphobic.”)
Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified. The current director, Avril Haines, was confirmed after previously serving as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and deputy counsel to the president for national-security affairs in the Office of White House Counsel. Gabbard has no similar background in intelligence or agency leadership. Henning, the Trump spokesperson, pointed to Gabbard’s endorsement from former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, who has commended Gabbard’s “independent thinking.”
Gabbard’s Assad visit and her pro-Russian views also remain fresh in the minds of many in Congress. Nothing proves that Gabbard is a “Russian asset,” as Hillary Clinton once famously put it, but Moscow seems gleeful about her selection to lead the intelligence agency: “The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravdacrowed after her nomination was announced. Another Russian state outlet called Gabbard a “comrade.”
Judging by the congressional hearings so far, traditional expertise and credentials may not matter much to the GOP lawmakers charged with confirming Trump’s picks. But the incoherence of Gabbard’s ideological evolution may yet count against her: Reliability could be the sticking point. Republicans should know, as well as Democrats, that “she’s ruthless in her pursuit of personal power,” the Hawaii campaign colleague told me. “Even if that means disappointing MAGA folks or Trump, it’s clear she’d do it in a heartbeat.”
During her eight years in Congress, Gabbard was a fierce defender of privacy rights, something her supporters on both the right and the left long admired. In particular, she had opposed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that permits some warrantless surveillance of American citizens. But after meeting with senators last week, Gabbard announced that the act’s surveillance capability “must be safeguarded.” The would-be director of national intelligence had had a change of heart.
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For weeks, Donald Trump has been exerting influence on events in the Middle East. After winning the 2024 election, he dispatched his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to help the Biden administration get the cease-fire and hostage-release deal over the finish line. Now, a little more than 24 hours into his presidency, Trump has already begun to undo much of President Joe Biden’s decision making from the past four years, including on foreign affairs. I spoke with my colleague Yair Rosenberg, who covers both Trump and the Middle East, about the new president’s goals and approach to the region.
Isabel Fattal: What moves has Trump made on the Israeli-Palestinian front since taking office yesterday?
Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after inauguration, Trump rescinded Joe Biden’s February executive order that erected an entire sanctions regime against extremist Israeli settlers. This order allowed the administration to impose stiff penalties on violent settlers in the West Bank and anybody who supported them, and—as I reported in March—could have eventually applied not just to individual actors and organizations on the ground but also to members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli army.
Biden’s executive order was seen as a sword of Damocles hanging over the settler movement. It effectively cut off some importantpeople on the Israeli hard right from the international financial system, because if you’re under U.S. sanctions, a lot of institutions cannot touch you. The settler movement was so concerned about this that they pressed Netanyahu to lobby against the sanctions in Washington, and some members even took the Biden administration to court in the United States. All of that now goes away: not just the sanctions, but the executive order that created the entire regime. Trump is also reportedly expected to end the U.S. freeze on 2,000-pound bombs that Biden put in place during the war in Gaza, and impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its attempted prosecution of Israeli officials—something Biden resisted.
Isabel: Trump told reporters last night that he is “not confident” that the Gaza cease-fire will last, adding that “it’s not our war; it’s their war.” How durable is the cease-fire deal right now?
Yair: Trump is right to be skeptical. It’s not at all clear whether this is actually going to hold. The first of the agreement’s three phases, which we are in right now, is 42 days long. Israel is releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for 33 women, children, and elderly hostages in Gaza held by Hamas, some of them living, some of them dead. That part of the deal seems likely to continue according to plan.
But partway through this period, the two parties are supposed to negotiate for the release of the remaining male hostages, for whom Hamas is demanding a much steeper ransom than this already steep price. And if those negotiations don’t bear fruit, it’s entirely possible the war will resume, especially because hard-right politicians in Netanyahu’s government have already vowed to press on until Hamas is eliminated.
The question becomes: How committed are Israel and Hamas to actually getting this done? And how committed is Trump to keeping the cease-fire on the rails? From his comments, it doesn’t seem like he knows. He’s speaking like a spectator instead of an actor. So we have no idea what he intends to do.
Isabel: What would it look like for Trump to truly commit to keeping the cease-fire on track?
Yair: It would require his administration to make it more worthwhile for both sides to compromise and stick to the deal rather than capsize it. Most Israelis support the current deal, but the accord’s most bitter opponents are the hard-right politicians in the current Netanyahu government, making the cease-fire harder to sustain as time goes on. But the Israeli far right is also hoping to get many items on their wish list over the next four years, much like they did during Trump’s previous term. Among other things, they seek U.S. support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the removal of the sanctions we discussed, and backing for Israel in its ongoing war with Iran and its proxies. If Trump is committed to the continuation of the cease-fire—an open question—he could make clear that some of these benefits come with a price, which is calm in Gaza. And Trump, both in his previous term and in recent weeks, has shown that he is willing to offer incentives that Biden would not.
Hamas is even harder to influence, because they’re a messianic terrorist group. Fundamentally, they don’t seem to care about not just how many of their own fighters they’ve lost but also how many Gazan civilians have been killed in this war. For them, every casualty is either immaterial or an asset in a gruesome PR war against Israel. But they do have sponsors abroad—like Qatar, which hosts some of the group’s political leaders. The Qataris want to be on the right side of the next Trump administration, like any other state in the Middle East. And so Trump has the ability to put pressure on the Qataris, who can then push Hamas to compromise on what they’re willing to accept in the next hostage exchange.
These methods aren’t guaranteed to work. It’s true that the U.S. has some sway over events, but these countries and actors have their own national interests and make decisions based on their own internal politics. Americans on both the right and the left tend to overestimate the U.S.’s role in world developments. Frankly, if there were a magic button here, Biden would have pushed it already.
Isabel: What can we learn about Trump’s second term from how he has handled this cease-fire situation thus far? What does it tell us about how he might relate to the region?
Yair: The thing to understand about Trump’s approach to politics, as I’ve written, is that he has few if any core beliefs, which means that he is both incredibly flexible and easily influenced. Both domestic and international actors know that if they can give Trump something he wants, he might give them something they want. It doesn’t matter if they are a traditional U.S. ally or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re a democracy or not. It’s entirely about whether you are in his good books. So everybody is now scrambling to get on Trump’s good side, to make down payments on the things they hope the most powerful person in the world will then pay them back for. In a real sense, that’s what this cease-fire is—for Israel, for Qatar, for Egypt, it’s all jockeying for advantage by trying to give Trump a win now so he’ll give them a win later.
Expect the next four years to look a lot like this, with international actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel and domestic actors such as American evangelicals and Republican neo-isolationists all playing this game of thrones, hoping to curry favor with the ruler now holding court.
Attorneys general from 22 states sued to block Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to ban birthright citizenship.
The former leader of the Proud Boys and the founder of the Oath Keepers have been released from prison after Trump signed an executive order yesterday that pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 January 6 defendants.
Former President Joe Biden issued numerous preemptive pardons yesterday, including for members of his family, General Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and members of the January 6 House select committee.
Dale Carnegie, the self-made titan of self-help, swore by the social power of names. Saying someone’s name, he wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, was like a magic spell, the key to closing deals, amassing political favors, and generally being likable … “If you don’t do this,” Dale Carnegie warned his readers, “you are headed for trouble.”
By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia.
Watch. The comedian Dave Chappelle took a break from punching down to deliver a timely and sincere message on Saturday Night Live (streaming on Peacock), Hannah Giorgis writes.
Scroll. TikTok went dark in the U.S. on Saturday night, only to be resurrected on Sunday. Steffi Cao details the chaotic moment for the most controversial app in America.
Did Elon Musk actually toss off a Sieg heil! at Donald Trump’s inauguration rally today?
A lot of people online seem to think he did, based on data from their eyeballs. Freeze-frame images of Musk on social media show the world’s richest man at a podium in Washington, D.C.’s Capital One Arena engaging in what could definitely be construed as a Nazi salute. Video clips of Musk’s speech support this conclusion. Musk stands at the podium, graced with the presidential seal, and thanks the crowd. Then he forcefully slaps his right hand to his chest and rather violently extends his arm outward diagonally to the audience. Multiple historians have backed the idea that Musk’s gesture was indeed a Nazi salute. “Thank you,” Musk says. He makes the gesture to the crowd, turns 180 degrees, and repeats it to the rest of the crowd behind him. “My heart goes out to you,” he adds, placing his hand back on his chest.
What’s left out of much of the discussion is that Musk is supremely, almost cosmically, awkward and stilted. All close observers of Musk—and I am one—know this.
So which one is it? A mask-off full-Nazi moment or just a graceless tech baron not in full control of both his arms and his feelings? (It wouldn’t be the first time he’s embarrassed himself onstage using his limbs.) I would urge you to watch the video for yourself.
Musk has not yet commented publicly on what he did, and he did not respond to my inquiry about what, exactly, he thought he was doing up there. (It’s worth noting that the video Musk posted of his speech did not show Musk performing the gesture head-on—it cut away to the crowd; a C-SPAN clip shows it in full, though.) Eventually, he will almost certainly deny that he Sieg heiled. If history is a guide, he will post on X, scoffing at the accusations. He could make a self-deprecating joke about being so excited that he wasn’t aware of his body. He could act like a troll, like he did when a German magazine likened him to a member of Hitler’s cabinet, and he responded, “I did Nazi that coming.” The most disturbing response might be if he says nothing at all. So far, he has posted several times on X today without addressing the matter.
Musk’s X has given a megaphone to bigots and restored the accounts of banned racists. I’ve argued that Musk has turned X into a white-supremacist website. Musk himself has spent recent weeks enthusiastically endorsing Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD. Members of the party have had documented ties to neo-Nazis; in 2018, the co-leader of the AfD downplayed the significance of the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi regime. Musk has endorsed posts about the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Even those inside the MAGA movement have voiced concerns about Musk. This month, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called Musk “a truly evil guy, a very bad guy.” He used the word racist to describe Musk and others in Trump’s Silicon Valley inner circle who have South African heritage: “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”
All of this informs how one might interpret Musk on the stage today. Above all else, Musk is a troll, an edgelord. He delights in “triggering” his ideological enemies, which includes the media. And his gesture—whatever the intent—has done just that. In a way, the uproar online over Musk is reminiscent of an incident in the first months of the first Trump administration, when two pro-Trump influencers were photographed in the White House press room making the “OK” hand gesture. The photo was interpreted by some media members as a white-power symbol. Reporters and organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League traced it back to racist message boards like 4chan’s /pol/ board. Eventually, however, the gestures appeared to be part of an attempt, by 4chan, to trick the mainstream media into overreacting and turning the handiwork of a few trolls into national news. The whole affair was exhausting and difficult to follow. A message board that trafficked in hate speech created a fake hate-speech symbol to try to trick the media into calling something racist. (The ADL, it is worth noting, has extended Musk the benefit of the doubt, issuing a statement that Musk made an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute,” and encouraged everyone to “give one another a bit of grace.”)
None of that is to suggest that Musk’s salute wasn’t genuine. A practiced troll consistently crosses redlines because they want to offend and trigger. They also swaddle their actions in enough detached irony and cynicism that allow them to relentlessly mock or harass anyone who dares take them seriously. There is every reason to take a right-wing troll at face value, and yet doing so often means giving them what they want: an intense reaction they can use against you.
For now, all anyone has to understand Musk’s motives is a damning video, his past words and actions, and plenty of circumstantial evidence about his beliefs. What is undeniable is that watching Musk do that onstage while thousands stood on their feet cheering was more than ominous. Across the internet, Wiredreports, neo-Nazis are thrilled at what they believe is a direct signal from the centibillionaire. In many ways, it is a fitting spectacle to begin the second Trump administration: a bunch of people arguing endlessly over something everyone can see with their own eyes.
In the hours after Donald Trump returned to power, Jacob Chansley, already in a celebrating mood, became exuberant. Chansley, who is also known as the QAnon Shaman, a nickname he earned for the horned costume he wore during the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, did what any red-blooded MAGA American might have done in his situation. “I GOT A PARDON BABY!” Chansley posted on X last night. “NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!”
In the lead-up to Inauguration Day, Trump had spent a lot of time talking about getting revenge on his political enemies. But in one of his first moves as president, Trump decided to treat his supporters to some forgiveness. Last night, he pardoned all of the nearly 1,600 people who had been convicted for their involvement in the Capitol riots. He commuted the sentences of 14 insurrectionists who remained in prison, allowing them to go free. Paired with his order for the attorney general to dismiss “all pending indictments,” Trump has effectively let everyone convicted for their actions in the January 6 attack off the hook.
In Trump’s telling, the people he pardoned were viciously and unfairly punished for what happened at the Capitol. Yesterday, he called the rioters “hostages.” Some of those pardoned included goofy characters, such as Chansley, who seemingly did not arrive at the Capitol intending to overthrow the government but got swept up in the moment. Chansley wasn’t exactly going out of his way to avoid the chaos of the day, however: He left a note on then–Vice President Mike Pence’s desk that said, “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.” Among those pardoned was Adam Christian Johnson, otherwise known as “lectern guy”: On January 6, he carried then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s podium around the Capitol, smiling and waving in a now-viral photo. “I’m ashamed to have been a part of it,” he said to a judge in February 2022, before he was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and sentenced to 75 days in jail. “Got a pardon … now … about my lectern,” Johnson wrote on X before later asking Trump to free the men imprisoned for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Among the rioters granted clemency by President Trump there are also longtime militia leaders who planned carefully for the riot. They have been implicated in actively conspiring to violently overtake the Capitol and attack police officers. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, and Kelly Meggs, who led its Florida chapter, were among the 14 people whose sentences were commuted. Meggs allegedly participated with his wife in weapons training to prepare for the attack. Before the president intervened, both were slated to spend more than a decade in prison after being convicted of seditious conspiracy. According to the Department of Justice, Rhodes and Meggs had organized “teams that were prepared and willing to use force and to transport firearms and ammunition into Washington, D.C.,” and tried “to oppose, by force, the lawful transfer of presidential power.”
Of the 14 people whose remaining prison sentences were commuted by Trump, nine were affiliated with the Oath Keepers and five with the Proud Boys, another violent far-right group. At least one other militia leader was outright pardoned: Enrique Tarrio, a former head of the Proud Boys, is now free long before the end of his 22-year sentence. Though he wasn’t in Washington during the insurrection, Tarrio egged on Proud Boys who entered the Capitol, posting on social media that he was “proud of my boys and my country” and telling his supporters, “Don’t fucking leave” moments after rioters entered the Capitol. In private messages, he took credit for the attack: “Make no mistake,” he wrote, “we did this.” Some of the Proud Boys, including top members Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, went inside the Capitol, where they “overwhelmed officers,” according to the Department of Justice. Biggs was sentenced to 17 years in prison and Rehl to 15.
Of course, it wasn’t just militia members who seemingly arrived at the Capitol with violence in mind. Also among those pardoned was Eric Munchel, who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after entering the Capitol clad in a tactical vest and carrying zip ties, with which he intended to “take senators hostage,” according to the judge who heard his case. The most important part of the pardons isn’t specifically who is released from prison, but the meaning of Trump’s gesture: Radical militias are free to act with impunity—as long as they’re loyal to Trump. Should an extremist on the right break the law, he can reasonably hope for Trump to pluck them out of the justice system. This is one of the key ingredients to the perpetuation of political violence across society—a belief among those who might carry it out that they can do so, and that they’ll get away with it.
In that sense, the pardons mark what’s to come. The insurrection was the culmination of increased militia activity during the first Trump administration. But after the riot, as law-enforcement agencies began to prosecute those involved, the militias went underground. Groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys continued to operate while many of their leaders and members were in prison, but in a less publicly visible way than before. Even without militia groups operating at their peak levels, political violence, particularly by the right, has been ascendant over the past several years. Now, after the pardons, right-wing extremists no longer have to hide.
*Lead-image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Mark Peterson / Redux; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Evan Vucci / AP; Getty.