We Are Living Through a Democratic Emergency
Updated at 12:05 p.m. ET on January 5, 2022.
Donald Trump could subvert the next election—and his second coup attempt has already begun, Barton Gellman warns in our latest cover story.
Ahead of the anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol, Gellman joined Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance for a live virtual conversation about the threats to American democracy.
“Once you have a true believer that the election was stolen last time, you have given yourself permission to steal the next one,” Gellman says. The events of January 6, 2021, were evidence of a movement prepared to use violence to get, and maintain, power. But how did it come to this? And what can be done to safeguard democracy? Read the full conversation below, which has been lightly edited for clarity:
Adrienne LaFrance: Bart, you wrote our latest cover story. The cover line is “January 6 Was Practice,” and it’s a remarkable story—a remarkably alarming story. I wanted to hear a little bit about what you went in expecting to find and what surprised you the most along the way over the course of your reporting.
Barton Gellman: I went in looking for more of the story behind January 6, what led up to it and what it led to, sort of situated along a continuum. And what I found was, the story has basically three main strands. One is that January 6 was the culmination, but really only one small part of a long and systematic campaign to overturn the election—that it had a specific role in that, which was to buy time, and that it came fairly close to succeeding in that sense. The second strand is that January 6 is probably the debut of a mass political movement that, for the first time in a hundred years in this country, is prepared to use violence as a tool, that there are tens of millions of Americans right now who are passionate, conspiratorial-minded, and believe that the use of violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the White House. And the third is that there is an ongoing conspiracy, really an ongoing operation, in which Republican operatives are looking through all the places which were obstacles to Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the last election and are going through and uprooting those obstacles. So it is paving the way for another coup attempt in 2024.
[Read: Trump’s next coup has already begun]
LaFrance: I want to go back in a moment to this question about the threshold for violence in this country, but first—you mentioned 2024. Are you feeling more worried about 2022 and 2024 than you were about 2020?
Gellman: I’m kind of the bad-news correspondent, so I was very worried about Trump’s capacity to create chaos and undermine the peaceful transfer of power in the 2020 election, and I wrote in advance about how he might do that. Right now, I think he intends to do the same thing again in 2024. I think his prospects of succeeding are a little bit better. I think conditions are more favorable to his efforts to undermine the election, because he’s had practice; he’s faced no serious consequences. And, as I said, there are thousands of political operatives and lawyers around the country who are doing their best to pave the way for it next time and figuring out where his effort went wrong and trying to fix that.
LaFrance: Anne, same question for you. How worried are you today?
Anne Applebaum: I am continually surprised by what’s happening inside the Republican Party, even though I have myself written about it and analyzed it and tried to explain it. I’ve written about the phenomenon of complicity, why people go along with things they know to be wrong, which is not unique to the United States or to world history; in fact, it’s very common. And I’m still surprised by the extent to which the Republican Party is seeking to whitewash the history of January 6 so that the perpetrators are heroes and the victims are villains. I am surprised by the extent to which they are building on this mythology.
This is something that has lots of precedent. The election was stolen, and therefore we deserve to break the rules in order to win the next one. And by the way, I do think it could be 2022 as well as 2024. You can look at the 1930s. The myth of something stolen from us that gives us the
