On January 20 2021, Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for what most people assumed was the last time. He was going back to Palm Beach. A fortnight earlier he had helped goad a mob assault on Capitol Hill — the first attack on America’s legislature since it was set on fire by British troops during the war of 1812.
Few of Trump’s entourage turned up at Andrews Air Force Base to wave him off. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, had just called Trump a “despicable human being”. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, which had been Trump’s biggest cheerleader, vowed in an internal email to make him a “non-person”.
Much of America and the world agreed with Joe Biden’s contention that Trump’s presidency had been “an aberrant moment”. A handful of loyalists, notably Steve Bannon, Kash Patel, Richard Grenell, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro and Boris Epshteyn stuck with Trump over the following months. In Maga mythology, this was Trump’s wilderness period.