Appalling
new video of the rioters is a big problem for Trump’s GOP enablers
Opinion by
Columnist
Jan. 18, 2021 at 9:55 a.m. CST
In the days after
President Trump instigated a violent mob assault on the Capitol, his most
craven enablers have frantically searched for a political sweet spot: They’ve
tried to condemn the violence without retracting or apologizing for their
active role in sustaining the big lie that incited it.
This will become a
lot harder to pull off, thanks to appalling new video of the rioters brought to
us by the New Yorker and by ProPublica.
The footage
illustrates with great force just how tightly bound up that big lie — that the
election was illegitimate — was in the rioters’ motivations. The enablers of
this lie badly want to flush this truth down the memory hole.
The enablers here are
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri. They
prominently led Trump’s charge to object to Joe Biden’s electors in Congress,
which constituted an effort to invalidate millions of votes and overturn the
results.
Cruz is directly
mentioned in the video filmed by the New
Yorker’s Luke Mogelson. It depicts two men rummaging through a lawmaker’s
papers in the Capitol.
“There’s gotta be
something we can f---ing use against these scumbags,” one says.
“I think Cruz would
want us to do this,” the second man says soon after. “I think we’re good.”
It’s hard to know
what “this” is a reference to. But plainly, they believed Cruz — by virtue of
claiming fellow lawmakers shouldn’t count Biden’s electors — wanted them to go
to extralegal lengths to damage them, including violently invading the Capitol
and stealing their secrets.
At another point, as
a mob menaces cops in a hallway, a man screams at them: “There’s a f---ing
million of us out there. And we are listening to Trump.” And as a mob enters
the Senate chamber, another man shouts: “Where the f--- are they?”
In other words,
Trump’s effort to get lawmakers to object to Biden’s electors based on the lie
that the election was illegitimate — and Trump’s command that the mob
intimidate them into doing so — inspired them to break into the Capitol and
seek out senators for exactly that purpose.
‘We’re coming for
you, too, f---ing traitor’
This is also
forcefully demonstrated in the video obtained by ProPublica, a treasure trove of
footage posted by Parler users. This illustrates how rioters subsequently
shared footage with great pride to rally the movement in the attack’s
aftermath.
“Where they meeting
at?” one man shouts. “Hey, where they count the f---ing votes?” shouts another.
All throughout, the crowd bellows with bloodthirsty rage.
“We’re coming,
b---h,” another man says of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We’re coming for you,
too, f---ing traitor,” he yells about Vice President Pence, whom Trump
had menacingly singled out to the mob
earlier in the day.
In short, they were
seeking to intimidate and possibly injure or even kill lawmakers — and the vice
president — for doing their constitutional duty in making a U.S. presidential
election official.
Not long after this
invasion, Cruz, Hawley and more than 100 other Republicans voted to sustain the
very same lie about the election’s illegitimacy. Cruz and Hawley plainly sensed
an opportunity: Promoting it was seen as good positioning for the 2024 GOP presidential
primaries. Indeed, even former Cruz aides say his motive was to outflank
Hawley.
Ever since Cruz and
Hawley lost control of the plot, they have tried to condemn the violence itself
while sanitizing their support for the lie driving it.
Surfing authoritarian
currents
Cruz, for instance,
has insisted that he
disagreed with Trump’s inciting rhetoric, calling it “reckless,” and adding: “I
have disagreed with the president’s language and rhetoric for the last four
years.”
Hawley,
meanwhile, claims that “to equate
leading a debate on the floor of the Senate with inciting violence is a lie,”
and says that in leading that debate, he was “representing my constituents.”
Both are nonsense.
Even if many Hawley constituents believe the election was illegitimate,
validating that lie by perverting his ceremonial role in counting already
certified electoral votes — after the voter fraud claims were dismissed in
dozens of courts — doesn’t constitute “representing” them. Rather, it
constitutes deliberate abuse of Hawley’s official role for the purpose of
keeping them trapped in an already litigated and debunked delusion.
Meanwhile, even if
Cruz does condemn Trump’s incitement, that doesn’t justify his support for the
lie at that rhetoric’s core, which, again, is a serious abuse of official duty
for the express purpose of keeping that falsehood alive.
Even worse, Hawley
and Cruz sought to validate that lie for purely instrumental purposes: to
capture a constituency of Trump voters for 2024. The complication here, as Jonathan Last notes, is that it isn’t
easy to see how the grip Trump holds over Republican voters can be transferred to other
standard-bearers, since it appears largely rooted in perceptions of Trump’s
willingness to do whatever it takes to vanquish the people he and they hate.
So Cruz and Hawley
decided that the way to pull this off was to harness the surging authoritarian
currents inside the GOP. These currents are real: Majorities of Republican voters say Biden didn’t
legitimately win the election and that GOP leaders didn’t go far enough in
trying to nullify the outcome. Cruz and Hawley tried to surf those currents,
and they wiped out.
The offense here is
in calculating that the way to capture the Trumpist energy is to abuse official
power to bolster a lie so destructive that Trump’s own intelligence
agencies have warned it threatens to inspire
untold future violence.
What has now been
underscored is the degree to which this falsehood inspired the assault. There’s
only one way out for them now: Stand up for the legitimacy of the election,
unambiguously disown the lie to the contrary, and accept that it’s singularly
responsible for our ongoing breakdown. This new video illustrates their
dereliction as forcefully as anyone could want.