| As overtures go, this one packed a wallop.
The leadoff hearing of the House committee
investigating the January 6th insurrection was intended to demonstrate the threat that that day’s riot posed not just to Congress but to the legitimacy of the constitutional transfer of power, and that Donald Trump was certainly in a moral sense and probably in a legal sense behind it.
The case, whose historic context was laid out by Chairman Bennie Thompson and whose particulars were mapped out with pointed clarity by Vice Chair Liz Cheney, appears based on several facts—some already known, some quite new—that the committee leaders, using video clips from witnesses, deftly laid out. One of those facts is that people whose business it was to know clearly told Trump that he had lost the election—most prominently, his attorney general Bill Barr, in whose videoed testimony that was
aired said he told Trump that his contentions of fraud and rigging were “bullshit.” It’s not clear, and may never be, whether Trump actually believed this, in which case he knew he’d lost the election that he was illegally and unconstitutionally seeking to overturn, or whether his industrial-strength narcissism kept him from acknowledging what the facts said and he still was OK with contravening the Constitution to keep his hold on power. What is clear is that either way, Trump is the last person any sentient being would want to occupy the White House.
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