The House-select-committee hearings are over, but will the former President ever be held responsible for the tragedy?
The House select committee investigating January 6th has now rested its public case against Donald Trump. Over nine hearings and more than twenty hours of testimony, culminating in a two-and-a-half-hour session on Thursday, the panel showed that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election; knew that the mob he summoned was violent, armed, and determined to block Congress from carrying out its constitutional responsibility; knew that the Vice-President’s life was in danger; and knew that, in urging his followers to march on the Capitol, he was encouraging them to illegally attack the building. Once the assault began, Trump did nothing except watch the spectacle, approvingly, on television. The select committee’s presentation of these facts was specific, damning, and even occasionally riveting.
In one memorable early hearing, Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, testified that Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud were “bullshit,” adding that he had told the former President so to his face. When Barr publicly said as much to the Associated Press, it so enraged Trump that he threw a ketchup-smeared plate against the wall in his private White House dining room—an indelible image of the petulant President, disclosed by the former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson during her blockbuster July testimony. Like others in Trump’s White House, Hutchinson heard Trump and his top aides acknowledge his defeat yet continue to lie about it to the public. “No, Cass, he knows it’s over,” Hutchinson quoted the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as saying to her, in a clip from Hutchinson’s video deposition shown at Thursday’s hearing. “But we’re gonna keep trying.”
Thursday’s hearing added a few more details to the select committee’s trove of incriminating evidence about January 6th: memorable footage of the Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, evacuated to a secure location that afternoon, frantically trying to get Trump’s executive branch to do something to stop the violence; a January 4th intelligence warning to the Justice Department and the F.B.I. about extremists talking of “invading the Capitol building”; and new documentation showing that Trump’s decision to claim victory on Election Night was “premeditated.” As Representative Zoe Lofgren said, it was a “plan concocted in advance to convince his supporters that he won.” Trump himself—his wild plotting and his willful indifference to its consequences—was at the center of the events, as he was in each of the committee’s hearings.
Inevitably, the panel also showcased an array of unsavory characters and dispiriting subplots that swirled around Trump’s post-election conspiracy. The smarmy, nihilistic Roger Stone, who featured prominently in Thursday’s session, was shown in a Danish filmmaker’s video footage from before the election: “Fuck the voting,” Stone laughed, as he walked through an airport, wearing a red, white, and blue “Trump 2020” face mask. “Let’s get right to the violence.” Other sessions spotlighted the machinations of Trump’s heavy-drinking personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s failed coup at the Justice Department, and the deceitful advice of the constitutional-law professor John Eastman to have Vice-President Mike Pence singlehandedly reject the Electoral College results. Eastman knew the plan that he pushed on Trump was legally suspect and likely to be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court, but he pushed it anyway—and then tried to get himself a preëmptive Presidential pardon.
But none of it would have mattered had Trump not been in the White House, urging them all on, demanding something, anything, that would somehow undo the election loss he was desperate to overturn. “The central cause of January 6 was one man, Donald Trump,” Representative Liz Cheney, the apostate Republican who emerged as Trump’s chief tormentor on the committee, said. “None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of it.” Cheney lost her seat in a Republican primary this summer because she refused to bow down to the man whom one of her colleagues called the G.O.P.’s “Orange Jesus.” These hearings have been her vindication and her revenge.
Cheney was clear in her remarks on Thursday that she believed Trump deserved not just public excoriation but also criminal sanction. “Our nation cannot only punish the foot soldiers who stormed our Capitol,” Cheney said, and yet so far that is all that has happened. The Justice Department has charged some nine hundred people with participating in the January 6th insurrection—but not a single person close to Trump, who summoned the mob that rampaged in his name and on his behalf, has been indicted. “Without accountability, it all becomes normal, and it will recur,” she warned.
Before the gavel banged down late Thursday afternoon, the panel voted unanimously to approve a motion by Cheney to subpoena Trump to testify about his actions. Members were liberal in their use of the A-word to describe the vote. “This is a question about accountability to the American people,” the committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi, said. “He must be accountable. He is required to answer for his actions.”
Yet accountability—at least the kind that comes in a court of law and ends in a prison term—was never the House select committee’s to confer. It made for a compelling headline, but Thursday’s vote was pure symbolism from a committee that may well be out of business in just a few weeks, if the voters, as expected, give control of the House to the Republicans. It’s impossible to imagine Trump willingly testifying before this or any future Congress about anything—at least, not without years of legal wrangling. The real decision about whether and how to hold Trump responsible for the tragedy of January 6th rests, as it always has, with the Justice Department and its enigmatic Attorney General, Merrick Garland. And we will not know the answer to that question anytime soon.
So did any of the committee’s work matter? When the January 6th hearings began, on June 9th, Trump’s average approval rating in the polls was 41.9 per cent, and his average disapproval rating was 53.5 per cent, according to FiveThirtyEight. As the hearings ended, Trump’s average approval rating stood at 40.4 per cent. All that damning evidence, and the polls were basically unchanged. The straight line in the former President’s approval rating is the literal representation of the crisis in American democracy. There is an essentially immovable forty per cent of the country whose loyalty to Donald Trump cannot be shaken by anything.
I pointed out these numbers to Representative Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, over the weekend, when my colleagues and I interviewed him during The New Yorker Festival. He insisted that driving down Trump’s poll numbers was not the point. “The point,” he said, “is to deliver the truth to the people and to the Congress because, like Madison said, those who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. And we think that we have armed the public with the power to make some serious decisions going forward.”
Since the committee’s formation, Raskin and the other committee members have advanced various arguments for what the panel hoped to achieve. Establishing Trump’s complicity in the storming of the Capitol was always an important goal, and the final report that the panel intends to release before the current Congress expires will no doubt be the most definitive summation yet of this American tragedy. Even by that measure, however, a full accounting for history still awaits. Key witnesses such as Mike Pence, Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, refused to testify; more than thirty witnesses, according to Cheney, invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and declined to answer questions. Steve Bannon will be sentenced later this month, after being convicted of contempt of Congress, but he still has not been forced to speak under oath about his dealings with Trump and other White House officials in the days leading up to January 6th. And then, of course, there is Trump himself, newly subpoenaed but not any likelier to testify.
And yet Trump’s essential culpability for January 6th was never really the question. That was more than evident on the day itself. Accountability was always the problem. Will the former President, with his Houdini-like powers of escape, ever face it?
