![]() ![]() Kinzinger seemed almost gleeful as he recounted how, during the riot, McCarthy was “scared and begging” Trump to call off the mob. Unshackled from any further demands of partisan loyalty, they were both unsparing in reminding their prime-time national-television audience of the perfidy of their own party.īoth seemed to take particular delight in tweaking House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who initially blamed Trump for January 6th and then, weeks later, abjectly sought his favor once again. Kinzinger, faced with an unwinnable new gerrymandered district, chose not to run for reëlection, and Cheney is a distinct underdog to a Trump-endorsed candidate in her upcoming primary. Cheney and Kinzinger, of course, are both G.O.P. ![]() Much of Thursday’s session was about forcing her fellow-Republicans to wallow in that dishonor, and this is why the hearing both began and ended with clips of the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell condemning Trump’s actions. “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain,” she warned then. When the hearings began, in June, Representative Liz Cheney started them out with a rousing admonition to her Republican colleagues, almost all of whom have refused to join her and Kinzinger in robustly and publicly condemning Trump for the disaster that he brought on himself and the nation. But this, it seemed to me, was the real thing. They chose right, as it turns out, but what if they hadn’t?Ī lot of what passes for televised drama in our politics is not much more than manufactured artifice: a faux reveal of something we already know, an embarrassing gaffe that is soon forgotten, and the like. We knew, but still it was something to hear the rising terror in their crackling voices, to understand that they had seconds to decide whether to race Pence through to safety or get stuck and risk being overwhelmed by the fast-approaching mob. And yet it was still transfixing, and terrifying, to listen as the committee played newly revealed audio and video detailing how Vice-President Mike Pence’s security detail feared they were about to be overrun by the mob-fears so acute, the committee revealed, that some even called their loved ones to say goodbye. It is hard to produce a season-ending cliffhanger when the conclusion is never in doubt. Of course, the hearing started out with a built-in problem: we already knew that Trump did not do a damn thing to stop the attack on January 6th, and that he had, in fact, incited and encouraged it. As unbelievable as it still seems, a year and a half later, America had a President who was willing to burn down democracy itself rather than admit he lost an election. Which might as well be Donald Trump’s petulant political epitaph. “I don’t want to say the election is over,” he says. But it was both revelatory and deadly serious to hear Trump, in that previously unreleased footage, refuse to give up his lies. It was as if the screenwriters for “ Veep” had conjured the moment. “ ‘Yesterday’ is a hard word for me,” he says. There were even moments of cringe-inducing comedy, like the blooper reel of Trump balking, on January 7th, at reading words that his staff had written for him renouncing his rigged-election crusade after the previous day’s debacle. There were damning new revelations, greatest-hits reprises, earnest and preachy lectures about the fate of the Republic. The hearing, like the seven that preceded it, was, in all honesty, a bit of a mishmash. “President Trump did not fail to act,” Representative Adam Kinzinger, the renegade, anti-Trump Republican from Illinois, who presented much of the evidence on Thursday, said. The words “dereliction of duty” came up a lot, as did phrases like “stain on our history” and “betrayed his oath of office.” It all added up to a portrait of something that the United States has not seen in its more than two hundred and forty years: a President who abdicated his role as Commander-in-Chief, having unleashed a violent mob of his own making and then chosen to sit by and do nothing as his nation’s Capitol was besieged and overwhelmed by that mob. ![]() On Thursday night, the House select committee charged with investigating January 6th concluded a two-month run of blockbuster hearings with a searing, minute-by-minute account of what Trump did-and didn’t do-in the dining room that awful afternoon. ![]()
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