AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
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Outtakes of a speech by former President Trump on January 7th, 2021, were a highlight of the hearing.
It wasn’t a night for big reveals. It was a night for putting things in context, in particular the context of the ticking clock.
The Thursday night primetime hearing by the Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack sought chiefly to explain what then-President Trump was doing, and not doing, as his supporters sacked the Capitol and came closer than we knew to knocking off his vice president. The Committee showed us text messages from notable Trumpians (from Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to his own son Don Jr.), imploring him to call a halt to the violence. It showed us testimony from his closest advisers, begging him to stop it.
But we already knew about those, as we knew about his refusal to do anything. We knew, as Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) made clear, that “Trump didn’t fail to act; he chose not to act.”
We already knew, from Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, that Trump had fought with Bobby Engel, who headed his Secret Service detail, when Engel kept him from driving to the Capitol to join his armed mob. We heard testimony tonight from other witnesses saying they’d heard the same account.
We had not heard what one of last night’s witnesses, whose identity was kept secret, said: That White House security was concerned that if Trump succeeded in joining his mob, what would follow would be “a coup,” or at least, an attempted coup. That testimony echoed the presentiments of other West Wingers who feared that, if Trump went unscripted before the press room cameras while the rioters were still advancing in the Capitol, he might well tell them to keep going.
Slowly, the real fears of Trump’s handlers are bubbling to the surface. We did hear for the first time recordings from Mike Pence’s Secret Service agents, who were mortally fearful that Pence’s escape route was nearly blocked as the insurrectionists drew close. We heard that some were calling their families to offer provisional goodbyes.
The new (to me, at least) fact that contextualized Trump’s conduct was the Committee’s assertion that, by the time Trump finally acceded to the chorus of pleas that he call off his thugs, he had realized that the coup had failed. Mike Pence was still alive, the cops had been reinforced, the National Guard was en route, members of Congress had all been secreted away in secure locations, and surely the House and Senate would reconvene before the night was through to declare Joe Biden the president-elect. Only then did Trump relent, telling his legions to go home. (Nevertheless, dead-ender Rudy Giuliani kept calling senators, even after the mob had dispersed but before the joint session reconvened, asking them at Trump’s behest to keep challenging the votes of swing states that went to Biden.)
The fact that Trump agreed to call off the insurrection only when it hadn’t prevailed was, I should add, based more on temporal analysis than direct testimony. By 4 PM on the 6th, Reps. Kinzinger and Elaine Luria (D-VA) concluded, surely speaking for the Committee as a whole, it was clear the riot would not succeed in keeping Congress from returning. This was all public knowledge, and hence Trump’s knowledge. Time had run out on the Donald’s attempts to stay in power. As the Committee has clearly documented, the January 6th insurrection was only the last, desperate gasp.
But it wasn’t, as we all know, the end of Trump’s claim that he’d actually won the election. The high point of the hearing was the outtakes the Committee showed from Trump’s January 7th speech, in which he promised an orderly transfer of power—a speech he was compelled to make to hold off his Cabinet from convening to invoke the 25th Amendment and toss him out of office. In one outtake, confronted by a teleprompter that read “the election is over,” Trump grimaced and said he didn’t want to say that.
Indeed, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, says that Trump called him last week to urge him to overturn the state’s vote in the 2020 election. Which leads me to make one suggestion to the team of lawyers who’ll defend Trump if Merrick Garland ever bestirs himself to indict him (and with each successive hearing, the committee’s semi-demands that Garland do just that grow louder and more compelling): Plead insanity.
Sure, Trump knows exactly what he’s doing, and he knows that he lost; he just can’t bear the shame of acknowledging it. Nonetheless, there may be someone on the jury who’ll conclude that anyone who thinks he can reverse the outcome of a presidential election halfway through his successor’s term is majorly deranged.
Deranged he may be, but he’s also the most evil son of a bitch in our nation’s history. John Wilkes Booth, you’ve been upstaged.
