Slate: “Things are supposed to feel better now – better than they felt during the Trump administration, at least. The Biden administration and the Justice Department appear hellbent on restoring the (appearance of) normalcy, boring us to death, and getting past the days of a citizenry held captive to madcap tweets. That’s why the administration is focusing on infrastructure, COVID relief, economic recovery, and the workaday acts of governance. Except that alongside these acts of sleepy normalcy are constant reminders of where we have been and where we are still heading.”

“In the past few days we have learned – among other object horrors – that Donald Trump’s Justice Department seized metadata records for members of the House Intelligence Committee and their families, whom it suspected of leaking. We learned that Trump supporters have been leveling crippling death threats against state election workers. We learned that White House counsel Don McGahn had been instructed to fire Robert Mueller. We learned that in 2019, Rudy Giuliani, acting in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer, pressed Ukraine to announce baseless investigations about alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. And yet as Richard Painter and Claire O. Finkelstein showed last week, the Justice Department has worked to stymie investigations and litigation that would unearth at least some of these truths, in a quest to protect institutional prerogatives and values. Perhaps this would all be understandable if we had actually turned a page. But this great unearthing taking place in the press right now has also revealed that Donald Trump and some of his (never disbarred) lawyers are presently insisting that he will be ‘reinstated’ as president in August, that several Republican senators who lost in November will be swept back into office with him, that Trump is insisting that ‘audits’ in Arizona and other states are going to trigger a nonexistent mechanism for his return to office. Oh and that huge numbers of Republicans believe him. In other words, nothing that is meant to be over is actually over.”