The Fever Still Hasn't Broken: January 6^th and After

In June 2012, Barack Obama told a room full of donors that “if we're successful in the election, when we're successful … the fever may break.” He continued: “My hope, my expectation is that after the election, now that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start to get some cooperation,” that the voices of compromise would begin asserting themselves within the Republican Party.1

Obama had come into office as popular as any president in modern memory. Despite that popularity, G.O.P. leadership began plotting how to hamstring his administration on the very night of his inauguration. Running again, he couldn't just tell his audience that if he won, the country would be in for another four years of bitter partisan warfare. But the idea that peace would break out amounted to a fantasy.

More than a decade later—in September 2023—Obama's erstwhile Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, announced that he would not run for re-election to the Senate seat he had occupied since 2019. “A very large part of my party,” he told his biographer, “really doesn't believe in the Constitution.” (Readers assumed that Romney was using “the Constitution” as a rhetorical stand-in for “American democracy.”) He was not content simply to target Trump. He called out the many colleagues who, with little regard for the damage it does to the American political system, have toed Trump's line.2 A case in point: during the first Republican debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump's rivals were asked to raise their hands if they would support Trump if, after being convicted in a court of law, he still won the nomination. The hands went up—six out of eight—some eagerly, some hesitantly. Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election weren't just a potential criminal offense. It also violated the cardinal rule of democracy: politicians must accept the results of elections, win or lose.

“Working thro