‘Detached from reality,’ Trump believed wild theories rather than listen to inner circle and accept defeat
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s closest campaign advisers, top government officials and even his family were dismantling his false claims of 2020 election fraud ahead of Jan. 6, but the defeated president seemed “detached from reality” and kept clinging to outlandish theories to stay in power, the committee investigating the Capitol attack was told Monday.
With gripping testimony, the panel is laying out in step-by-step fashion how Trump ignored his own campaign team’s data as one state after another flipped to Joe Biden, and instead latched on to conspiracy theories, court cases and his own declarations of victory rather than having to admit defeat.
Trump’s “big lie” of election fraud escalated and transformed into marching orders that summoned supporters to Washington and then sent them to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to block Biden’s victory.
“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” former Attorney General William Barr testified in his interview with the committee.
Barr called the voting fraud claims “bull---,” “bogus” and “idiotic,” and resigned in the aftermath. “I didn’t want to be a part of it.”
The House 1/6 committee spent the morning hearing delving into Trump’s claims of election fraud and the countless ways those around him tried to convince the defeated Republican president they were not true, and he had simply lost the election.
The witnesses Monday, mostly Republicans and many testifying in prerecorded videos, described in blunt terms and sometimes exasperated detail how Trump refused to take the advice of those closest to him, including his family members. As the people around him splintered into a “team normal” headed by former campaign manager Bill Stepien and others led by Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani, the president chose his side.
On election night, Stepien said, Trump was “growing increasingly unhappy” and refusing to accept the grim outlook for his presidency.
Son-in-law Jared Kushner tried to steer Trump away from Giuliani and his far-flung theories of voter fraud. The president would have none of it.
The back-and-forth intensified in the run-up to Jan. 6. Former Justice Department official Richard Donoghue recalled breaking down one claim after another — from a truckload of ballots in Pennsylvania to a missing suitcase of ballots in Georgia — and telling Trump “much of the info you’re getting is false.”
Still, he pressed on with his false claims even after dozens of court cases collapsed.
Barr, who had also testified in last week’s blockbuster opening hearing, said Trump was “as mad as I’d ever seen him” when the attorney general explained that the Justice Department would not take sides in the election.
Barr said when he would tell Trump “how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
The panel also on Monday provided new information about how Trump’s fundraising machine collected some $250 million with his campaigns to “Stop the Steal” and others in the aftermath of the November election, mostly from small-dollar donations from Americans. One plea for cash went out 30 minutes before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“Not only was there the big lie, there was the big rip-off,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.
On Monday an unrepentant Trump blasted the hearings in his familiar language as “ridiculous and treasonous” and repeated his claims. The former president, mulling another run for the White House, defended the Capitol attack as merely Americans seeking “to hold their elected officials accountable.”