Trump ignored allies’ pleas as Capitol riot raged

What happened

The House of Representatives voted to hold former President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in contempt for refusing testify to the Jan. 6 special committee this week, following revelations that Trump allies had begged Meadows to persuade his boss to call off the U.S. Capitol riot. While violence engulfed the Capitol, Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, Donald Trump Jr., and others texted Meadows, warning the insurrection would destroy Trump’s legacy. “The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us,” Ingraham wrote. “He’s got to condemn this s--- ASAP,” added Trump Jr. After Meadows replied that he would speak to Trump, the riot continued for more than three hours, contradicting Trump’s claim that he did not know of its extent.

“he lied about what the vice president’s powers were.” He lied about election fraud and enablers like Meadows treated it as “a kind of naughty habit that had to be tolerated or indulged.” When Trump’s conservative-media friends “tried to intervene on behalf of reality,” he kept lying. As the United States faced a grave constitutional crisis, the commander-in-chief was “a baby whose feelings had to be coddled.”

The evidence unfolding in texts and documents “is a tale of two coups,” said in Before the outin-public Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump lackeys waged a “paperwork coup” orchestrated in “closed-door meetings, legal memos, and private phone calls.” The plan: Get the Department of Justice to decertify the election, convince Vice President Mike Pence to do it, or “declare a national security emergency.” Their plot might have worked if Pence had gone along with it. No wonder Trump “remains furious” at Pence. “Trump knew how tantalizingly close he’d been to clinging to power.”