2016 election

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has thrown out the conviction of Douglass Mackey for lack of evidence, remanding his case to a district court for immediate dismissal. The ruling marks a massive victory for shitposters everywhere. For those of you who are not extremely online or deeply obsessed with the Pilgrim’s Progress of First Amendment rights in America, Mackey is the online figure formerly known as “Ricky Vaughn” whom the Biden FBI arrested in 2021 for a tweet he posted in 2016 making fun of Hillary Clinton and spreading satirical information about “texting to vote.” The government said he was using "social media to spread disinformation relevant to the impending 2016 Presidential Election.

My first semester of college coincided with the 2012 presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I was a conservative from a small rural town at an elite liberal university, and this was not great for my social life. My freshman floormates at Georgetown defaced my political signs, made nasty comments to me in the hallways and on election night my RA dropped by my room to rub it in my face when the race was called for Obama. The following morning, we all went back to class and started preparing for midterms. Four years later, universities across the country all but shut down when Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Suddenly the mental health of the losers was priority number one. Classes were canceled to allow students space to grieve.

Could 2025 give Democrats a do-over for how they misplayed the results of Donald Trump's first election? Early signs point to yes — and that could come at the consternation of some conservatives. Let's consider some political alternative history for a moment. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, it's easy to forget how many Democrats started sounding a note of reconciliation with the incoming president. Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were all open about their willingness to find common ground with the new White House on infrastructure and other policy areas, hoping their views would be closer to Trump's than more fiscally conservative Republicans.

From the outset, it was inconceivable. The idea that Donald J. Trump, limousine liberal, famed for bankruptcies both financial and moral, would triumph within a Republican Party less than four years removed from nominating Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan struck nearly every analyst as absurd on its face. Sure, there was a faction of support. Sure, he appealed to the populist wing. Sure, his message on immigration was more in line with the party’s base than the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But to win, in this crowded field, over so many leading lights of conservatism with the carefully constructed résumés designed to equip them for the nomination, if not the presidency? Inconceivable. Of course, in 2016, he did it — and by now we all know how.

As the latest special counsel files new charges against former president Donald Trump, it’s beginning to look like legal crusades in America are more important than political ones. Locking up one’s political opponents is the sort of thing they used to do in Ukraine, after all, or the totalitarian state of which Arthur Koestler wrote in Darkness at Noon. Just a few years after claims of Russian collusion with the winning candidate of America’s 2016 presidential election were debunked, it is ironic that a Russian’s critique of our political culture nearly half a century ago captures our current predicament so clearly.

It is an irony of history that the bronze Statue of Freedom which stands tall atop the US Capitol dome was commissioned by the man who would seek to break the nation apart a few years later. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war when the statue was ordered, clashed with Yankee sculptor Thomas Crawford over his original design, which included a liberty cap, the symbol of an emancipated slave, above the statue’s crown. The statue is adorned with a sword, a shield and a wreath of victory. It’s symbolic in other ways as well: struck hundreds of times by lightning, it conducts and dissipates that violent energy into the earth. Freedom makes an excellent lightning rod. Today, critiques of the statue and what it represents arise from different sources.

Bill Kristol suggested that to get rid of Trump Republicans, it might be necessary for anti-Trumpers to be “with the Democrats for a while.” In a chat with Politico this weekend, the Weekly Standard founder proposed a Gretchen Whitmer-Abigail Spanberger ticket, in what would be a perfect combination of TikTok mom-schmaltz and Beltway hackery. Luckily, though, Kristol’s prediction record is — to put it nicely — lacking. Let’s start in 2008. Kristol was a huge proponent of then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin for John McCain’s vice presidential pick, saying, “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin.” McCain and Palin lost by 10 million votes and received only 173 electoral votes to Obama and Biden’s 365. It’s not like Kristol was just a decade too early, either.

Hillary Clinton has an ominous warning ahead of the 2024 election: right-wing extremists, she said this week, are already planning to steal it. If they were, she would certainly know something about it. Hillary has been shrieking about “vast right-wing conspiracies” since the 1990s when she and her husband were mapping out their political futures of “Eight for Bill, Eight for Hill.” The poor woman just can’t catch a break. You'd have to hood Hillary like a falcon to stop her from talking about how elections have been stolen from her. She claimed that about the 2016 election, in which she seemingly forgot the state of Wisconsin existed for 104 days.

In May, when a federal jury acquitted former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of one count of lying to the FBI, the cadre of politicians, pundits and activists that comprise what they consider a “resistance” to Donald Trump’s presidency were brimming with indignation at the insult of its having gone to trial at all. The Sussmann prosecution was the first case from special counsel John Durham to go to trial. Durham was appointed in 2019 to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. And it took only a few hours for the jury to rule against him.

Michael Sussmann, a senior lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, is currently on trial for lying to the FBI. The allegation is straightforward. As the election approached, Sussmann texted his old friend and fellow attorney, James Baker, requesting a brief, urgent meeting. Baker was the FBI’s top lawyer and Sussmann was a partner at Clinton’s election-law firm. They were friends from their days together at the Department of Justice and continued to know each other socially. According to the indictment, Sussmann told Baker he was coming solely to help the Bureau and not on behalf of any client.