Photo by Douglas Rissing/Getty Images
United States Capitol building
Start with the fact that the defeated president’s attempt to violently overthrow American democracy after he lost the election by millions of votes was always insane. So were Republicans for absurdly trying to pretend Trump’s deranged mob were simply overly enthusiastic patriots. We all watched their destructive rampage on television.
So, it’s no surprise elected Republicans closing their eyes, poking fingers in their ears and singing “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall” failed miserably to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for the bloodiest day of domestic terrorism in our history.
But there’s another reason the hearings of the House Jan. 6 Committee wrapping up until they resume in September have succeeded beyond all expectations. Every episode presented damning new details about Trump’s lawless actions to increase the violence on Jan. 6 in testimony from many of the Republicans around Trump who witnessed it.
The season finale connected Trump directly to the escalating violence by the murderous mob as it was taking place. The Secret Service wouldn’t allow Trump to personally lead the mob, but he joined them in spirit by inflaming their homicidal anger against his own vice president they were stalking with a hanging rope. Trump tweeted Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” to sabotage President Biden’s election. He refused to throw out the electoral votes of seven states including Wisconsin where Republicans submitted fraudulent electoral votes for Trump.
Violent Surge
After that tweet, law enforcement reported a visible surge in the violence by thousands of rioters flooding into the Capitol. At that same moment, a White House security official monitoring Secret Service radio traffic reported Pence’s agents feared for their lives.
“It sounds like that we came very close to either (agents) having to use lethal options or worse … They’re screaming and saying things like ‘Say goodbye to the family.’ … (The National Security Council) needs to know this is going to a whole ‘nother level soon.”
|
|
For more than three hours, staff and family members desperately urged Trump to do something to stop the attack, but he refused. Pence did all that. While dodging Trump’s raging mob, Pence called the Defense Department, the National Guard and other police agencies desperately seeking backup for overwhelmed police.
That’s why Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so offended when Trump’s own chief of staff Mark Meadows called him late in the afternoon. Milley told the committee: “He said, ‘We have to kill the narrative that the Vice President is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that, you know, that the president is still in charge and that things are steady or stable.’ Or words to that effect. I immediately interpreted that as politics, politics, politics … And I don’t do political narratives.”
Revelations about what really happened before and throughout Jan. 6 were made public for the first time in every one of the committee’s televised hearings. Some testimony was literally unforgettable. Capitol Officer Caroline Edwards described engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the mob while slipping in the blood of her colleagues. Black election workers talked about being terrorized for volunteering at the polls to honor family members who were denied the right to vote.
Spectacular Revelations
The most spectacular revelations came from Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows’s top aide, who testified Trump not only knew the mob was heavily armed but tried to have metal detectors removed for his speech so the Secret Service wouldn’t confiscate deadly weapons from his supporters before he sent them to the Capitol to shut down Congress. That chilling testimony was illustrated with a photograph of a man in a tree with an AR-15 assault rifle.
Like all good television, the darkest, most disturbing scenes were occasionally broken up with comic relief. You learned to tell Trump’s reaction to lunchtime television by reading the ketchup on the wall. And that Trump’s deranged conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn had a map tracing secret rays being beamed from enemy nations flipping voting machine ballots to Biden by remote control using Nest thermostats.
Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were the only two Republicans courageous enough to join the committee to try to prevent the violent forces Trump unleashed within their party from destroying it. Kinzinger has already decided he can’t be re-elected in a Republican district and Trump is obsessed with defeating Cheney. They can’t be the last to try to save Republicans or it’s doomed as a legitimate American political party.
The Jan. 6 Committee already has presented a solid criminal case against Trump to the U.S. Justice Department. In November, that case will be submitted to the American voters. If Republicans who continue to side with Trump against democracy are successful, all the rest of us have a lot more work to do.
