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Civics Unhinged is the new home for my long-form satire and political commentary — a place where essays can breathe without algorithms or paywalls. I write about the civic unraveling of our time: the absurdities of power, the decay of seriousness, and the endurance of humor as a last civic virtue. Dunnegin is a former senior federal official, policy analyst, and longtime political consultant who has advised members of Congress, federal agency heads, and corporate leaders. He has spent decades...
Civics UnhingedThe Real Heirs of the Republic
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Trump, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Cramping His Scene
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Civics UnhingedAbout Civics Unhinged
Civics Unhinged is the new home for my long-form satire and political commentary — a place where essays can breathe without algorithms or paywalls. I write about the civic unraveling of our time: the absurdities of power, the decay of seriousness, and the endurance of humor as a last civic virtue. Dunnegin is a former senior federal official, policy analyst, and longtime political consultant who has advised members of Congress, federal agency heads, and corporate leaders. He has spent decades...
Civics UnhingedThe Real Heirs of the Republic
Heritage, Myth, and the Power We Inherit
Civics UnhingedThe World Is Not a Real Estate Listing
Trump, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Cramping His Scene
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There are moments when moral clarity arrives so belatedly that it risks being mistaken for courage.
Last week, The New York Times editorial board declared, with unmistakable force, that Donald Trump is the January 6 president—that the attack on the Capitol was not a rupture from his politics but their clearest expression. It was a welcome departure from euphemism. It was also long overdue.
The editorial is correct. Trump does not merely carry the legacy of January 6; he governs from it. The event defines his posture toward power, law, and legitimacy. He did not repent of it. He refined it. In that sense, January 6 was not an aberration but a rehearsal.
🎧 Listen to the narrated version of The Cost of Saying It Late (7 minutes, 45 seconds).
And yet the question that lingers beneath the Times’ sudden forthrightness is not whether the claim is valid, but why it has taken this long to say so without qualification.
If this is true now, when was it not then?
For years after the insurrection, much of the American press—The New York Times foremost among them—treated January 6 as a trauma rather than a strategy. It was described as a “shock to the system,” a “stress test,” a “dark chapter,” language that suggested rupture without responsibility. Trump was portrayed as a corrosive presence, a destabilizer, a rule-breaker. Rarely was he described as what he plainly was: a sitting president who attempted to retain power by force and intimidation when the electorate refused him a second term.
This oversight was not ignorance. The facts were known. The timeline was clear. The intent was public. What was missing was not information but proportion. The Times now acknowledges that America remains trapped in the political era that began on January 6. That is undeniably true. But it is also true that this reality was visible almost immediately—to scholars of democracy, to prosecutors, to historians, and to millions of citizens who understood that something irrevocable had occurred. The reluctance to name it fully was not born of uncertainty. It was born of institutional caution.
Caution, however, is not neutral.
In subsequent essays marking the anniversary of the attack, the Times has increasingly gestured toward a broader diagnosis: that January 6 was not the disease but the symptom, and that elite impunity is the underlying illness eating away at American democracy. This, too, is correct. A system that refuses to hold powerful actors accountable invites repetition. Lawlessness does not triumph spontaneously; it triumphs when institutions signal that the costs of defiance are manageable.
What remains unexamined is the press’s own role in sustaining that signal.
For years, Trump’s conduct was mediated through a language of normalization. Each outrage was contextualized, and each escalation was framed as another turn in an ongoing saga rather than a cumulative assault on the constitutional order. Even as courts, state officials, and civil servants testified to sustained pressure campaigns and explicit threats, coverage often retreated into procedural abstraction. The question was not whether Trump had attempted to subvert democracy, but how voters might “feel” about the attempt.
This habit of narration mattered. Impunity does not survive without an accommodating story. That story did not write itself.
The answer, uncomfortably, lies in the press’s self-perception. For years, American journalism has confused distance with rigor and restraint with seriousness. In the face of a president who treated law as optional and legitimacy as theatrical, many institutions chose to believe that calm description might itself impose order. It did not. The language of moderation proved no match for a politics of escalation. By declining to speak with moral specificity when specificity was warranted, the press did not preserve neutrality; it preserved ambiguity. And ambiguity, in moments of democratic stress, is not a shield. It is an accelerant.
Contrast this with the work of writers and publications less burdened by institutional self-regard. In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser’s year-end assessment of Trump’s return to power dispenses with the fiction that restraint equals objectivity. Her account is unsparing, not because it is partisan, but because it is proportionate. Trump’s actions are described in language that matches their scale. The erosion of norms is not treated as atmosphere but as an outcome.
The difference is instructive. Where one institution hesitated, another spoke plainly—not louder, but clearer.
This distinction is not a question of tone. It is a question of moral timing.
The Times’ editors are right to say that January 6 remains the defining event of our political moment. They are right to say that the lawlessness it unleashed has not been reversed. But arriving at this clarity only after Trump’s return to power risks confusing recognition with resolve. When moral judgment is postponed until the verdict is obvious, it ceases to function as a warning and becomes mere annotation.
A democracy does not fail only when coups succeed. It fails when the institutions tasked with describing reality decide that doing so too plainly might appear unseemly.
For years, American journalism insisted that its role was not to label threats but to present facts neutrally, allowing readers to decide. That posture collapses when the danger is to the system that makes decision-making possible in the first place. Neutrality toward anti-democratic behavior is not balance; it is abdication.
To say this now is necessary. To have said it earlier would have been braver.
There is still value in the Times’ clarity, belated though it clearly is. But clarity delayed carries a cost. It teaches the public that certain truths may be acknowledged only once they have hardened into inevitabilities. It trains readers to expect candor only after consequence. And it reassures those who test the limits of democracy that time, if nothing else, remains on their side.
January 6 did not become Trump’s presidency in retrospect. It was always so. The failure was not in recognizing this fact, but in deciding—again and again—that saying it aloud could wait.
The question now is whether this plain speech marks a change in habit or merely a moment of editorial conscience tied to an anniversary. Democracies cannot be defended episodically. They require institutions willing to name danger while it is still unfolding, not after it has been absorbed into the landscape.
If January 6 is finally being described honestly, the obligation is not to commemorate it more vividly, but to refuse the next euphemism when it presents itself.
If the press wishes to regain authority, it must relearn that clarity is not an indulgence granted after danger passes, but an obligation owed while it still unfolds.
~ Dunneagin
Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).
☕ Civics Unhinged mugs and merchandise are available at:
👉 Thank you for listening and for your support.
M
· Platform tags: January 6
· Donald Trump
· Democratic Erosion
· Media Accountability
· Institutional Failure
· Rule of Law
· Authoritarianism
· Political Norms
There are moments when moral clarity arrives so belatedly that it risks being mistaken for courage.
Last week, The New York Times editorial board declared, with unmistakable force, that Donald Trump is the January 6 president—that the attack on the Capitol was not a rupture from his politics but their clearest expression. It was a welcome departure from euphemism. It was also long overdue.
The editorial is correct. Trump does not merely carry the legacy of January 6; he governs from it. The event defines his posture toward power, law, and legitimacy. He did not repent of it. He refined it. In that sense, January 6 was not an aberration but a rehearsal.
🎧 Listen to the narrated version of The Cost of Saying It Late (7 minutes, 45 seconds).
And yet the question that lingers beneath the Times’ sudden forthrightness is not whether the claim is valid, but why it has taken this long to say so without qualification.
If this is true now, when was it not then?
For years after the insurrection, much of the American press—The New York Times foremost among them—treated January 6 as a trauma rather than a strategy. It was described as a “shock to the system,” a “stress test,” a “dark chapter,” language that suggested rupture without responsibility. Trump was portrayed as a corrosive presence, a destabilizer, a rule-breaker. Rarely was he described as what he plainly was: a sitting president who attempted to retain power by force and intimidation when the electorate refused him a second term.
This oversight was not ignorance. The facts were known. The timeline was clear. The intent was public. What was missing was not information but proportion. The Times now acknowledges that America remains trapped in the political era that began on January 6. That is undeniably true. But it is also true that this reality was visible almost immediately—to scholars of democracy, to prosecutors, to historians, and to millions of citizens who understood that something irrevocable had occurred. The reluctance to name it fully was not born of uncertainty. It was born of institutional caution.
Caution, however, is not neutral.
In subsequent essays marking the anniversary of the attack, the Times has increasingly gestured toward a broader diagnosis: that January 6 was not the disease but the symptom, and that elite impunity is the underlying illness eating away at American democracy. This, too, is correct. A system that refuses to hold powerful actors accountable invites repetition. Lawlessness does not triumph spontaneously; it triumphs when institutions signal that the costs of defiance are manageable.
What remains unexamined is the press’s own role in sustaining that signal.
For years, Trump’s conduct was mediated through a language of normalization. Each outrage was contextualized, and each escalation was framed as another turn in an ongoing saga rather than a cumulative assault on the constitutional order. Even as courts, state officials, and civil servants testified to sustained pressure campaigns and explicit threats, coverage often retreated into procedural abstraction. The question was not whether Trump had attempted to subvert democracy, but how voters might “feel” about the attempt.
This habit of narration mattered. Impunity does not survive without an accommodating story. That story did not write itself.
The answer, uncomfortably, lies in the press’s self-perception. For years, American journalism has confused distance with rigor and restraint with seriousness. In the face of a president who treated law as optional and legitimacy as theatrical, many institutions chose to believe that calm description might itself impose order. It did not. The language of moderation proved no match for a politics of escalation. By declining to speak with moral specificity when specificity was warranted, the press did not preserve neutrality; it preserved ambiguity. And ambiguity, in moments of democratic stress, is not a shield. It is an accelerant.
Contrast this with the work of writers and publications less burdened by institutional self-regard. In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser’s year-end assessment of Trump’s return to power dispenses with the fiction that restraint equals objectivity. Her account is unsparing, not because it is partisan, but because it is proportionate. Trump’s actions are described in language that matches their scale. The erosion of norms is not treated as atmosphere but as an outcome.
The difference is instructive. Where one institution hesitated, another spoke plainly—not louder, but clearer.
This distinction is not a question of tone. It is a question of moral timing.
The Times’ editors are right to say that January 6 remains the defining event of our political moment. They are right to say that the lawlessness it unleashed has not been reversed. But arriving at this clarity only after Trump’s return to power risks confusing recognition with resolve. When moral judgment is postponed until the verdict is obvious, it ceases to function as a warning and becomes mere annotation.
A democracy does not fail only when coups succeed. It fails when the institutions tasked with describing reality decide that doing so too plainly might appear unseemly.
For years, American journalism insisted that its role was not to label threats but to present facts neutrally, allowing readers to decide. That posture collapses when the danger is to the system that makes decision-making possible in the first place. Neutrality toward anti-democratic behavior is not balance; it is abdication.
To say this now is necessary. To have said it earlier would have been braver.
There is still value in the Times’ clarity, belated though it clearly is. But clarity delayed carries a cost. It teaches the public that certain truths may be acknowledged only once they have hardened into inevitabilities. It trains readers to expect candor only after consequence. And it reassures those who test the limits of democracy that time, if nothing else, remains on their side.
January 6 did not become Trump’s presidency in retrospect. It was always so. The failure was not in recognizing this fact, but in deciding—again and again—that saying it aloud could wait.
The question now is whether this plain speech marks a change in habit or merely a moment of editorial conscience tied to an anniversary. Democracies cannot be defended episodically. They require institutions willing to name danger while it is still unfolding, not after it has been absorbed into the landscape.
If January 6 is finally being described honestly, the obligation is not to commemorate it more vividly, but to refuse the next euphemism when it presents itself.
If the press wishes to regain authority, it must relearn that clarity is not an indulgence granted after danger passes, but an obligation owed while it still unfolds.
~ Dunneagin
Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).
☕ Civics Unhinged mugs and merchandise are available at:
👉 Thank you for listening and for your support.
M
· Platform tags: January 6
· Donald Trump
· Democratic Erosion
· Media Accountability
· Institutional Failure
· Rule of Law
· Authoritarianism
· Political Norms
F.P. Dunneagin
F.P. Dunneagin
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