While watching Trump’s second impeachment trial, I heard his lawyers use a strategically clever term that I dissected and denounced at New York:

Donald Trump’s impeachment trial lawyers, amid their effort to recast Trump as a victim of Congress — rather than the president who sent his militant followers to storm the U.S. Capitol and stop the routine confirmation of an election he himself had tried to steal — deployed an evocative new term: “constitutional cancel culture.” Attorney Michael van der Veen introduced it as part of his angry diatribe against the alleged Democrat witch hunt targeting Trump. Then Bruce Castor used it again to dramatize his claim that Trump’s wild remarks on January 6 were protected by the First Amendment and squarely within existing political traditions.

This semantic development was probably inevitable. “Cancel culture,” a term originally associated with a sort of loosely organized boycott of offensive people in power, gradually gained use as an invidious description of any incident where people are pressured to conform their opinions. But then “cancel culture” was adopted by conservatives, for whom it has the same sort of function the equally abused term “politically correct” used to serve: a way for those wrong-footed by habits of prejudice and privilege to regain high ground by posing as victims. And it has caught on with Republican politicians in a very big way, as Vox’s Aja Romano pointed out during the 2020 GOP National Convention:

“[D]uring Monday night’s lineup, several speakers mentioned cancel culture. Former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle portrayed it as a culture of ‘elites … who blame America,’ and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) stressed that Republicans ‘don’t give into cancel culture or the radical and factly baseless beliefs that things are worse today than in the 1860s or the 1960s.’ Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley described cancel culture as ‘an important issue. [Trump] knows that political correctness and cancel culture are dangerous and just plain wrong,’ she told viewers. ‘You cannot cancel a culture that love its heroes,’ Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl) said, referring obliquely to the nationwide trend of toppling Confederate statues in protests against racism.”

More recently, the term “cancel culture” has been used to convert some of the more egregiously aggressive and violence-prone conservatives into brave and persecuted dissenters, most notably freshman congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Last week, House Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan wept crocodile tears for Greene, asking: “Who will the cancel culture attack next?”

On the principle that the most authoritarian of political figures are most likely to need the kind of moral switcheroo that attacks on “cancel culture” are designed to produce, it’s not surprising to find Donald Trump’s lawyers try to confer him its benefits. But it was devilishly clever to elevate it to a constitutional matter. Regardless of what you think of the arguments over the Senate’s power to sanction an ex-president, or the question of whether he met the definition of “incitement,” or whether mob he spoke to on January 6 constituted an “insurrection,” it is indisputable that Trump was the aggressor against Congress in trying to disrupt an entirely routine electoral vote count. Earlier he was the aggressor against the states, both Republican and Democratic controlled, who sought to count and certify votes. And above all, for months and months, he maligned and assaulted the rights of voters who wanted the opportunity to vote by mail in order to reduce their odds of dying. He left office as he spent every day of his presidency: a bully who deeply and cynically believed in winning by intimidation and incessant lying.

Wrapping this man in the crimson robes of martyrdom is one of the most outrageous stunts of Trumpism, worthy of its object in shamelessness. Yes, Trump will be acquitted, and there are defensible grounds for that verdict. But he did not come to the events under debate in the impeachment trial with clean hands. The idea he deserves pity for the treatment he has been given, and the dignity of a constitutional doctrine to protect behavior like his, is simply unconscionable.

Nothing in recent days has exasperated me more than the desire of Washington reporters to imagine some anti-Trump coup led by Mitch McConnell. I tried to pour cold water on it at New York this week:

A day into the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and more than two weeks after a test vote that showed how many Senate Republicans wanted to stop the trial before it started, there remains a peculiar, glittering fantasy among Beltway media types that somehow Mitch McConnell will yet find a way to lead his flock onto the path of righteousness in time to save his party and prevent a Trump comeback. Here’s a report from Bloomberg:

“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is signaling to fellow Republicans that the final vote on Donald Trump’s impeachment is matter of conscience and that senators who disputed the constitutionality of the trial could still vote to convict the former president, according to three people familiar with his thinking.

“The Kentucky Republican has also suggested that he hasn’t made up his mind how he’ll vote, two of the people said, even though he voted Tuesday to declare it unconstitutional for the Senate to hear the case against a former president.

“That position is starkly different than McConnell’s declaration at the start of Trump’s first impeachment trial last year that he did not consider himself an impartial juror.”

This intel was gobbled up and posted at the top of Wednesday’s edition of Politico Playbook, the daily bread of the Capitol set. Both the Bloomberg and Playbook accounts have “to be sure” acknowledgements that Trump’s conviction remains unlikely. But there’s something dreamy and almost mystical about the abiding belief that the wily McConnell is operating behind the scenes to save his party from a MAGA future. It was, indeed, a raging counter-narrative in Washington until January 26, when McConnell joined 44 other Senate Republicans in supporting Rand Paul’s effort to preempt the swearing in of senators on grounds that trying an ex-president is unconstitutional.

Technically, it’s true that the January 26 vote was on a motion to table Paul’s resolution stopping the trial. So, in theory, Republicans could say they just wanted to hear more about Paul’s deep constitutional thinking, and did not necessarily share it. But that’s certainly not what anyone understood the vote to be about at the time. Paul designed his gambit to show that conviction was impossible, and accomplished his purpose.

Those who detect the moving of tectonic plates far beneath the surface of Senate Republican sentiment may point to Senator Bill Cassidy’s epiphany on Tuesday. He was the one Republican who apparently changed his mind since January 26 about the constitutionality of the trial. But what was his reasoning? He was pretty clear about it in interviews:

“The House managers were focused, they were organized … they made a compelling argument. President Trump’s team, they were disorganized. … One side is doing a great job and the other side is doing a terrible job. … As an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job.”

Voting for the team of lawyers who put on a better show on a matter of constitutional law is not a very good look, though in Cassidy’s defense, he is a gastroenterologist by training, not an attorney. He’s already been rebuked by his own state Republican Party, and isn’t exactly showing his colleagues the benefits of changing sides.

As for McConnell, it’s easy enough for him to call the ultimate guilty or not guilty verdict a “vote of conscience.” In Senate-speak, all that means is that he won’t whip the vote and make it a matter of party conference discipline. But here’s the thing: Unless there’s some previously undetected movement in his conference, he doesn’t have to.

So why do sources “familiar with his thinking” keep whispering in the ear of reporters that McConnell is still on the fence? That’s unclear, though they could be trying to force the Kentuckian’s hand via the media, tapping into the intense desire of the permanent Washington Establishment for a return to the pre-Trump days when politicians didn’t incite mobs to attack the Capitol.

Most likely, a misunderstanding of the current fault lines dividing Republican elected officials is the problem. Since January 6, only a handful (like the ten House Republicans who voted for impeachment) have been willing to fully turn their backs on Trump. The vast majority have been divided between those who argued Trump did nothing wrong (and that his allies who tried to overturn the election results in Congress were brave patriots trying to “stop the steal”), and those who conceded bad presidential behavior but wanted to forget about it and move on to the crucial task of opposing Joe Biden’s agenda. McConnell has been in the latter camp all along. There’s a vast gap between that position and the fateful step of telling Republican voters they have no right to vote for Donald Trump in the future, which is what a conviction would mean. If some force exists that will ultimately save the GOP from the views of its own base, it’s not going to be Mitch McConnell or the Senate Republican conference, no matter how poorly Trump’s attorneys perform.

As someone who was in Des Moines during the 2020 Iowa Caucus debacle, I’ve been watching what may happen next with the presidential nominating system, and wrote it up at New York:

One year ago today, Iowa’s Democrats caucused in the first step of their party’s 2020 presidential-nomination process. As is now clear, state’s party officials were nervous heading into the night of the caucuses because of new reporting demands imposed on them by the national party, a new (the first ever) remote-caucuses process, and because they had doubts about the technologies being deployed to tabulate the results. And during the event, the overburdened, volunteer-run caucuses results reporting system broke down, leaving furious campaigns and pundits with nothing to talk about.

As I reported at the time from Des Moines, there was a palpable sense of mourning the following day amid widespread predictions that the meltdown would cost Iowa its privileged — but much-criticized — position in the nominating process.

Little did any of us political junkies know that the country was about to experience traumas that made the Iowa-caucuses reporting debacle the smallest of small potatoes. Even in terms of the Democratic presidential nominating contest, Iowa (along with its co-privileged first primary in New Hampshire) wound up being largely irrelevant, as the nomination was won by a candidate who finished fourth in Iowa (once the votes finally were tabulated) and fifth in New Hampshire.

In any event, the fateful presidential cycle of 2020 has now given way to its successor, and the parties are beginning to look ahead to 2024. Given everything that happened in the past year, everything’s on the table, including a return to the status quo that looked kaput after the last caucuses, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Democrats and Republicans are united in Iowa behind defending the state’s political golden goose: the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses …

“Members of both national parties are already strategizing about how to structure the 2024 nominating contests, a formal Democratic National Committee review is under way, and potential Republican presidential candidates are likely to spend time in Iowa and other early states this year.

“Jeff Kaufmann, the Republican Party of Iowa chairman, said he plans to meet soon with his newly elected Democratic counterpart, Ross Wilburn, and pledged bipartisanship in trying to keep both party caucuses first. ‘We will stand shoulder to shoulder in this fight,’ he said.”

One option for maintaining Iowa’s position as a protected “early state” (there are four whose status have been recently protected by both parties: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina) would be to switch from a caucus to a primary (as Nevada is already planning to do in a bid to enhance its own status). But that would require action by the Republican-controlled legislature and an expenditure of taxpayer dollars in a state where the parties have controlled and financed the presidential nominating contest dating back to 1972. Worse yet, New Hampshire’s law requiring its secretary of State to take every necessary measure to ensure that its primary remains first is a problem for Iowa and for Nevada – it’s largely why Iowa has stuck with having a “first-in-the-nation caucus” for so many years.

A wild card is new DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison, who, as nominations-process expert Josh Putnam explains, may not approach the primary calendar unprejudiced:

“[N]ewly elected DNC chair, Jaime Harrison does hail from South Carolina. That could mean an effort to strip out contests that were not representative to the broader party (like the three states that preceded South Carolina on the 2020 Democratic calendar). But it could also translate to a maintenance of the status quo if the delegations from each carve-out state’s party to the DNC sees benefit in coalescing.”

Presidents have a huge influence over their own party’s rules for the nominating process. In Joe Biden’s case, it’s hard to overestimate how much he owes to South Carolina Democrats, who saved his bacon after poor performances in the three earlier contests and put him on the road to the White House. And any national deal to subordinate the “early states” could depend on the kind of bipartisan agreement that won’t be easy, particularly given the many uncertainties impacting the field for the presidential race in both parties. Yes, Iowa haters may use the experience of 2020 and the state’s (and equally white New Hampshire’s) unrepresentative nature to push for a new calendar. But so long as the four early states hang together, it’s a lot more plausible now than it was a year ago that the political class will again be spending many wintry days and nights in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2023 and 2024.

Looking through some political history, I saw some bad news and some potentially good news about 2022, and wrote it up at New York:

If it seems Joe Biden is in a big hurry to get things done, there’s a very clear reason, aside from the poor shape in which his predecessor left the country. His party has a five-seat majority in the House and only controls the Senate by the tie-breaking vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris. The odds of Democrats maintaining a trifecta after November 8, 2022, are not good. In the last century, there have been 25 midterm elections. The president’s party lost House seats in 22 of them (the exceptions were in 1934, the very beginning of the New Deal; in 1998, when Republicans were trying to impeach Bill Clinton; and in 2002, the first election after 9/11). The Senate is a bit iffier, thanks to the variability of the landscape in any given election. But even there, the president’s party has lost seats in 20 of 25 elections.

The reason for these midterm blues for the president’s party are obvious enough. There’s a natural cooling-off period of affection for the party lifted to executive power, with all the afflictions and disappointments over the direction of the country becoming attached to the people controlling the White House.

Midterms when the president’s party holds a governing trifecta (controlling the White House and both Houses of Congress) have been especially difficult; in the last century, no party in that circumstance has gained House seats, and only two gained Senate seats (under JFK in 1962, and believe it or not, Trump in 2018). There’s a strong consensus among political scientists that midterms typically serve as a referendum on the incumbent president and his record. Since World War II, presidents with a Gallup job-approval rating under 50 percent going into the midterms (Truman in 1946, Truman in 1950, Johnson in 1966, Carter in 1978, Reagan in 1982, Clinton in 1994, Obama in 2010, Obama in 2014, and Trump in 2018) have lost an average of 37 House seats. Biden’s job-approval-rating average at FiveThirtyEight right now is 53.2 percent, which is pretty low for a newly elected president (albeit better than Trump’s at any point in his presidency).

Adding to the obstacles facing Democrats in hanging on to the House in 2022 is the decennial redistricting just ahead, in which Republicans have a clear advantage. As David Wasserman put it recently: “[Republicans] could gain all six seats they need for House control from reapportionment and redistricting alone.”

It’s possible, of course, that the COVID-19 pandemic is an event like the Great Depression or 9/11, one that scrambles all normal political expectations. If the Biden administration confidently leads the country to a public-health and economic recovery, a referendum on the first two years of the presidency could turn out well. But there’s another possibility, too, that Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter describes:

“Donald Trump isn’t going anywhere. Unlike previous presidents — especially those who lost re-election, he isn’t interested in retreating from public view. He — and those who support his brand of politics — are going to play a much more significant role than we’ve seen in modern times …

“Democrats [may] want to make Trump the centerpiece of their midterm strategy. Do they want to keep up the pressure on Republicans to answer for the events on January 6th or for its most controversial members like freshman firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene? Or, once the impeachment trial is finished, will they try to put Trump — and those attacks — in the rearview mirror?”

In other words, Trump’s unique character and his continued domination of the GOP could make 2022 at least in part a referendum on him rather than (or as well as) Biden, particularly if the 45th president tries to make the midterms a vindication of his thwarted 2020 campaign. Indeed, this could be the silver lining for Democrats of an impeachment trial expected to acquit Trump and leave him eligible to run for president again. If the Senate doesn’t kill a 2024 Trump comeback, some voters might feel compelled to do so in 2022. And that could provide Biden’s party with a crucial margin of victory.

Looking back at the most recent presidential beginnings, I made some comparisons at New York  to what Biden is trying to accomplish:

For those closely following the initial steps of the Biden administration, it’s obvious the new president’s team is placing a premium on creating the impression that it’s successfully following a carefully planned rollout. Each day has a topical theme, and Joe Biden’s time is ruthlessly rationed. One purpose, of course, is to create a vivid contrast with the previous occupant of the White House, and from this Washington Post report, it seems a success:

“Almost every day of his young tenure, President Biden has entered the State Dining Room, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln looking down and wood burning in the fireplace. He speaks on the planned topic of the day. He sits at an undersized desk and searches for a pen to sign his latest stack of executive orders. Within 30 minutes of entering the camera’s frame, he has left it.

“It is all plotted and planned. Little room is left for the unscripted or the unusual.

“Biden’s first full week in office has showcased an almost jarring departure from his predecessor’s chaotic style, providing the first window into a tenure whose mission is not only to remake the White House in Biden’s image but also to return the presidency itself to what he sees as its rightful path”.

But there’s more to this disciplined approach than adding a redundant reason to wish Donald Trump good riddance. Biden and his people are undoubtedly aware that they need a sense of momentum to encourage Democratic unity and just enough Republican cooperation to get his agenda passed. Getting things done is the key to avoiding a midterm setback that will make it truly impossible to get more things done. Recent presidents provide plenty of object lessons in the dangers of a slow or clumsy start.

Bill Clinton stumbled early

Clinton was the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter, which meant limited experience for his eager and relatively young team and a disorganized transition that got the new administration off to a bad start, as Vox’s Richard Skinner later explained: “An atmosphere of chaos and disorganization permeated this transition. Clinton’s policy advisers were divided between centrists and liberals. The president-elect stumbled into a controversy over allowing open military service by gay individuals that soon set him against the Joint Chiefs of Staff and members of his own party.”

Clinton also had some conspicuous personnel problems, including trouble finding an attorney general who had not violated laws on reimbursement of domestic servants (the so-called Nannygate scandal that ended two AG nominations and complicated the top Pentagon nomination) and some disorganization in the White House itself. His first major legislative initiative was an economic-stimulus plan that Senate Republicans gutted. After successfully (albeit narrowly) getting a budget approved, the Clinton administration got bogged down in a complex and ultimately unsuccessful health-care-reform effort. And it failed to pursue the sort of political reforms that might have kept 1992’s Ross Perot voters from returning to the GOP voting habits many of them had abandoned.

In 1994, all these setbacks and lost opportunities contributed to a disastrous midterm election in which Democrats lost both houses of Congress for the first time since the early days of the Eisenhower administration. Democrats didn’t regain both houses until 2006.

Obama lost control

Some Biden advisers served in one capacity or another in the Clinton administration. Far more worked for Obama and Biden when they took office in 2009.

Unlike Clinton, Obama had the benefit of a solid popular-vote majority and coattails that gave his party a big margin of control in the House and 58 Democratic senators. By July, Democrats had a supermajority of 60 senators after Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter switched parties and Minnesota’s Al Franken was seated upon the resolution of a disputed election.

But before gaining complete control of the Senate, the new administration lost early momentum when it had to pare back and reconfigure its own economic-stimulus package to secure Republican votes, a step widely thought to have reduced its effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the fruitless pursuit of Republican senators in the design of Obamacare slowed down its progress and complicated its provisions, nearly producing a catastrophe when Ted Kennedy’s illness and death, and then a shocking Republican victory in the special election to replace him, robbed Democrats of their supermajority.

If disorganization was the biggest avoidable problem besetting Clinton in his early days, for Obama it was probably the failure to keep his powerful campaign infrastructure in place to mobilize support for his agenda and keep pressure on a Republican Party that saw no real risk in obstructing him.

Like Clinton, Obama suffered a calamity in his first midterm election, with congressional and downballot losses that emboldened Republicans further and made a mockery of the talk after 2008 that Democrats were building a durable majority. Democrats lost the House and any measure of real control in the Senate.

George W. Bush’s accidental success

If Clinton and Obama showed how much promise could be squandered through poor planning and strategy or just bad luck, the administration between theirs got out of the early doldrums via a bolt from the blue.

Bush got off to a reasonably good start despite the shady nature of his elevation to the White House in 2000, easily enacting one of his campaign’s top priorities, a big tax-cut bill (made possible, ironically, by Clinton’s achievement of budget surpluses). But his party lost control of the Senate in May 2001 when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords changed sides to become a Democrat, and by the end of the summer, Bush’s job-approval ratings had slumped to a meh 51 percent. He was likely en route to the usual midterm setback and a further loss of power.

All that changed, of course, on September 11, 2001. W. was transformed overnight into the wildly popular commander-in-chief of a unified nation, and his party managed the very unusual feat of gaining ground in 2002 and consolidated its control of Congress. It took Bush a longer time to squander his wartime popularity than his father did after the Gulf War, but he did so thoroughly by 2008.

Presidents can overcome a bad start

Clinton and Obama both had comebacks after a slow start and a disastrous first midterm election, winning second terms and posting some impressive accomplishments (including, in Clinton’s case, becoming more popular than ever even as Republicans impeached him). And in his own way, Trump also showed there’s life after failure or, in his case, failures every day. Despite his party controlling Congress and bending the knee to his every whim, it took him nearly a year to post a significant legislative accomplishment: the 2017 tax-cut measure. Republicans lost a string of special elections the first two years of the Trump presidency and then, in 2018, lost the House and some key governorships that ultimately played a role in thwarting his attempted 2020 election coup.

Trump had his own good luck in inheriting a strong economic recovery and in harvesting an epochal trend in conservative-media infrastructure that gave him a way to convince his supporters to reject the exposure of his many lies and missteps as nothing more than enemy misinformation. But in the end he came within a distressingly small margin of winning a second term on the scorched ground of his divisive and violence-inducing rhetoric.

So Biden’s current effort to get off to a fast start isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, and there will be positive and negative influences on his power that he can neither anticipate nor control. But I can think of no precedent in which early success hurt a new president. So he and his people might as well get a few steps down the road before the winds of fortune buffet them.