What the replacement of Ed Martin, who punished his own prosecutors for bringing cases against January 6th rioters, signals about the President’s signature campaign promise.

On the first night of Donald Trump’s second term in office, he signed an executive order called “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which pardoned more than fifteen hundred people who were charged or sentenced for their participation in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Earlier in the day, Trump had appointed Ed Martin, a conservative activist and lawyer from Missouri, as the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin had helped organize the Stop the Steal rally, at the Ellipse, which preceded the riot. He was at the Capitol on January 6th; he characterized the energy as “like Mardi Gras,” though he later claimed that the federal government had staged some of the day’s activities. He went on to defend so-called J6 hostages in court, and worked with their advocacy organization, the Patriot Freedom Project. (Martin gave an award to a pardoned rioter and Nazi sympathizer, whom he called “an extraordinary man.”) He has compared the imprisonment of Capitol rioters to the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Martin would now lead the office that handled the January 6th prosecutions—the largest criminal investigation in American history. He worked quickly to undo it.

Martin, who was the first U.S. Attorney for D.C. in more than fifty years to have been neither a judge nor a federal prosecutor before assuming the role, summarily fired more than a dozen of the prosecutors who had been involved in the cases, then launched a probe to investigate how the office had handled what he saw as “Communist show trials.” He demoted senior leaders, among them those who oversaw the prosecutions of Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. (Both men served time after D.C. juries found them guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to coöperate with the House committee investigating January 6th.) On X, Martin described his office as consisting of “President Trumps’ lawyers.”

On Thursday, Trump announced that Martin, who was serving in an interim capacity and still needed to be confirmed by the Senate, would be withdrawn from his post. Two days earlier, Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina and a member of the Judiciary Committee, had indicated that he would cast a deciding vote to scuttle Martin’s nomination. “Most of my concerns are related to January 6th,” Tillis told reporters at the Capitol. (He elaborated that if Martin were “being put forth as a U.S. Attorney for any district except the district where January 6th happened, the protests happened, I’d probably support him.”)

Trump, who would ordinarily lead a public campaign of intimidation in the face of such intransigence, seemed only mildly glum; he didn’t even threaten Tillis. “I’m very disappointed,” Trump said. “But I have so many different things now I’m doing with the trade. I’m one person. I can only lift that little phone so many times in a day.” When I called Tami Perryman, whose husband participated in the riot, and was sentenced to three years in jail for assaulting a police officer, she spoke cheerfully about seeing a prosecutor cry after losing her job in Martin’s purge. “It’s rare that someone takes a moral stand, and that’s what Martin did,” she said. But that was meant to be just the beginning. “J6 didn’t end with those pardons,” Perryman said. “We want a true investigation. They came after us, and all the nefarious things need to be brought out. I need to see some action.”

Though Trump has by many accounts taken swift and extreme action in the first few months of his term, the maga originalists remain fearful of being stymied by the deep state, and worry about loyalty to the first principles of the movement. In the lead-up to what would have been Martin’s confirmation hearing, J6 defendants circulated a catalogue of what they saw as broken promises: “Epstein list in their hands—no arrests. DOGE pointing out fraud/abuse—no arrests Clinton proven to be behind the Russian hoax—no arrests. When will we start seeing accountability?” Also: “They’re doing it again because you didn’t hang them last time.” Just after Trump won reëlection, Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project, a constitutionalist judicial organization (tagline: “brass knuckles to fight leftist lawfare”), said, of the Democrats, “I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall.” (He has also suggested “gulags” for journalists.) Kash Patel, Trump’s F.B.I. director, published, in an appendix to his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters,” a long list of enemies that he promised to go after. The latest hope for follow-through—not just pardoning the rioters, but arresting those who had put them away—had been pinned on Martin, with all of D.C. under his jurisdiction. “People saw Ed Martin as courageous enough to go after corrupt actors in the federal government, Congress, N.G.O.s, defense contractors,” a person who served in the first Trump Administration told me.

Martin’s defenders began to eulogize a version of the Presidency, promoted relentlessly on the campaign trail, that would seek revenge on behalf of those who had gone to jail for Trump. “That is Trump at his core,” a conservative D.C. lawyer told me. “January 6th and arresting liberals as the top issue. But the real Trumpism is dead.” (He acknowledged some victories: the ongoing antitrust trial that could break up Meta—an important symbolic battle for the anti-tech, populist right—and the sweeping tariffs imposed across the globe.) Steve Bannon, who continues to be a sort of maga spiritual leader, and who spends hours each week talking about retribution on his popular “War Room” podcast, told me there needed to be more urgency in taking revenge against bad actors. We discussed the recent arrest of Hannah Dugan, a circuit judge in Wisconsin who was charged with obstruction for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom evade arrest by federal authorities. She was photographed being marched out of the courthouse in handcuffs. “That’s what I voted for,” Bannon told me. He was eager to see much more of it. “We haven’t even really started the hard work,” he said. “We’re burning daylight.”

These past few months, on Capitol Hill, the Republican-led Congress has contorted itself time and again to support the President, with little significant pushback.“I don’t mind what Trump does, because I trust Trump,” as Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, once put it. The inability to get Martin into a committee hearing seemed to mark a kind of ending. It also exposed the fractures and tensions within the legislative branch. “What’s at play here is a soft Civil War within the Republican Party,” the person who served in the first Trump Administration told me. “Only a handful of the Senate Republicans are behind Trump in a meaningful way.”

Other Trumpists were more sanguine. A maga-friendly government lawyer in D.C. pointed out that a significant chunk of Martin’s brief tenure appeared to have been spent writing threatening letters to members of Congress, which were shared widely online. “I’ve seen a widespread lack of appreciation for the distinction between political loyalty and technical competence,” he said. “I think that’s a major problem for the Trump movement right now—how loud people are willing to be about their commitment to the agenda versus how competent people are going to be at implementing it.” Making substantive progress on the issues that mattered most would require the U.S. Attorney for D.C. to position himself as a more credible actor. The lawyer articulated a different retributive vision, one that corresponds to, say, dismantling federal agencies via deregulation, or rooting out dark money—not just handcuffing Trump’s enemies for the camera.

As the other conservative lawyer put it, “I think there are real deep-state problems, but it’s probably better not to have someone that’s that buffoonish in charge of that.” He went on, “The prosecutions the Democrats did were politicized, but there was at least an attempt to create a fig leaf of institutional neutrality.” And any cases brought by the U.S. Attorney in D.C. that made it to trial would go before a jury in a heavily Democratic city. “It’s just pointless,” he said. “They’ve completely lost touch with how the law works.” Undoing the norms and institutions that the maga faithful saw as weaponized against them wouldn’t happen just by arresting a D.C. judge. Bannon felt differently. He wanted to see District Court Judge Beryl Howell, who presided over January 6th cases and struck down Trump’s executive order targeting Perkins Coie, “in cuffs.” He told me, “That’ll send shock waves through the effete legal and political establishment that runs this city.” And for him it went beyond pure symbolism—he felt that a liberal-leaning D.C. jury might actually be compelled to convict her if they finally heard the true story of how deep the rot was. “You have to break glass, and that’s not happening. Ed Martin was starting to do that, and they freaked out.”

On Thursday evening, Trump announced that Jeanine Pirro, the TV host from Fox News, would step into Martin’s role. (Martin was moved to the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group.) Pirro is the former district attorney for Westchester County, and in 2016 had been considered to run the Eastern District of New York. She is also well trained in playing the part of a fiery justice on prime time and on her spinoff “Judge Jeanine Pirro” reality show. “She’s perfect casting, she’s got the fighting spirit,” Bannon told me. To him, the fear of losing Martin may have given way to an even better replacement. (“Hope they enjoy Judge Jeanine,” Jack Posobiec, the maga loyalist, told me, winking at the G.O.P. senators who had hoped to hem in Martin.)

Trump appointed Pirro to a hundred-and-twenty-day acting term, bypassing the Senate, replacing one interim U.S. Attorney with another. It may be cumbersome to operate without the approval of his own party; defendants indicted in Washington could challenge their prosecution, and the courts could strike down certain actions, on the ground that Pirro hasn’t been lawfully appointed. But it’s not difficult to imagine Trump replacing the U.S. Attorney every four months from a roster of loyalists, allowing them to act with abandon, unfettered by the worry of a confirmation hearing. “Imagine if he appoints me,” Mike Davis wrote on X. “My 17-week reign of terror. No mercy.” ♦