Trump news: How the Jan. 6 insurrectionists won.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Trump had already lost dozens of frivolous lawsuits in an effort to overturn the election; had fallen flat trying to enlist his own vice president, Mike Pence, in the effort to interfere with the counting of electoral votes; had tried and failed to install a loyalist willing to declare martial law atop the Department of Justice; and had become such a toxic force in his own party that he had helped cost Republicans the Senate in the double-barrel Georgia runoffs held just one day before. And yet somehow, over the course of Biden’s four soporific years in the White House, Trump managed not only to get away with every last bit of it, but to in effect finish what he started on the Ellipse that day—with boosts from our collapsing legal system, an amnesia-riddled electorate, and contrarian broligarchs who saw in the declining, erratic Trump a unique opportunity to smash any remaining obstacles to their A.I. In the Senate, GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said that “President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” made the fateful decision not to whip his caucus in favor of conviction after Trump’s second impeachment in the House, saying publicly that the criminal and civil justice systems should be responsible for holding him accountable. Perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts, who was “shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision” in the Trump immunity case, according to CNN’s Joan Biskupic, may have thought that the electorate would reject Trump, allowing prosecutions to move forward on the much more narrow terms the Supreme Court appeared to allow.