JAN 6 HEARINGS MUCH BETTER THAN EXPECTED

Ifelt a nauseating dread as the Jan 6 hearings approached, fearing that all they would do is demonstrate Donald Trump’s impunity. That the ex-president attempted a coup has been obvious since his mob descended on the Capitol, if not before. With Mr Trump, however, the question has never been whether he’s committed outrageous misdeeds, but whether those misdeeds can be made to matter. Over and over again, the answer to that question has been no.

It might still be no. But the hearings are having more of an impact than I expected. The decision by the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to keep pro-Trump Republicans off the Jan 6 committee has eliminated the back-and-forth bloviating that typically plague congressional inquiries, allowing investigators to present their findings with the narrative cohesion of a good true-crime series. Mr Trump appears to be aware of how bad the hearings are for him; The Washington Post reported that he’s watching all of them and is furious at Mr McCarthy for not putting anyone on the dais to defend him.

There are signs that public opinion is moving, at least a little. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 58% of Americans believe that Mr Trump should be criminally charged for his role in the Jan 6 riots, compared to 52% in late April. Sixty percent think the panel’s probe has been “fair and impartial”. Sarah Longwell, a GOP strategist, has been conducting focus groups of Trump voters since Jan 6. In her last two, no participant wanted Mr Trump to run again — something that hadn’t happened before.

For some, the hearings are doing more than that. Dustin Stockton helped organise the proTrump bus tour that culminated in the Jan 6 rally in front of the White House. Politico once called him and his fiancée Jennifer Lawrence the “Bonnie and Clyde of Maga world”. On Tuesday, after a hearing, Mr Stockton tweeted: “This has been the most impactful of the January 6th Committee hearings. Embarrassed that I was fooled by the Fulton County ‘suitcases of ballots’ hoax.”

He was referring to the conspiracy theory, pushed by Mr Trump and his allies, that election workers smuggled fraudulent ballots into the State Farm Arena in Atlanta and ran them through the voting machines multiple times. Tuesday, he said, was the first time he realised the tale was a complete fabrication.

This wasn’t a total about-face; as Hunter Walker reported in Rolling Stone, Mr Stockton and Ms Lawrence had already grown disillusioned with Mr Trump.

Still, Mr Stockton has been publicly sceptical of the congressional investigation, and he remains a hater of Joe Biden and a fan of rightwing trolling. The hearing on Tuesday, however, got to him, especially the testimony from election workers about how their lives were upended by the lie Mr Stockton helped spread.

“To see the just absolute turmoil it caused in her life, and the human impact of that accusation, especially, was incredibly jarring,” Mr Stockton said of one of the workers.

Very few on the right, of course, are watching these hearings as closely at Mr Stockton, but he said he’s hearing from some people who are following them.

“I think the loudest voices are doing their best to divert attention and not focus on it all,” he said. “There are tons of conservatives who private message me, who don’t have large voices, who are paying attention to some degree.”

Some of them, he said, are deeply disappointed by what they’re hearing.

Perhaps this makes sense. Elite conservatives mostly understood that Mr Trump’s stories about a stolen election were absurd; as one senior GOP official asked The Washington Post: “What is the downside for humouring him for this little bit of time?” But his rank-and-file devotees weren’t all in on the con. Instead, they were the marks.

“If there are parts of the population that are totally captive to Trump’s propaganda and cannot be reached by facts and truth, that part of the population will begin to shrink over time,” said Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the Jan 6 committee. “It’s certainly not going to grow.”

There’s not going to be a big moment when the scales fall from GOP eyes. Too many already see Mr Trump clearly and simply prefer autocrats to Democrats. But as the Jan 6 committee methodically lays out what was, for all its squalor and absurdity, a systematic plan to subvert the 2020 election, it will get marginally harder for Mr Trump to present himself as a defrauded winner rather than the flailing loser he is.

That might, in turn, make the prosecution of Mr Trump and his enablers a tiny bit less politically fraught. Getting the truth out won’t guarantee justice. It’s at least a step toward making justice possible.