Donald Trump Is Returning to Ground Zero of His Insurrection

The last time Donald Trump was on Capitol Hill, he was fomenting an attack on it. When he returns Thursday after more than three years, for meetings with congressional Republicans, it will be in service of another, somewhat slower-moving hazard to democracy: one that may not feature the bear spray and bashed in windows of January 6, but that could ultimately prove more destructive.

The former president—who has been impeached a second time, quadruply-indicted, and convicted on 34 felony charges since he was last on the Hill—will meet with House and Senate Republicans this week to discuss the November election and plans for 2025 should he win, with the goal of hitting the ground running as quickly as possible if he returns to power. That “strategic governing agenda” would, of course, include his plans to roll back his successor’s policies, enact hardline immigration restrictions, and dramatically expand executive power, which he has made clear he would use to seek “retribution” on behalf of himself and his supporters.

“When this election is over, based on what they have done, I would have every right to go after them,” Trump told Sean Hannity last week of President Joe Biden and the Democrats, whom he falsely accuses of wielding the justice system against him.

It’s a dark vision for the country, one that would put the United States on a road to extremism without the brakes that slowed him down in his first term. “Americans don’t understand just how far down the road to a dystopic, right-wing theocracy we are right now,” Democratic Representative Jared Huffman, the leader of a campaign to combat Republicans’ far-reaching “Project 2025” agenda, told the Hill recently. “In the unthinkable event that Trump wins the presidency, this stuff is going to move very quickly.” (“Project 2025 will not be ‘stopped,’” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which composed the blueprint for the still-hypothetical second Trump term, told the Associated Press Tuesday. “We will not give up and we will win.”)

Trump’s visit Thursday will highlight some intra-party divisions over that authoritarian agenda: Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 and is refusing to endorse him in 2024, will not be in attendance because of a “conflict.” Others, like Indiana Senator Todd Young, have said they will not vote for him this fall. But mostly, the meetings will likely showcase a Republican Party in remarkable lockstep with their leader. “We are all on the same team,” West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito told Politico, “and we need to be united as we move into the fall.”

Indeed, the GOP that greets him Thursday will be depressingly similar to the one that bid him farewell three and a half years ago: a party under his control, and eager to execute his dangerous agenda. That includes Mitch McConnell, leader of the Senate Republicans, who has not spoken with Trump since December 2020. Though his already frosty relationship with the former president has only gotten icier in the years since—as Trump attacks him and his wife, former administration official Elaine Chao—McConnell once again endorsed him for president in March, and will attend the Senate meeting with him Thursday.

McConnell’s capitulation speaks to the shamelessness of the GOP conference, which enabled Trump’s aspiring authoritarianism during his first term and his assault on democracy as it came to an end. Now, the party seems committed to helping him wreak even more havoc this time around. “I think it’ll be a very good meeting,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday.