The headline from the final hearing of the January 6 committee is that its members voted unanimously to subpoena the testimony of Donald J. Trump, former American president. Rep. Liz Cheney also said the committee has "sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals." But maybe the most astounding moment came in a video the committee showed from inside the secure location where congressional leaders took cover from the mob that day. It's a remarkable record of how American political leaders responded to the attack.
It's not simply that, by the account offered in the video, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi almost instantly assumed the role of managing the American government's response to an assault on the seat of the Legislative Branch. It also shows the array of leaders working together to respond to the mob: the speaker, her colleagues in House Democratic leadership, the majority and minority leaders in the Senate, the vice president. Everyone is working to stop what's happening at the Capitol, except the president of the United States.
Trump refused to tell the people carrying TRUMP flags—attacking cops and chanting that they were there to make him president—to leave. He did not call any officials in the American security apparatus to organize a response to the mob. That was Pelosi, and Schumer, and Pence. Trump did nothing because he summoned the mob to Washington, he sent them to the Capitol, and when his Secret Service detail wouldn't let him go along with them, he watched on television and enjoyed the show. He liked what was happening. He thought it should continue. House Republican Jaime Herrera Butler testified under oath that she heard Trump tell House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy the following as the attack was happening: "Well, Kevin, I guess they’re just more upset about the election than you are."
It's almost disorienting to go through this every time the committee meets. We all watched this happen on TV. There was no doubt about what was happening as it happened. (Trump had just given a speech telling these people to go to the Capitol and take their country back! He'd been saying the country was being stolen away from them for months!) There was no doubt about what happened in the immediate aftermath, when staunch Trump ally Lindsey Graham announced that "enough was enough" on the Senate floor. It has only been in the weeks and months since, when the propaganda machine and the elected officials in thrall to it got their scam together, that the picture became at all murky. They will force us to tell the truth about what happened again and again. They will make us continually reinforce the history to which they and we all bore witness, live in HD.
Before the election, Trump declared his intent to say he won regardless of the result: If he lost, he'd say it was rigged and he had actually won. Afterwards, the January 6 committee showed in witness testimony Thursday, he occasionally admitted to aides that he'd lost. But he kept pushing publicly to overturn the result. When his attempts to go through the courts failed, he called up the chief elections officer in Georgia to try to force him to "find" the exact number of votes Trump needed to win the state. He pressured local officials to throw out results or appoint alternate slates of electors in a bunch of swing states. It all culminated with January 6, where he summoned his fans to Washington and sent them to the Capitol. He did nothing—nothing—to stop it until the security apparatus had begun to beat back the mob and he knew the day was lost.
It was all in the hope of stopping the Legislative Branch from confirming that he would soon leave office because THE AMERICAN PEOPLE VOTED HIM OUT. Is there any worse crime against the American Idea? Actually, never mind the high-falutin' shit. How is his call to the Georgia secretary of state not a crime? He offered veiled threats of prosecution if Brad Raffensperger did not stuff the ballot box for him! In the United States of America! And it's on tape! What are we even doing here?
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.
