The whirlwind of events of the last several weeks have displaced more familiar political analyses in much popular media. An apparent attempt at assassinating former president Donald Trump on the eve of the Republican convention, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, and Vice President Harris replacing him at the head of the ticket would each have been unusual, striking events individually, but taken together sent commentators and analysts in search of precedents.

Yet amid or in spite of the unusual events, some things quickly reverted to normal. Despite a professed “toning down” of violent language from Republicans, Trump and newly anointed elegiac hillbilly VP candidate JD Vance “doubled down” on violent language, especially that directed at migrants and immigrants. And with that, some things were back to “normal,” at least as far as Republican candidate sound bites were concerned.

What had in the runup to the events of mid-July seemed newly bold right-wing rhetoric pervading Republican party communications has been treated by some commentators as something new. Certainly the January 6, 2021 riot represented a new level of violence in the nation’s capital. To find a precedent for the placement of bombs one must look back to the 1983 bombing of the Senate side of the Capitol building, ostensibly to protest US involvement in Grenada. In its conception and coordination, however, January 6 most closely resembled the so-called Brooks Brothers riot in Miami in 2000, largely coordinated by Bush campaign official Brad Blakeman, but including future Trump partisan Roger Stone and others who would become members of the George W. Bush administration. Like the January 6 riot, the goal of the Brooks Brothers riot was to stop a vote-counting process, resorting to violence if necessary.

In his recent book When the Clock Broke, writer John Ganz locates the origins of multiple aspects of our current political and cultural environment in events, people, and actions from the 90s. For example: the mythologizing of criminal figures as popular outlaws he associates with legendary mafioso John Gotti; the trend toward political movements that purport to oppose political movements he associates with the quixotic campaigns of Ross Perot; the rightward shift of the Republican party he associates with one-time grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, and serial presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

During the recent BET awards TV broadcast, host Taraji P, Henson used the platform to issue repeated warnings that a win by Republican Donald Trump in the November presidential election would, in Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch’s words, “undermine our fundamental rights.” Bunch, who has been one of the few op-ed writers at a major news outlet to focus on Trump and his lies in the aftermath of the recent presidential debate, sees Henson’s use of her platform to warn of the GOP’s plans to drastically change the relationship between government and citizens as a potential turning point in the presidential campaign. While the details of Project 2025 are apparently not widely known, the 900+ page document is publicly available, and touted by right-wing pundits – including principal architect, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts – on conservative media.

Voting rights website Democracy Docket describes Project 2025 as “a collection of policy transition proposals” that would enable Trump, if elected, to “vastly remake the federal government most effectively to carry out an extremist far-right agenda.”

House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol

On day two of Amy Coney Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing , Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham asked, “You say you’re an originalist. Is that true?” “Yes,” Barett replied. “What does that mean in English?” Graham continued. “… [T]hat means that I interpret the Constitution as a law, that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it,” Barrett replied, reciting a now familiar mantra.

Some time later that day Senator Mike Lee of Utah probed further: “Tell me why textualism and originalism are important to you.” “… I think originalism and textualism, to me, boil down … to a commitment to the rule of law," Barrett said, "to not disturbing or changing or updating or adjusting ... in line with my own policy preferences what that law required.” “And is it the subjective motivation, the subjective intent of an individual lawmaker or drafter of a constitutional provision that we’re looking at?” Lee continued, “Or is it original public meaning? And if so, what’s the difference between those two?” “It’s original public meaning, not the subjective intent of any particular drafter,” Barrett predictably replied. “So one thing I have told my students in constitutional law is that the question is not what would James Madison do? We’re not controlled by how James Madison perceived any particular problem. That’s because the law is what the people understand it to be, not what goes on in any individual legislator’s mind.”

These exchanges present the rote formulation of originalism and textualism – legal jargon that has seemingly improbably found its way into popular media. Writing in 2011 on the occasion of members of the House of Representatives reading the Constitution aloud at the opening of its legislative session, University of Chicago’s Eric Posner noted with some surprise at the ascendance of originalism signaled by the House’s homage. “Although originalist ideas have floated around since the Founding,” Posner wrote in the New Republic, “the modern theory was produced by a small group of mostly marginalized (conservative) academics, whose ideas were rarely taken seriously by the most influential (liberal) scholars in the top law schools.”