Kyle Cheney

Good to be with you, Kimberly.

Thanks for having me.

I mean, it's a great question and one I've grappled with a lot because it's a very different story arc if Donald Trump is not president today versus now that he is, what the meaning of that day and the sort of arc of history and the arc of presidential history and Washington history because what we'd be covering now if Donald Trump

lost the 2024 election is sort of the aftermath, the accountability phase of what happened on January 6th.

The criminal cases would be playing out in courts.

But instead, what we have is Donald Trump's return to power and his attempt to use that power to turn back on the people who pursued him.

And also the lessons that he learned from that January 6th, which is that you can push

the boundaries of presidential power in ways that even cross legal and constitutional lines and not face consequences.

And I think that is a through line that we see now in sort of how he's conducting himself in the second term.

Exactly.

And that is what the story of this past year has been.

The first year of Donald Trump's second term has been essentially pushing, as we said, right up to the line or past the line of what's constitutionally and legally allowed, banking on the Supreme Court, siding with him at the end of the day.

So even when lower courts are ruling against him, saying this is flagrantly illegal, hoping the Supreme Court goes the other way, and most of the time they've been correct about that, although not in every instance, and we can get into some of that.

But for the most part, that formula has worked in the second term, and that includes dismantling entire elements of the bureaucracy, agencies, firing supposedly independent agency heads,

and cutting certain funding and with grants and really overhauling the way government looks in ways that we used to think required acts of Congress.

Sure.

So what struck me the most was how quickly people who don't normally speak out, you know, some congressional Republicans to say this is not a legitimate criminal investigation, you know, even, you know.

Even when Trump has gone as far over the line as we've seen him, congressional Republicans have usually been pretty reluctant to say, this is wrong, this is a problem.

And instead, what we saw here was the contrast to that.

We saw a couple of Republican senators, actually at least three, maybe four Republican senators say, wait a second, this is not about criminal justice, this is about justice.