Opinion Trump’s latest Jan. 6 grift poses a hidden challenge to Democrats
That’s a polite way to say that Trump’s propagandists will flood the media zone with a rancid gush of disinformation and lies, designed to dupe GOP voters into seeing themselves as the hearings’ victims and to pollute the information environment so the media activates its worst both-sides instincts.
The stench of grift is strong here. Per Axios, GOP leaders and conservative groups will coordinate their mighty messaging across many right-wing media platforms to delegitimize the hearings. That sounds formidable, but the ruse is to project swagger at a time when Democrats will command the national spotlight with a powerful tale of Trumpian violence and treachery.
Yet this effort does point to a big challenge Democrats face with these hearings: It shows that large swaths of the GOP and conservative establishment have fundamentally invested in full-blown denial that Trump’s effort to destroy our constitutional order requires any serious national reckoning.
That, in turn, could make a meaningful breakthrough harder for these hearings to achieve.
Think back over the storied congressional hearings in modern times, and you’ll generally recall some kind of big moment that grabbed attention across the country, demanding heightened recognition and introspection.
There’s the “Have you no sense of decency?” moment during the 1954 hearings that led to Sen. Joe McCarthy’s demise. Or White House official Alexander Butterfield’s revelations about Richard M. Nixon’s secret taping system during the 1973 Watergate hearings. Or Rep. Henry Waxman’s extraordinary grilling of the nation’s leading tobacco executives in 1994.
The Jan. 6 hearings may struggle to achieve a moment quite like those.
First, many of the highest-profile players in the insurrection effort will probably refuse to testify. This includes Trump; his vice president, Mike Pence, who was pressured to execute Trump’s scheme; and other top co-conspirators such as chief of staff Mark Meadows and former adviser Stephen K. Bannon.
“Every hearing that had enormous impact hinged on the witnesses,” congressional scholar Norman Ornstein tells me. The question is whether the Jan. 6 hearings produce a big moment without the biggest players under the spotlight.
What’s more, as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein explains, it took hearings like those on Watergate months to break through; the Jan. 6 committee is planning six hearings. Even if that’s understandable given our political calendar, it also seems to reflect a recognition that the public is in a very different place than it was during the Watergate era.
This doesn’t mean the Jan. 6 hearings will fail to capture attention. Rather, it means committee members will need to conduct them in a manner that’s fundamentally different from those previous hearings.
In some ways, this is very doable. The Jan. 6 hearings are about an unprecedented effort to subvert the peaceful transfer of power with appalling levels of corruption and mob violence. It involves numerous deaths and scenes of extraordinary violence and brutality perpetrated by white supremacists, white nationalists and other assorted ugly characters.
In this sense, the hearings will produce some searing prime time drama. We may see new footage of the horrors of violence, emotional testimony from wounded Capitol police, powerful expert discussion of the outsize threat posed by violent domestic extremists, and so forth.
We may also see new information. In a useful primer on the hearings, Just Security and Protect Democracy lay out revelations to watch for: new evidence that Trump was involved in the scheme to manufacture fraudulent electors; that Trumpworld knew the “fraud” pretext for subverting the election was bogus; and that Trump weaponized the mob in real time to complete the procedural coup.
But is there a way to produce something like serious bipartisan recognition that an extraordinary crime was committed against the country — one that requires meaningful reconciliation and reform?
It seems unlikely. The Bulwark’s William Kristol and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait each posit that a fundamental shift is taking place within the Republican Party and conservative establishments. This shift means new reigning orthodoxies are taking hold at the highest levels, and dictating that the insurrection attempt simply did not amount to a serious offense against the country.
This shift also means new institutions are developing in the GOP and on the right that are expressly organized to promote a more militant refusal to accept election losses in the future. As Chait notes, we’re witnessing the “institutionalization of an insurrectionary movement.”
All this may sound very dramatic. But it can’t be dismissed, given that a large swath of the party will respond to the Jan. 6 hearings with a full-fledged propaganda effort to bury a serious political crime against the country — and to substitute a new story in which the true victims related to Jan. 6 are Trump and his supporters.
And that makes a serious bipartisan breakthrough moment seem a whole lot less likely.
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