How Trump manipulates the Big Lie believers
It took Stephen Ayres’ life being ruined to finally break his devotion to Donald Trump and the Big Lie.
As he testified Tuesday before the U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, his tale of how he came to be part of the mob that day provided a window into the cult-like mindset of the rioters. His tale of delusion and recovery is a cautionary one for a nation where so many still seem ensnared by the lie that Trump somehow didn’t lose in 2020.
Ayres testified that for him, and hundreds of others who gathered in Washington ahead of the vote in Congress to certify Joe Biden’s win, Trump’s tweets served as a call to arms to disrupt the proceedings.
“The president, you know, got everybody riled up, told everybody, ‘Head on down,’ ” Ayres testified Tuesday, adding that most rioters believed Trump would join them at the Capitol. “So we basically just were following what he said. … I was already worked up, and so were most of the people there.”
“Worked up” doesn’t quite cover it. Testimony Tuesday underscored the violent intentions of the people Trump was summoning to the Capitol, with many openly musing online about participating in firing squads and murdering Democrats down to the “last man, woman, and child.”
Ayres’ detailed his devolution from a family man from Ohio with a stable job as a supervisor at a cabinet company to a radical Trump supporter who openly posted on social media about “standing up to tyranny” and fighting in a civil war if the “deep state” robbed Trump of an electoral victory in 2020.
It wasn’t until after Ayres pleaded guilty in June to disorderly and disruptive conduct inside a restricted building — a federal charge he will be sentenced for in September — that he finally decided to “do his own research” and come to grips with the fact that the Big Lie is, in fact, a lie.
“I got away from all the social media when Jan. 6 happened, basically deleted it all,” Ayres said. “You know, with all the lawsuits being shot down one after another, that — that was mainly what convinced me.”
What he and others like him didn’t know was that, outside their conspiratorial echo chambers, Trump’s own Justice Department, his White House staff, and his campaign officials had repeatedly told the president that there was no evidence of fraud that could change the outcome of the election.
Nor did they know of the “unhinged” meeting at the White House weeks before that appears to be the moment when Trump and his inflammatory outside advisers began plotting how he could use the loyalty of men like Ayres to remain in power.
They did not know that during this meeting — described by U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin as “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency” — advisers such as lawyer Sidney Powell, retired Gen. Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani presented him with a draft executive order directing the defense secretary to immediately seize voting machines. The order would’ve appointed Powell as a special counsel with the power to charge people with crimes for interfering in the 2020 election.
The meeting of the so-called “crazies” hadn’t been on the White House schedule, and when they learned of it, several senior White House aides rushed in to stop it. Among them was White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who testified this week that he had forcefully countered the outlandish claims of widespread election fraud involving foreign countries such as Venezuela, Iran and China.
“We were pushing back and we were asking one simple question as a general matter: Where is the evidence?” Cipollone told the committee in video testimony.
Of course there was none, and never had been. More than 60 lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies failed because they were unable to prove allegations of election fraud.
Powell herself was ultimately sanctioned by a federal court and sued for defamation by a voting machine maker. In her own defense to that lawsuit, Powell admitted that “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.”
Trump knew that, but he didn’t share it with Ayres and other loyalists.
Instead, shortly after the unhinged meeting ended, Trump issued that fateful tweet summoning his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6 for a “big protest.”
That tweet, posted in the early hours of Dec. 19, 2020, ricocheted around the nation but especially within pro-Trump forums. By the time they arrived in Washington ahead of the Jan. 6 vote, many supporters of the president were ready for violence, and primed to usurp the will of the people and the peaceful transfer of power.
Trump’s tweet would also put hundreds of rioters such as Ayres behind bars, some of them for years.
“It makes me mad because I — I was hanging on every word he was saying,” Ayres said. “Everything he was putting out, I was following it. I mean, if I was doing it, hundreds of thousands or millions of other people are doing it, or maybe even still doing it.”
Ayres’ belated epiphany offers some hope that Trump’s grip on the Republican Party will loosen the closer we get to 2024. Recent polling suggests half of Republican voters are ready to move beyond Trump.
But judging by the refusal of so many elected officials, and so many candidates, to denounce his schemes and sever ties with the former president, the delusion that so bedazzled Ayres has not dissipated. Nor has the threat to our democracy.
America won’t be safe from the former president’s influence until his supporters realize that Trump will continue to exploit them to further his authoritarian ends.
If these hearings, which continue next week, do nothing else but awaken more Americans to that reality, they will have more than served their purpose.
The Jan. 6 hearings will be a success if they diminish his influence.