A Glimpse Into a Fearful, Angry, Imaginary World
It was, by any measure, an extraordinary and unsettling set of exchanges. President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the right-wing political activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, texted each other at least 29 times in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Their purpose was not to lament the result; it was to encourage efforts to overturn it.
That would be worrisome enough, but what makes it doubly so is the arguments invoked, the sources cited, and the mindset revealed in these raw, unfiltered texts. They are a window into a very distorted, very disturbed world. A world of true believers. And a world that has largely influenced and defined the American right during the Trump era.
[David Frum: The real Ginni Thomas problem is Trump]
The texts, which were first reported by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and CBS’s Robert Costa, were among the 2,320 that Meadows provided to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol by insurrectionists.
Twenty-one of the
