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Throughout four years of scandals and investigations, President Trump has maintained an approval rating that rarely budged from a 10-point band between 35 and 45 percent. Nothing he could say, do or tweet appeared to dramatically change public opinion of him.
But the events of Jan. 6 — when a violent mob of Trump supporters incited by the president stormed the Capitol — appear to have damaged him in his final days in office in a way that finally moved the needle.
Mr. Trump is set to depart office on Wednesday with an approval rating of 29 percent, the lowest of his presidency, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center.
About 75 percent of the public said Mr. Trump bore some responsibility for the violence and destruction of Jan. 6, which put the lives of the vice president and members of Congress at risk and resulted in five deaths, according to the survey.
And his behavior since the election — a period during which he has repeatedly tried to contest his loss, relied on conspiracy theorists for advice, encouraged supporters who do not view President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as legitimate, and refused to concede — has cost Mr. Trump support even with those individuals who have loyally supported him up until now.
According to Pew, the share of his supporters who described his conduct as “poor” has doubled, from 10 percent to 20 percent, over the past two months.
Mr. Biden, in contrast, has benefited from how he has handled the transition period. About 64 percent of voters said they had a positive opinion of his conduct since the November election. The majority of voters said they also approved of his cabinet selections.
Mr. Trump’s polling while in office has been surprisingly stagnant, despite regular eruptions from the president. He was the only president in the history of Gallup’s polling who never earned the support of a majority of Americans for even one day of his term. But he also held onto his durable base, who appeared willing to overlook any behavior they did not approve of, or any promises that Mr. Trump never followed through on.
That group now appears to have shrunk, although Mr. Trump still has some stalwart supporters who believe the conspiracy theories he has encouraged about election fraud. About 34 percent of respondents said they believed Mr. Trump was “definitely” or “probably” the rightful election winner.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have tried to play up that base of loyal support to him, noting that there are “welcome home” events planned for his arrival in Florida on Wednesday. They have also planned an upbeat send-off on the morning of Jan. 20 to commemorate his final departure from Washington as president, aboard Air Force One.
But whatever show of support he sees on his way out will belie the reality of his situation.
Not only has he made history as the first president to be impeached twice. But he appears to be on track to leave office with the lowest approval rating of any modern-day president.
Government leaders and law enforcement announced new investigations on Friday into the security failures that led to the assault on the Capitol last week, showing how the pressure to secure Washington and other American cities is increasing amid growing threats of violent right-wing unrest ahead of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration next week.
Capitol Police said they had opened an investigation into whether members of Congress inappropriately gave visitors access to the Capitol ahead of the storming of the building, after several lawmakers raised concerns that their own colleagues might have allowed members of a pro-Trump mob inside in the days leading up to the assault.
The new inquiry came to light as Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Friday that she had named Russel L. Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general, to lead a security review of the Capitol in the wake of the riot.
And inspectors general from a range of federal agencies are opening a coordinated investigation into why the federal government was caught flat-footed during the siege on Jan. 6 and to come up with protocols to prevent such failures in the future.
States around the country are also on high alert. At least 19 states had activated National Guard members to help with security at their Capitol buildings as of Saturday morning, said Wayne V. Hall, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va. Several are also planning to close their Capitol grounds at different points in the coming days.
In Washington, the National Park Service announced that the National Mall would be closed for a week. Thousands of National Guard members continue to flood into the city, blocking streets and installing perimeters intended to safeguard next week’s ceremonies.
As the Biden administration prepares to take leadership of a nation in turmoil, Vice President Mike Pence telephoned Vice President-elect Kamala Harris Thursday to congratulate her and offer his belated assistance, according to two officials briefed on the call, which was described as gracious and pleasant. It is another instance of Mr. Pence filling a leadership role that President Trump has all but abdicated.
Mr. Pence will also be stepping in for the president on the day of Mr. Biden’s inauguration — although it is traditional for the outgoing and incoming first families to meet at the White House on the morning of the inauguration, Mr. Trump has said he will not meet with Mr. Biden nor will he attend the swearing- in ceremony.
He is instead planning to take off from Joint Base Andrews before Mr. Biden’s inauguration, in a relatively low-key conclusion to one of the most tumultuous terms of any president in history. But Mr. Trump does hope to depart to the blare of a military band, with a red carpet and military honors, those briefed on the planning said.
As Mr. Trump plans his departure, in the wake of a second impeachment, Ms. Pelosi declined to provide an official timeline for his Senate trial. The case is likely to advance even if Mr. Trump has already left office, with Democrats and some Republicans aiming to prevent him from holding public office again.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced more nominations for his State Department on Saturday morning and plans to introduce new White House science team officials in Wilmington, Del., in the afternoon.
The Biden-Harris transition team announced several nominations, including that of Brian P. McKeon, who has worked with Mr. Biden for more than 25 years, to be deputy secretary of state for management and resources. Bonnie Jenkins, a veteran arms control expert, was nominated for under secretary for arms control and international security affairs; Ms. Jenkins is also the founder of a group for women of color in national security.
Uzra Zeya, who has held multiple roles at the State Department, was nominated for under secretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights. Mr. Biden also formally announced the nominations of Wendy Sherman to be deputy secretary of state and Victoria Nuland as under secretary for political affairs; his plans to nominate both Ms. Sherman and Ms. Nuland were previously reported.
On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will publicly introduce members of the White House science team. They are:
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Dr. Eric Lander, nominee for director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (O.S.T.P.) and Presidential Science Advisor-designate
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Dr. Alondra Nelson, O.S.T.P. deputy director for science and society
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Dr. Frances H. Arnold, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
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Dr. Maria Zuber, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
Law enforcement officials are vetting hundreds of potential airplane passengers and beefing up airport security as officials amplify warnings of violence before the presidential inauguration from extremists emboldened by the Capitol attack last week.
The Transportation Security Administration is increasing the number of federal marshals on flights and explosive-detection dogs at airports. Screening officers will be deployed to assist a militarized “green zone” in downtown Washington.
Federal officials say the security perimeter, which includes an increasing number of armed members of the National Guard, is necessary to prevent an attack from domestic extremists.
The extremists “remain a concern due to their ability to act with little to no warning, willingness to attack civilians and soft targets, and ability to inflict significant casualties with weapons that do not require specialized knowledge,” federal officials wrote in the bulletin obtained by The New York Times.
David P. Pekoske, the Transportation Security Administration administrator, said in a statement on Friday that the agency was vetting “hundreds of names” before the event on Jan. 20. Commercial airlines have tracked an increase in passengers checking in firearms on their way to airports in the Washington area, according to a separate bulletin from the Justice Department.
Federal agencies have also begun to identify those captured on video at the Capitol with weapons or engaging in violence and putting them on a “no-fly” list aimed at preventing suspected terrorists from boarding flights, according to an administration official.
Federal law enforcement officials have said they continue to be alarmed by an increase in chatter from groups like the boogaloo, a far-right group that aims to start a second civil war, and other racist extremists threatening to target the nation’s capital to protest Mr. Biden’s decisive victory in the popular vote and Electoral College.
Mr. Biden has resisted calls to move the celebration indoors for the sake of safety. His inauguration committee had already been planning a scaled-back celebration with virtual components because of the coronavirus.
National Guard officials said they would most likely need at least 25,000 troops in Washington, 5,000 more than they projected this week, for duties ranging from traffic control to security in and around the Capitol itself. That number, roughly more than three times the number of American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria, could still grow.
As President Trump prepares to leave office with his party in disarray, Republican leaders including Senator Mitch McConnell are maneuvering to thwart his grip on the G.O.P. in future elections, while forces aligned with Mr. Trump are looking to punish Republican lawmakers and governors who have broken with him.
The bitter infighting underscores the deep divisions Mr. Trump has created in the G.O.P. and all but ensures that the next campaign will be a pivotal test of the party’s direction.
The friction is already escalating in several swing states in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol last week. They include Arizona, where Trump-aligned activists are seeking to censure the Republican governor they deem insufficiently loyal to the president, and Georgia, where a hard-right faction wants to defeat the current governor in a primary election.
In Washington, Republicans are particularly concerned about a handful of extreme-right House members who could run for Senate in swing states, potentially tarnishing the party in some of the most politically important areas of the country. Mr. McConnell’s political lieutenants envision a large-scale campaign to block such candidates from winning primaries.
But Mr. Trump’s political cohort appears no less determined, and his allies have been laying the groundwork to take on Republican officials who voted to impeach Mr. Trump — or who merely acknowledged the plain reality that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the presidential race.
Republicans on both sides of the conflict are acknowledging openly that they are headed for a showdown.
“Hell yes we are,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump.
An early test for the party is expected in the coming days, with Trump loyalists attempting to strip Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of her House leadership role in retaliation for her vote to impeach the president.
If that effort proves successful, it could further indicate to voters and donors that the party’s militant wing is in control — a potentially alarming signal to more traditional Republicans in the business community.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., racing against a surge in coronavirus cases and the emergence of a new variant that could worsen the crisis, is planning a vaccination offensive that calls for greatly expanding access to the vaccine while using a wartime law to increase production.
“We remain in a very dark winter,” Mr. Biden told Americans in a speech in Wilmington, Del., on Friday. “The honest truth is this: Things will get worse before they get better.”
But he also tried to offer hope for an end to a pandemic that has taken more than 390,000 American lives and frayed the country’s economic and social fabric.
Mr. Biden pledged to increase vaccination availability in pharmacies, build mobile clinics to get vaccines to underserved rural and urban communities, and encourage states to expand vaccine eligibility to people 65 and older. He also vowed to make racial equity a priority in fighting a virus that has disproportionately infected and killed people of color.
The president-elect’s expansive vision is colliding with a sobering reality: With only two federally authorized vaccines, supplies will be scarce for the next several months. Mr. Biden is clearly prepared to assert a role for the federal government that President Trump refused to embrace, using the crisis to rebuild the nation’s public health services and Washington’s money to hire a new health work force and deploy the National Guard. But many of his bold promises will be difficult to realize.
“It won’t mean that everyone in this group will get vaccinated immediately, as the supply is not where it needs to be,” he acknowledged. But as new doses become available, he promised, “we’ll reach more people who need them.”
The vaccine distribution plan comes one day after Mr. Biden proposed a $1.9 trillion rescue package to combat the economic downturn and the Covid-19 crisis, including a $20 billion “national vaccine program.” The president-elect has said repeatedly that he intends to get “100 million Covid vaccine shots into the arms of the American people” by his 100th day in office.
Prosecutors in Georgia appear increasingly likely to open a criminal investigation of President Trump over his attempts to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 election, an inquiry into offenses that would be beyond his federal pardon power.
Fani Willis, the new district attorney in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, is already weighing whether to proceed. Among the options she is considering is hiring a special assistant from outside to oversee the investigation, according to people familiar with her office’s deliberations.
At the same time, David Worley, the lone Democrat on Georgia’s five-member election board, said this week that he would ask the board to make a referral to the Fulton County district attorney by next month. Among the matters he will ask prosecutors to investigate is a phone call Mr. Trump made in which he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the state’s election results.
Jeff DiSantis, a district attorney spokesman, said the office had not taken any action to hire outside counsel and declined to comment further on the case.
Some veteran Georgia prosecutors said they believed Mr. Trump had clearly violated state law.
“If you took the fact out that he is the president of the United States and look at the conduct of the call, it tracks the communication you might see in any drug case or organized crime case,” said Michael J. Moore, the former United States attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. “It’s full of threatening undertone and strong-arm tactics.”
He said he believed there had been “a clear attempt to influence the conduct of the secretary of state, and to commit election fraud, or to solicit the commission of election fraud.”
The White House declined to comment.
Anthime Joseph Gionet, a far-right media personality nicknamed “Baked Alaska” who is known for livestreaming himself participating in illegal activity, was arrested by the F.B.I. on Friday and accused of illegally storming the Capitol during the attack on the building by President Trump’s supporters earlier this month.
Mr. Gionet, who has been banned from Twitter and YouTube for his content, livestreamed himself in the mob on DLive, a streaming service becoming more popular after a mass exodus of right-wing figures from more mainstream platforms. He posted a video that showed supporters of President Trump taking selfies with officers in the Capitol who calmly asked them to leave the premises. The video showed the Trump supporters talking among themselves, laughing, and telling the officers and each other: “This is only the beginning.”
Mr. Gionet was arrested in Houston on Friday, according to the Justice Department’s website, and charged with two federal crimes. In a court filing, Nicole Miller, an F.B.I. agent, said Mr. Gionet had recorded a 27-minute live video in which he appeared to chant “Patriots are in control” and says “We are in the Capitol building, 1776 will commence again.”
Over 70 arrests have been made in relation to the riots, and at least 170 cases have been opened. Many of the mob participants have been easily identified through their social media posts.
Emily Hernandez, a woman photographed with part of the wooden name plate torn from the entrance to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, was arrested and charged in federal court on Friday, according to The Kansas City Star.
Ms. Hernandez was seen in numerous videos and photographs holding Ms. Pelosi’s splintered nameplate like a prized keepsake. According to documents from the F.B.I., they received tips about Ms. Hernandez from her friends and acquaintances after she posted pictures and videos of herself parading around with the nameplate on Facebook and Snapchat.
Jenna Ryan, a real estate broker from Frisco, Texas, who took a private plane to Washington to participate in the mob, was also charged on Friday. She was easily identified after she posted about her participation in various ways, including livestreaming herself at the Capitol saying, “Life or death, it doesn’t matter. Here we go.”
Then, just before she entered, she turned to the camera and said: “Y’all know who to hire for your Realtor. Jenna Ryan for your Realtor.”
The ragged camps of far-right groups and white nationalists emboldened under President Trump have been further galvanized by his false claims that the election was stolen from him — and by the violent attack on the nation’s Capitol that hundreds of them led in his name.
The Capitol riots served as a propaganda coup for the far right, and those who track hate groups say the attack is likely to join an extremist lexicon with Waco, Ruby Ridge and the Bundy occupation of an Oregon wildlife preserve in fueling recruitment and violence for years to come.
Even as dozens of rioters have been arrested, chat rooms and messaging apps where the far right congregates are filled with celebrations and plans. An ideological jumble of hate groups and far-right agitators — the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, the Boogaloo movement and neo-Nazis among them — are now discussing how to expand their rosters and whether to take to the streets again this weekend and next week to oppose the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Some, enraged by their failure to overturn the presidential election, have posted manuals on waging guerrilla warfare and building explosive devices.
Since last week, dozens of new channels on secure-messaging apps have popped up devoted to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory that says Mr. Trump is fighting a cabal of Satanists and pedophiles. Militias have found thousands of new followers in darker corners of the internet, such as one Telegram channel run by the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group, which more than doubled its followers to over 34,000 from 16,000.
“People saw what we can do,” boasted one message on a Proud Boys Telegram channel earlier this week. “They know what’s up, they want in.”
Ever since descending the gilded escalator of Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid in 2015, Donald Trump has tethered his success to the politics of law and order, stoking fears and then positioning himself as the only person capable of confronting them.
As for what — or whom — Americans should fear, Mr. Trump has virtually always targeted people of color and people who protested for their rights: Mexicans, migrants from Central America, Black Lives Matter activists, the diverse array of protesters in major cities last summer.
But this month, it was a largely white mob that trawled the Capitol grounds with Trump banners and zip ties, and killed a police officer. The president did not preside over a tear-gas-fogged show of force, as he had during a protest for racial justice before the White House last summer. Instead, he praised these supporters on the evening of the riot — “you’re very special,” he assured them, “we love you” — before trotting out the “law and order” comment the next day under pressure from advisers.
If Mr. Trump spent much of his presidency casting the G.O.P. as the party of law and order, he is concluding it by clarifying just who, in his view — and in his base’s view — the law was designed to order. It’s the Black Lives Matter protesters who are confronted and arrested by the police in Mr. Trump’s law-and-order America; the white mob can expect officers who pause for selfies.
“This ‘Blue Lives Matter’ stuff was just a code word for race that they were using,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist. “‘Law and order’? Here you have a police officer murdered on Capitol grounds, and the White House doesn’t even acknowledge it. It’s incredible.”
Some Republican candidates succeeded last year in positioning their party as the one more committed to law and order. But Mr. Trump, in refusing to accept the results of the election and encouraging his supporters to “fight back,” has seemed committed to proving them wrong.
And so the law-and-order presidency ends like this: hundreds of National Guardsmen posted behind a seven-foot fence looped by razor wire, protecting the Capitol not from the people Mr. Trump spent his presidency demonizing, but all the ones he didn’t.
Political Memo
The relationship between President Trump’s words and their consequences has always been fairly straightforward: He says what he wants, and nothing particularly durable tends to happen to him.
But in the final frames of his presidency, and in the aftermath of his second impeachment, Mr. Trump is confronting an unfamiliar fate. He is being held to account as never before for things he has said, finding his typical defenses — denial, obfuscation, powerful friends, claiming it was all a big joke — insufficient in explaining away a violent mob acting in his name.
In almost certainly the most expansive series of penalties he has incurred in his life, Mr. Trump’s Twitter account has been banned, his business brand badly dented, his presidency doomed to the historical infamy of a second impeachment. His largest lender, Deutsche Bank, is moving to create distance from him. His New Jersey golf club was stripped of a major tournament. Some once-reliable Republican congressional loyalists are revisiting their commitment, threatening his grip on the party, even as the president’s popularity with much of his support base remains undimmed.
Those who have known and watched Mr. Trump across the years cannot shake the irony of a president felled by the very formula that powered his rise: inflammatory speech and a self-regard that has congealed at times into functional self-delusion.
He has never considered words to be as significant as actions, or even in the same category of prospective offense. Words were whatever got him through the next interaction, people who worked with him say. Words were not deemed important enough to invite serious trouble.
So well-developed were Mr. Trump’s survival instincts, in theory, that he had all but perfected the art of semi-plausible deniability — an upside of being on seemingly every side of every major political issue at various points in his adult life.
Hadn’t he said the right thing that onetime? That was what he meant.
Hadn’t he winked at the crowd a bit? Everyone takes him too seriously.
Hadn’t he used the word “peacefully” onetime in that address before the Capitol riot, tucked between the more dominant instructions to “fight” and “show strength” and “go by very different rules” as he whipped up anger against elected officials, including his own vice president, who were disinclined to subvert the will of the electorate?
“He has had a habit of saying outrageous things and then saying he was being sarcastic, he was kidding, that people shouldn’t take him literally — and in fact, if you do, what an idiot you are,” said Gwenda Blair, a biographer of the Trump family. “It’s both deniability for himself, but it’s also deniability for his followers. He gives them something to hold onto so that they can then continue to believe in him.”
But Mr. Trump, and much of the political class that was shocked and disoriented by his 2016 win, has sometimes conflated his reputational resilience with a notion that nothing he says can hurt him, no matter how ostensibly damaging.
In the days leading up to the mob attack on the Capitol, congressional security officials never let House and Senate leaders know that the Capitol Police had warned they might need National Guard backup, according to a congressional aide and other people familiar with the matter.
The police request, made to the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, was prompted by intelligence that showed Trump supporters planned to target the Capitol itself as Congress certified the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, according to a congressional official. The Capitol Police asked the sergeants-at-arms to request that the National Guard be placed on standby.
But the sergeants-at-arms, Michael C. Stenger of the Senate and Paul Irving of the House, rejected the request without raising the issue with either the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, or Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to the aide and another person familiar with the matter.
Mr. Stenger and Mr. Irving, who have resigned amid the fallout from the violence, would most likely have had to ask the leaders whether to approve the requests for such a serious measure, according to former sergeants-at-arms.
The sergeants-at-arms and the chief of the Capitol Police were also among officials who briefed lawmakers the day before the riot and reassured them that they were prepared for the events that day, going so far as to say the National Guard was on standby, though only a modest contingent was on duty to provide traffic control. The sergeants-at-arms are the chief law enforcement officers for the House and Senate, responsible for security matters and keeping order.
Their inaction was a key breakdown in a series of security decisions that left the Capitol inadequately protected as thousands of Trump rioters breached the building, leading to the melee that killed a Capitol Police officer and at least one of the rioters.
transcript
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“It’s not a peaceful protest.”
Rosanne Boyland, a 34-year-old Trump supporter from Georgia who died during the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, appears to have been killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line, according to videos reviewed by The Times.
The manner of her death had been unclear until The Times discovered that the clothes and backpack strap of a woman in widely circulated videos match those that Ms. Boyland wore in a picture taken of her earlier that day.
The rush that led to Ms. Boyland’s death began when rioters, captured on video, massed together in a dangerous crush and attempted to use the weight of their combined bodies to push officers back in a tunnel on the west side of the Capitol, trapping many people in the process.
Even as they first began to push, a rioter could be heard on video warning: “Stop pushing, somebody’s going to get hurt.”
The Times was able to spot Ms. Boyland on the ground in the hours that follow and subsequent attempts by rioters to resuscitate her and get her medical attention. But she was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 6:09 p.m, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.
Two witnesses, one of whom tried to help her, gave similar accounts of her death.
“By the time that they decided to pick the person up and give them to a police officer, she had blue lips and blood was coming out of her nose,” he said on the video. “I don’t think that person will be revived.”
Evan Hill, Arielle Ray and
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