First, Trump lied to the public. Then he tried to weaponize the Justice Department to back up his lies. He pressured state election officials and legislators to adopt far-fetched legal theories and change election results in their states. His team worked to fabricate and send to Washington a list of invalid voters in hopes that Congress would recognize them and allow him to reverse his loss. He called on supporters and encouraged armed groups to join him in D.C. on Jan. 6, promising in a tweet that “it’s going to be wild.” He then pressured Vice President Mike Pence to break his constitutional oath and refuse to certify valid election results before January 6. Finally, he seemingly refused to lift a finger — or make a phone call or send a tweet — to summon federal help as the Capitol and the Legislature came under violent attack for hours. Instead, according to the committee, only Vice President Pence — himself holed up in a secure loading dock in the Capitol compound after being hastily evacuated from the Senate chamber above — contacted the military and ordered them to respond and secure the Capitol.
Taken together, this is the most audacious, calculated, and unconstitutional conspiracy America has faced in its history—one that is much closer to success than anyone imagined.
Over the course of those two hours, the committee was able to reframe the national conversation and focus on the real horror of January 6th. In doing so, it certainly increased the pressure on the Justice Department, which has been conducting an apparently slow-moving parallel investigation that has brought hundreds of indictments and low-level charges against the rebels since Jan. 6 — including yesterday’s arrest of a GOP gubernatorial candidate in Michigan. – and a number of more serious charges of “subversive conspiracy” against the leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. So far, it has failed to penetrate Donald Trump’s motley collection of supporters, fraudsters and supporters.
Despite the shocking clarity of the committee’s inaugural presentation, it remains uncertain at best whether it will succeed in breaking through America’s political polarization and its increasingly separate and unequal media ecosystems. Fox News, alone among the major networks, refused to air the hearings live and instead allowed its host Tucker Carlson, who has increasingly espoused outspoken white nationalist positions, to spew venom at his millions of viewers in prime time during hour-long show, unusually uninterrupted by commercials.
In many ways, Fox’s decision to double down on Tucker Carlson’s lies Thursday night isn’t surprising. The network’s decision in the weeks after the 2020 election. — when Donald Trump built the Big Lie and scheduled the January 6th incendiary — to embrace Trump’s lies and undermine the legitimacy of then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory makes him anything but an unindicted co-conspirator in the violence on Capitol Hill.
The challenge facing America now, heading into next week’s follow-up hearings, is that none of us know which part of Donald Trump’s story we’re living in—the beginning, the middle, or the end? The committee’s job ahead is to convince America to view January 6 as a turning point, not a warning that we will later say was ignored.
After all, there is a saying that there is no such thing as a failed coup. A failed coup is just practice.
