Dishonor,
Trump’s and His Party’s, Is the Real January 6th Takeaway
Liz Cheney, defying the
G.O.P., offered a searing indictment of the former President at Thursday’s
hearing.
There were many
memorable lines, and even a few revelations, in the long-awaited House select
committee prime-time hearing on the harrowing events of January 6, 2021. Viewers on Thursday night
learned that Donald Trump’s own Attorney General, Bill Barr, had dismissed his “rigged election”
claims as “bullshit.” They learned that Trump’s own daughter Ivanka agreed with
Barr. And they learned that Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had been informed of the complete
and utter emptiness of Trump’s false election claims by one of Trump’s own
campaign lawyers. “There’s no there there?” Meadows asked the lawyer.
But
the most unforgettable words were those of Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who, in
defiance of her party, is helping to lead the investigation by the House panel.
Speaking directly to her fellow-Republicans in Congress, the vast majority of
whom have continued to support and promote Trump even after a pro-Trump mob
stormed the Capitol and sent them fleeing for their lives, she concluded her
presentation with a warning: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone,
but your dishonor will remain.”
In
the course of a searing forty minutes, Cheney was given the starring role in
laying out the select committee’s case against Trump. She marshalled the
evidence—much of it new, much of it devastating—to show how the former
President knew that his claims about the election were a lie but used them to
inflame his followers and summon them to the Capitol anyway. She nailed it.
It
was, in the end, appropriate that it should be a Republican who emerged as the
most brutally effective prosecutor of Trump, the former President who has not
only escaped being banished and disgraced by his party but remains its leader
and the putative front-runner for its Presidential nomination, should he run
again in 2024.
At
the end of her presentation, Cheney showed what might have been the night’s
most revealing witness statement—a short clip of Jared Kushner. In it, Kushner
was asked about the repeated threats to resign made by Trump’s White House
counsel, Pat Cipollone, and his staff, as they sought to stop Trump from
unconstitutionally seeking to overturn the election. Kushner, Trump’s
son-in-law, who served as one of the former President’s close advisers
throughout his four disruptive years in the White House, said that he did not
take Cipollone’s threats to resign seriously. He thought that Cipollone was
just “whining.”
It
was a brutal moment. Kushner did not believe Trump’s false claims about the
election. But he, like so many others surrounding Trump, like so many of
Cheney’s Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, who knew full well that
everything Trump said about the election was a lie, chose to wash his hands of
the matter. Instead of trying to stop the President, he and Ivanka purchased a
32.2-million-dollar lot on an exclusive private island near Miami, in December,
2020, and he started writing his memoir. Whining, indeed.
The
hearing began and ended, as it should have, with Trump himself. “President
Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,”
Cheney said, consciously echoing an interview that she gave to Fox News on the
afternoon of January 6th, while she and her colleagues were still in hiding
from the pro-Trump mob. It said everything about where American politics are
today that on Thursday night, a year and a half after the events in question,
Fox News did not dare to broadcast Liz Cheney’s remarks—or to air the full
hearing live, as the other networks did. Instead, it chose to run its regular
evening programming of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the Trump
propaganda machine.
There
is a moment, often replayed in the various January 6th retrospectives, that
always hits me like a gut punch. It is the frantic call over a police radio at
around 2:30 p.m. on January
6th. “We lost the line! We’ve lost the line,” an officer screams. It was the
moment when the Capitol was overrun, ransacked, and occupied by a hostile force
for the first time since the War of 1812. I wanted to cry listening to it again
on Thursday night.
The
January 6th committee hearings will continue throughout June and have been a
year and a half in the making. The panel has reportedly interviewed a thousand
witnesses and reviewed many thousands of pages of documents. It has chronicled
what the committee’s chairman, the Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, said
on Thursday was a “sprawling, multipart conspiracy aimed at overturning the
Presidential election.” Cheney declared it a “sophisticated seven-part plan,”
and future hearings will dive deeper into its components: Trump’s spreading of
election misinformation; his plot to fire the acting Attorney General in order
to get the Justice Department to further his false claims; his pressure on
Vice-President Mike Pence to block the counting of the electoral votes; his
pressure on Republican-led state legislatures to switch their electoral votes
and scheme to send fake electoral certificates to Congress; his summoning of
the mob to the Capitol on January 6th; and his refusal to do anything to stop
them once they were there, rampaging.
Thursday’s
hearing suggested that there is still much to be learned from the
investigation, as the evening offered only a glimpse of what the testimony has
uncovered. One of the night’s more tantalizing nuggets was Cheney’s revelation
that Trump, when told about rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” seemed to agree
with the sentiment, telling his staff, “Maybe our supporters have the right
idea.” Another came when she noted that multiple Republican members of Congress
who had participated in Trump’s plotting had unsuccessfully sought Presidential
pardons for their roles.
After
less than two hours, it was clear that much of the most damaging information
from the committee’s probe will come from Trump’s aides, advisers, and even
family members. Jason Miller, a Trump campaign adviser, was shown testifying
that Trump had been clearly and unambiguously informed by his campaign’s data
expert that he would certainly lose. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, testified that he had not heard from Trump himself on January 6th but
had received a call from Meadows. The White House chief of staff expressed no
interest in the attack on American democracy, according to the nation’s top
military officer, but offered only concern that Trump, not Pence, still be seen
as in control. “We have to kill the narrative that the Vice-President is making
all the decisions,” Milley testified that Meadows told him. “We need to establish
the narrative that the President is still in charge.” To Milley—and to all of
us listening at home—the conclusion was obvious. As Milley said, it was just
“politics, politics, politics.”
Before
the hearings began, committee members had promised stunning revelations. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat and lead
House prosecutor of Trump during his second impeachment trial, memorably said
that they would “blow the roof off the House.” I’m not sure we know yet whether
he was right. Already it is clear that the information gathered by this
remarkable investigation will keep historians busy for years, sifting through
the wreckage of an American political system battered by the former President’s
unprecedented and unpresidential actions. But, unfortunately, the true scandal
of January 6th had always been apparent, long before the House select committee
made it clear once again on Thursday night: the mob never would have been there
had Donald Trump not lied about the election he lost. ♦