All Roads Lead to Trump
The American Prospect
All Roads Lead to Trump
We already knew he was at best indifferent to the January 6th violence. The committee that convened last night seeks to prove he was directly responsible for it.
by Harold Meyerson
June 10, 2022
snip//
The case, whose historic context was laid out by Chairman Bennie Thompson and whose particulars were mapped out with pointed clarity by Vice Chair Liz Cheney, appears based on several facts—some already known, some quite new—that the committee leaders, using video clips from witnesses, deftly laid out. One of those facts is that people whose business it was to know clearly told Trump that he had lost the election—most prominently, his attorney general Bill Barr, in whose videoed testimony that was aired said he told Trump that his contentions of fraud and rigging were “bullshit.” It’s not clear, and may never be, whether Trump actually believed this, in which case he knew he’d lost the election that he was illegally and unconstitutionally seeking to overturn, or whether his industrial-strength narcissism kept him from acknowledging what the facts said and he still was OK with contravening the Constitution to keep his hold on power. What is clear is that either way, Trump is the last person any sentient being would want to occupy the White House.
Cheney also alluded to other instances of mind-boggling bad faith that will be detailed in the hearings to come, including that John Eastman, who came up with the bright idea that Vice President Pence could single-handedly declare the election null and void when he chaired the session tallying the electoral votes, had written a month previous that this Pence strategy was nonsense. Another preview of revelations of culpability came when Cheney mentioned that Republican Rep. Scott Perry, who’d brought Eastman into Trump’s coven, sought a post–January 6th pardon from Trump before Trump left office, and that he wasn’t the only congressional Republican who did so.
That’s not normal conduct for a member of Congress unless they think they may well have violated the law.
In other words, the committee appears ready to make the case that the conspirators to overturn the election, among whom Trump was both the germinal and seminal figure, likely knew that they were lying when they said Trump had won, and surely knew that keeping him in power through the bizarre and desperate means they’d chosen broke the law and violated the Constitution.
What makes Trump a formidable figure, of course, is that of all the slimeballs and nitwits involved in this conspiracy, he was probably the only one who didn’t in the slightest degree care that he might be breaking the law and contravening the Constitution. Stacked up against the shattering humiliation of acknowledging that he’d lost, such legal niceties were of no concern to him whatsoever.
Does that mean Trump knew he was inciting a violent insurrection when he told the Proud Boys to stand by, and when he tweeted an invitation (just hours, we learned last night, after meeting with the cracked cabal of Flynn, Powell, and Giuliani, with no staff present to tamp those lunatics down) to his fans to come to D.C. on the day the electoral votes were to be tallied, and that it would be “wild”? Whatever uncertainty still hangs over that question, which later hearings may dispel, the one thing we can be sure of is that he certainly didn’t care if his hold on power was obtained by violence. His conduct during the breach of the Capitol, we already knew, makes that perfectly clear, and the hearings will make that clearer still.
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https://prospect.org/politics/all-roads-lead-to-trump-january-6th-hearing/
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