While ample attention remains on the most frontal of Donald Trump's assaults on our democracy — his role in the Capitol riot that has led to his looming impeachment trial — the Biden administration has started to tackle some of its predecessor's less public upending of governing norms.
The latest moves were revealed without fanfare Wednesday. The Justice Department rescinded two policies instituted in the weeks after the election, designed to give the defeated president extraordinary support as he promulgated his campaign of lies claiming flawed election rules and rampant cheating had robbed him of a rightful second term.
The reversals came as President Biden professed his strongest support yet for conducting the Senate impeachment trial, saying to do otherwise would be "farcical," and a panel of election law experts declared that simple math proved there was "no evidence" to support the Trump crusade.
Monty Wilkinson, a career civil servant who is the acting attorney general until the confirmation of Merrick Garland, rescinded two directives issued by Attorney General William Barr near the end of his tenure.
One, issued a week after Election Day as Trump was escalating his baseless claims of a stolen victory, repealed decades-old policies of restraint for field offices across the country investigating allegations of ballot fraud — allowing them, for example, to bypass such procedural steps as getting permission from Justice Department headquarters before interviewing witnesses.
The point of the longstanding policy was for the government to stay out of the way so states could conduct their vote certification processes.
Barr's move prompted his chief election law prosecutor, Richard Pilger, to resign. Fifteen of his career lawyers then urged Barr to revert to previous the status quo, saying the policy change was "was not based on fact" and "thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics."
The other directive abandoned Wednesday was the last Barr signed before leaving office in December.
By that point he had infuriated Trump by telling the nation his department had found no evidence of election fraud or other irregularities significant enough to come close to changing the outcome in any state. But Barr told the Civil Rights Division to leave states alone if they decided to reimpose strict rules for absentee or early voting that had been relaxed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"A change in voting laws or procedures by a state or local jurisdiction which readopts prior laws or procedures shall be presumed lawful unless the prior regime was found to be unlawful," he declared.
Because that policy is now abandoned, it could make it more difficult for states to withstand lawsuits alleging the reimposition of voter suppression statutes. Republicans in charge of the General Assembly in newly purple Georgia are moving to do so most prominently, but the Brennan Center for Justice has tabulated 106 bills in 28 states designed to make access to the plls more difficult than in 220 — a huge increase from a year ago.
Meanwhile, a paper circulated Wednesday by three election scholars — Andrew Eggers of the University of Chicago and Haritz Garro and Justin Grimmer of the Democracy and Polarization Lab at Stanford — cited an ocean of calculations to debunk the efforts of Trump and his loyalists to discredit the election with statistics suggesting foul play.
"Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing," they said. "The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous."
Nonetheless, Trump pointed to these and other specious allegations time and again after the election — culminating in his Jan. 6 speech exhorting allies to head to the Capitol to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes. Six people died in the ensuing riot, and a week later the House impeached him for inciting the insurrection.
The Senate trial of that charge is set to start Tuesday, with Trump's lawyers arguing the proceedings are unconstitutional now that Trump has left office. The consequences of conviction, which would require the highly unlikely support of at last 17 Republcian senators, is that Trump would be barred from a presidential comeback.
Canceling the trial would "make a mockery of the system," Biden said in an interview with People published Wednesday. "He was impeached by the House and it has to move forward, otherwise it would come off as farcical what this was all about."
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.