Attention to the Unseen

Jimmy Carter writes: One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy. However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over…

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Politico reports: Mitch McConnell is signaling he’s open to reforming the Electoral Count Act, one year after a mass of Republicans objected to certification of President Joe Biden’s win ahead of an attempted insurrection. Democrats are pursuing more sweeping election reforms and federalization of elections, but some lawmakers in both parties are also suggesting there may be more modest reforms that could pass on a bipartisan basis. Centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema both endorsed pursuing work on…

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Politico reports: The EU’s chief fear is no longer that it will be squeezed onto the diplomatic sidelines by the U.S. and China — because it is now more afraid of being squeezed out by the U.S. and Russia. Washington is leading talks on defusing tensions with Moscow after Russia moved about 100,000 troops to its border with Ukraine and says it wants legally-binding guarantees from the NATO military alliance about its weapons deployment and its eastern expansion. At a…

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David Rothkopf writes: As we approach the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, many questions remain. Among these, one of the most important is, “What if?” What if the coup attempt had succeeded? What if the election results had been overturned? What if Donald Trump were illegally installed for a second term as president of the United States? It could have happened several different ways. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman might have been out sick…

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Rolling Stone reports: When the 2020 election didn’t go Trump’s way, Peter Navarro did something dangerous. He began to do his own research. Navarro, an economist whom Donald Trump tapped to lead his trade war against China, didn’t stay in his lane at the White House. He’d already inserted himself in the administration’s botched pandemic response, pushing the unproven hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab. And after the 2020 vote, Navarro began compiling a series of inflammatory dossiers…

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Jonathan Chait writes: January 6, 2021, may be the most contentious date in American history. To Democrats and the surviving remnant of anti-Trump Republicans, the event was a spasm of right-wing political violence aimed at terminating the republican experiment. To most Republicans, it was something ranging from a noble uprising to a prank gone somewhat awry to, at worst, a minor lapse in judgment. We do not yet have a common language to describe this event: Its critics call it…

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Michael Tomasky writes: Most every night, just after he slips into bed, Jamie Raskin picks up a volume of the collected works of Shakespeare, thumbs through it, and reads a few pages before sleep takes him. He is not, he admits, a big reader of fiction; doesn’t have the time. But he loves his Shakespeare, he told me one October night as we sat in his kitchen. Two days later, I asked him for a quote from the Bard that…

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Anne Applebaum writes: Children twirled around a skating rink just outside the president’s office in central Kyiv last week, while tourists took pictures of themselves in front of onion-domed, snow-dusted churches. The stores were full of people shopping for the New Year’s holiday and Orthodox Christmas, just as they always are at this time of year. The airports were crowded. In other words, nothing unusual was happening in the Ukrainian capital—nothing except for the contingency plans being made for a…

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Bloomberg reports: In the days before Christmas, U.S. officials in Boston unveiled insider trading charges against a Russian tech tycoon they had been pursuing for months. They accused Vladislav Klyushin, who’d been extradited from Switzerland on Dec. 18, of illegally making tens of millions of dollars trading on hacked corporate-earnings information. Yet as authorities laid out their securities fraud case, a striking portrait of the detainee emerged: Klyushin was not only an accused insider trader, but a Kremlin insider. He…

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The New York Times reports: After long indulging him, leaders in the European Union now widely consider Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary an existential threat to a bloc that holds itself up as a model of human rights and the rule of law. Mr. Orban has spent the past decade steadily building his “illiberal state,” as he proudly calls Hungary, with the help of lavish E.U. funding. Even as his project widened fissures in the bloc, which Hungary joined…

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Politico reports: Donald Trump has already telegraphed the remarks he plans to give at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. If he follows the script laid out in his announcement of the news conference, he will commit a whitewashing of the day, repeating the lie that the 2020 election was rigged and defending his part in fomenting the insurrection — all while a solemn prayer service is held at the Capitol, in a…

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Thomas Homer-Dixon writes: By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship. We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the…

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ABC News reports: Nearly a year after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a strong majority of Americans condemn it and believe former President Donald Trump is at least partially to blame. But partisan splits have hardened over time, with Republicans still largely backing Trump’s version of events, a new ABC/Ipsos poll finds. An overwhelming majority (72%) of Americans believe the people involved in the attack on the Capitol were “threatening democracy,” while 1 in 4 Americans believes…

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