The hearing’s the thing
With a steady stream of real and manufactured outrages, it’s perhaps understandable for some Americans to underplay the significance of what we all witnessed just 16 months ago: A gang of rioters who considered themselves patriots, whipped into a rage by Donald Trump’s wholecloth lies, disrupted the peaceful transfer of power, flooding the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the counting of electoral votes making Joe Biden president.
Thursday night in primetime, the House Jan. 6 committee did more than 20 million viewers and the nation a great service by not only retelling the ugly and brutal and lethal story in painful detail, but exploding myths that have already grown up like strangler figs around the tree of truth.
The first critical fact established by the committee: Many of Trump’s closest allies knew that he had indeed lost the election. Attorney General Bill Barr, who’d been enough of a loyalist to flatly misrepresent the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s report, called the talk of widespread fraud “bulls—t,” a judgment with which
Trump’s daughter Ivanka concurred. Trump aide Jason Miller relayed that the campaign’s data guru told Trump in “pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.” White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, presented with evidence that there was no widespread fraud in key states Trump lost, acknowledged “there’s no there there.”
Second is a crucial corrective as a declining 45% of Americans hold the president solely or mainly responsible for Jan. 6.: Trump himself, who spread the falsehoods without which the uprising would have been impossible, approved of what transpired. Not only did he do nothing to stop the insurrection in progress, but, aware of the crowd’s chants to hang his vice president, a witness told the committee, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.”
Liz Cheney put it best in addressing her Republican colleagues, who continue to defend the former president and parrot his lies and incitement: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”