The fight came home

One year ago, President Donald Trump incited a violent mob of his supporters to desecrate the U.S. Capitol. Their goal: to prevent Congress from counting electoral votes and declaring Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election. It appeared possible that Trump’s campaign to advance his personal interests at the expense of the country’s had finally reached a turning point. So shocking was the disregard for the democratic process that even senior Republicans might understand the peril they had invited by bowing to Trump.

But Trump quickly regained hold of the Republican Party. Three weeks after Jan. 6, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., made a penitential pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. He and his fellow Republicans rejected efforts to create a bipartisan panel to investigate the insurrection; some even defended the rioters. They booted Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., out of their leadership for refusing to go along with Trump’s lies. Republican state legislatures passed anti-voting measures and conducted bogus vote audits designed not to reconfirm the integrity of what experts declared to be a safe and secure election but to provide fodder for conspiracy theorists.

What Jan. 6 actually signaled was that the fight for democracy, so long a battle the United States waged on behalf of other people in other lands, had come home.

There is still much the public does not know about what Trump did that day, and about his aides’ and supporters’ actions leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. The investigative committee that Democrats authorized, with minimal GOP support, must provide an authoritative account, and courts must adjudicate quickly the cases against witnesses who defy the committee’s subpoenas.