Spotlight goes on ‘Trump’s last stand’

In first hearing into the Capitol riots, former President is depicted as a would-be autocrat seeking to hang on to power at all costs

In the entire 246-year history of the United States, there was surely never a more damning indictment presented against an American President than outlined yesterday in a cavernous congressional hearing room, where the future of democracy felt on the line.

Other Presidents have been accused of wrongdoing, even high crimes and misdemeanors, but the case against Donald Trump mounted by the bipartisan House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol described not just a rogue President but a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang on to power at all costs.

As the committee portrayed it during its prime-time televised hearing, Trump executed a sevenpart conspiracy to overturn a free and fair democratic election.

According to the panel, he lied to the American people, ignored all evidence refuting his false fraud claims, pressured state and federal officials to throw out election results favouring his challenger, encouraged a violent mob to storm the Capitol, and even signalled support for the execution of his own Vice-President.

“January 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after January 6, to overthrow the government,” said Bennie Thompson, the chair of the select committee.

“The violence was no accident. It represents Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”

Most incriminating were the words of Trump’s own advisers and appointees, played over video on a giant screen above the committee dais and beamed out to a national television audience. There was his own attorney general who told him that his false election claims were “bull **** ”.

There was his own campaign lawyer who testified that there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome. And there was his own daughter, Ivanka Trump, who acknowledged that she accepted the conclusion that the election was not, in fact, stolen as her father kept claiming.

Much of the evidence was outlined by the lead Republican on the committee, Liz Cheney, who has been ostracised by Trump and much of her own party for consistently denouncing his actions after the election. Unwavering, she sketched out the case and then addressed her fellow Republicans who have chosen to stand by their defeated former President and excuse his actions.

“I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone but your dishonour will remain,” she said.

Many of the details were previously reported, and many questions about Trump’s actions were left unanswered for now, but Cheney pulled together the committee’s findings in relentless, prosecutorial fashion.

Some of the new revelations and the confirmations of recent news reports were enough to prompt gasps in the room and, perhaps, in living rooms across the country. Told that the crowd on January 6 was chanting “hang Mike Pence”, the VicePresident who defied the President’s pressure to single-handedly block the transfer of power, Trump was quoted responding, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea”. Mike Pence, he added, “deserves it”.

Cheney, the panel’s vice-chair, reported that in the wake of the January 6 attack, members of Trump’s own Cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the President from office. She disclosed that Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and “multiple other Republican congressmen” involved in trying to overturn the election sought pardons from Trump in his final days in office.

She played a video clip of Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and senior adviser who absented himself after the election rather than fight the conspiracy theorists egging Trump on, cavalierly dismissing threats by Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and other lawyers to resign in protest. “I took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you,” Kushner testified.

Trump had no allies on the ninemember House committee, and he and his supporters have dismissed the panel’s work as a partisan smear attempt.

On Fox News, which opted not to show the hearing, Sean Hannity was busy changing the subject, attacking the committee for not focusing on the breakdown in security at the Capitol, which he mainly blamed on Speaker Nancy Pelosi even though Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then the Republican majority leader, shared control of the building with her at the time.

Before the hearing, Trump tried again to rewrite history by casting the attack on the Capitol as a legitimate manifestation of public grievance against a stolen election.

“January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again,” he wrote on his new social media site.

Trump, of course, was impeached twice already, and acquitted twice, the second time for his role in the January 6 attack. But even so, the case against him now is far more extensive and expansive, after the committee conducted some 1000 interviews and obtained more than 100,000 pages of documents.

What the committee was trying to prove was that this was not a President with reasonable concerns about fraud or a protest that got out of control.

Instead, the panel was trying to build the case that Trump was involved in a criminal conspiracy against democracy — that he knew there was no widespread fraud because his own people told him, that he intentionally summoned a mob to stop the transfer of power to Joe Biden and that he sat by and did virtually nothing once the attack commenced.

Whether the panel can change public views of those events remains unclear, but many political strategists and analysts consider it unlikely. With a more fragmented media and a more polarised society, most Americans have decided what they think about January 6 and are only listening to those who share their attitudes.

Still, there was another audience for the hearings as they got under way, and that was Attorney General Merrick Garland.

If the committee was laying out what it considered an indictment against the former President, it seemed to be inviting the Justice Department to pursue the real kind in a grand jury and court of law.

As she previewed the story that will be told in the weeks to come, Cheney all but wrote the script for Garland.

“You will hear about plots to commit seditious conspiracy on January 6,” she said, “a crime defined in our laws as conspiring to overthrow, put down or destroy by force the government of the United States or to oppose by force the authority thereof.”

But if Garland disagrees and the hearings this month turn out to be the only trial Trump ever faces for his efforts to overturn the election, Cheney and her fellow committee members were resolved to make sure that they will at least win a conviction with the jury of history.