It is a testament to the enduring power of the Trump brand that even today, in his final hour, some of his most fierce opponents still hoped for a final act of benevolent rebellion. The Left has spent much of his final week in office calling for pardons for Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner, earnestly imagining that Trump, at the last moment, would stick his thumb in the eye of the deep state. But as the clock on his presidency ran out, it became clear: there would be mercy for political allies, fundraisers, and various celebrities — but none for these opponents of the political establishment.

Donald Trump, a deeply reactionary capitalist billionaire, ran for president in 2016 on the audacious premise that he was actually a radical opponent of the political establishment. With his trademark combination of interpersonal belligerence, catty name-calling, and rhetorical bluster against a few prestigious targets of convenience — his political rivals in intelligence and law enforcement, for example — he maintained this public posture for a long four years.

And the strategy worked. Respectable liberals on both sides of the aisle popped their monocles and wrung their hands at the spectacle. Angry teenagers and maladjusted suburbanite boat dads gleefully retweeted and made a defiant show of wearing his trademark campaign merchandise, a red hat. And Very Serious right populist intellectuals praised Trump’s “trollitics” as “a wrecking ball to the institutionalized dandyism of politics, characterized by moral preening and worthless platitudes.”