The immensity of America’s democracy crisis means that no single politician or single event will be sufficient to turn back the Republicans’ authoritarian project and restore our halting national path to greater democracy, equality, and freedom. It will be easy for the GOP and cynics alike to advertise the alleged failures of the January 6 committee investigation, as indeed has been the case even before its public hearings began this week. But I’ve been trying to make the case over the last year that a proper focus and understanding of January 6 is something of a skeleton key for communicating to the American public the broader dangers of our political moment, and for mounting an adequate defense. In itself, January 6 constituted a singular domestic attack on American democracy, the likes of which none of us have experienced in our lifetimes; symbolically, it allows us to more fully comprehend the anti-democratic animus and violent mindset that has taken possession of the Republican Party.
And so I’ve awaited the public hearings with a mix of great anticipation and mounting dread. While they would never be enough in themselves to arrest the momentum of Republican authoritarianism, a proper understanding of January 6 in the public mind is essential to giving us a fighting chance to defend and restore American democracy, and the hearings are probably our last, best chance to do so.
There’s been a lot of coverage of what the committee members are actually aiming to accomplish, and from the opening session on Thursday, we’ve got at least part of an answer. The committee clearly has Donald Trump in its sights as the person who bears ultimate responsibility for both the attack on the Capitol and the larger conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. To its credit, they have also already made clear that Trump was assisted in his efforts by members of his own party, as well as by right-wing paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This wide-lens approach, in addition to capturing the full reality of the seditious scheme launched following Trump’s election loss, also properly conveys to the public the multi-pronged nature of the threat. It wasn’t just an onslaught of bloodlusting freaks garbed in MAGA caps and body armor who overran the Capitol police, but an attempted subversion of the law of the land by respectable men dressed in suits and ties. This is crucial to a point I’ve also been discussing recently — that we need to understand insurrection not just as acts of violence, but any general attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.
After the first day of hearings, it’s become clearer to me that the committee has its hands full with effectively illuminating and communicating the events leading up to January 6, and with elucidating Donald Trump’s illicit attempts to remain in power after losing the election. The broader, necessary project of linking Trump’s plot with the GOP’s continuation of his insurrection will fall to the broader Democratic Party, the media, and the public in the days ahead. What we can hope for, though, is that the committee provides powerful tools for making this larger case; what we’ve seen so far offers hope that they are in the process of doing so.
First, the committee’s clear demonstration that the effort to overturn the election involved far more than the storming of the Capitol is extremely important, both in terms of understanding Donald Trump’s treasonous behavior and for making the broader case that the Republican Party has now taken up his insurrectionary torch. An effort to overthrow a government doesn’t just have to involve violence, but can encompass a wide range of abuses of power involving the legal system, propaganda, and executive authority — and from what we’ve seen so far, the committee is well aware that this basic fact absolutely needs to be communicated to the public. The horrifying visuals of right-wing mobs overrunning the Capitol have much more visceral punch than the more abstract, behind-the-scenes and beyond-the-camera efforts to subvert the election, making it more difficult to understand the scope of the plot; but by sharing video of interviews with Trump administration officials and investigators, the committee has been working to elevate these less visually impactful elements to the same gut-punch level.
I think the committee also understands that one of its goals must be to communicate the essentially shocking nature of what the nation experienced — a goal more necessary than ever in light of the GOP’s year-and-a-half-long effort to whitewash and dismiss the Trumpist putsch. In this vein, it is all to the good that we heard Representative Benny Thompson give the events their proper name: “Any legal jargon you hear about seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, all boils down to this: January 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup.” Accurately referring to Trump’s efforts as an “attempted coup” is essential to conveying the true horror and threat of January 6; it is also necessary for conveying the true horror and threat of the GOP’s ongoing efforts to take up the insurrectionary torch from Donald Trump, as the party works to suppress votes, subvert election mechanisms, and gain power against the will of the American majority in future elections.
Beyond the use of accurate descriptive language, the committee is also demonstrating the shocking nature of the insurrection by revisiting, with new perspectives and details, the sheer violence of the Capitol assault. For instance, Representative Liz Cheney left little doubt that Donald Trump encouraged the assassination of Mike Pence that day, as he incited the crowd with tweets to target the vice president, and expressed his sentiment to witnesses that day that the mob was right in trying to hang him. The idea that a president would encourage the murder of his second-in-command is so far beyond the pale that we can be said to almost lack words to describe the horror of it. But most of us, I think, viscerally register the fundamental evil involved, and such feelings of dread and disgust will be key to rallying the public against Trump’s current accomplices and inheritors.
The committee has also made clear that it will not shy away from depicting the actual violence of that day, while also demonstrating that the crowd was beating police officers under the clear and direct inspiration of America’s chief executive; Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards’ statement that she was slipping in the blood of fellow wounded officers as they fought to keep the insurrectionists from breaching the Capitol is phrasing as powerful as a thousand images. Along these lines, it’s also to the good that the committee appears committed to highlighting the involvement of paramilitary gangs like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and their links to Trump’s larger scheme. The existence of such groups, their role in physically attempting to overthrow the US government, and the complicity of members of the GOP in their activities together constitute an enraging stick of political dynamite that, if properly deployed, should blow up the GOP’s continued existence as a viable national political party.
We are also seeing strong indications that the committee will lay out a case that the actions of President Trump and his accomplices broke the law. As Liz Cheney put it, “What President Trump demanded Mike Pence do wasn't just wrong -- it was illegal and unconstitutional.” I think this is an obvious but until now underplayed aspect of the public case that the committee, and Democrats, can make. The public will respond more strongly to the idea that Trump actually broke laws than the more diffuse notion that he broke political norms or acted immorally, and that this investigation is not reducible to a political power play by Democrats, but rather a way to uphold the rule of law to which all Americans should be subject.
Finally — and this again might seem like an obvious point — the committee appears to be making the case that no matter the punishment the justice system ultimately does or does not mete out to Trump, the American people must never allow him back into power. Even if the Justice Department refuses to indict him, the committee seems to be aiming at destroying Trump’s appeal to a maximal extent, exposing him as a liar, an insurrectionist, and a psychopath. On January 6, Donald Trump renounced his role as commander in chief, and assumed a new position as the chieftain of an insurrectionary army. This fact alone should exile him from American politics for all time.
It’s essential, though, that the Democrats take up a larger goal at the point where the committee’s responsibilities and realistic goals end: if not during the hearings, then in their aftermath, Democrats absolutely must mount a parallel effort to show that the GOP has embraced the insurrectionary goals of the Trumpian campaign that led to January 6. As important as it is to have a full accounting of Trump’s insurrection for its own sake, it’s even more important that the United States defend itself against the ongoing Republican insurrection that has taken up Trump’s cause, and ensure its failure. They can start with the point that, in defending Trump from the evidence of the committee, the party has retroactively made itself into a supporter of the insurrection. As Josh Marshall recently observed, “for House Republicans, a bipartisan investigation into a violent effort to overthrow the government of the United States is a "partisan witch-hunt." If you're seeking to protect and exonerate the insurrection you are supporting it. The GOP is pro-insurrection.”
The January 6 hearings provide an ideal opening for the Democrats to end once and for all their fruitless calls for bipartisanship in opposing the authoritarianism and white supremacism that are driving the GOP to greater and greater extremism. The party’s mass refusal to participate in the committee — save for exiles like Liz Cheney — is as glaring an example as you can get that the GOP simply doesn’t believe that Trump’s insurrection was in any way wrong; as Marshall pointed out above, there is no meaningful distinction between providing cover for an insurrection and supporting it. In this respect, the Democrats should use the hearings and whatever impression they make on public opinion to hammer home the GOP’s alignment with the events of that day — both the plot to overthrow democracy, and the willingness to employ violence to do so. For the plot to overthrow democracy, the Democrats have ample current evidence, from GOP voter suppression aimed at rigging the November election results to open plotting to subvert the 2024 election by rejecting the popular vote in key swing states. Demonstrating the continuities between the events culminating in January 6, and the GOP’s ongoing anti-democratic campaign, may be the single greatest weapon in the Democrats’ toolkit for defending the United States. Likewise, the overtly violent forces that Trump recruited to his cause on January 6 continue to threaten Americans’ safety; just yesterday, police arrested more then 30 associates of the Patriot Front white nationalist group in close proximity to a gay pride parade in Coeur D’Alene. After a point, continuing to behave as if the current GOP is redeemable is indistinguishable from providing the Republican Party with undeserved, counter-productive cover for its authoritarian assault on America. I don’t see how the Democrats can reconcile the GOP’s full-throated opposition to the January 6 hearings with calls for bipartisan defense of American democracy. Democratic leaders need to fully internalize that we’re past the old world of democratic competition between the two parties, where both respected election results and the rule of law; the Republicans are no longer following the same rules as the rest of us, and for the Democrats to behave otherwise no longer serves the public interest.