Donald Trump seems to realize that the Jan. 6 committee, its evidence, and its presentations are a major public event. The former president also seems to have some understanding of how devastating the case against him is.
As a New York Times analysis of last night’s primetime hearing explained, “In the entire 246-year history of the United States, there was surely never a more damning indictment presented against an American president than outlined on Thursday night in a cavernous congressional hearing room where the future of democracy felt on the line.”
With this in mind, the Republican is eager to push back against the revelations. As Yahoo News noted, it led Trump to publish a striking message to his social platform yesterday. The missive read in part:
“The Unselect Committee didn’t spend one minute studying the reason that people went to Washington, D.C., in massive numbers, far greater than the Fake News Media is willing to report, or that the Unselects are willing to even mention, because January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”
So, a few things.
First, that is a very long, 63-word sentence.
Second, the bipartisan select committee didn’t scrutinize Trump’s discredited election conspiracy theories because — and this is important — they’re discredited election conspiracy theories.
Third, I loved the former president’s complaint about journalists not reporting about how “massive” the Jan. 6 crowd was because, as he’s made painfully clear, no detail about Jan. 6 is more important to Trump than the number of people who showed up for his pre-riot rally.
But putting all of that aside, what obviously stands out about the Republican’s message yesterday was his insistence that Jan. 6 “represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”
With this assertion, Trump effectively came full circle.
During the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the then-president sat on his hands and ignored calls to intervene. More than three hours after the violence began, Trump released a video urging his mob of radicalized followers to disperse.
But even then, the Republican made clear that he and the rioters were on the same side. In the video he released at the time, Trump told his supporters that there had been “an election that was stolen from us.” He added, “We love you. You’re very special.”
Circling back to our earlier coverage, it was soon after when the then-president started to realize that this, at least at the time, was a politically untenable position: Regardless of party or ideology, every prominent political voice agreed that participating in an insurrectionist riot inside the nation’s seat of government was indefensible.
And so, Trump, mindful of the public’s revulsion toward the assault, shifted his message in order to be seen as a mainstream figure. As regular readers know, the then-president said on Jan. 7, “Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem.” He went on to describe the riot as a “heinous attack.”
Reading from a prepared text, Trump added, “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy…. To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction: You do not represent our country, and to those who broke the law: You will pay.”
Five days later, the Republican condemned the “mob [that] stormed the Capitol and trashed the halls of government.” On the final full day of his term, again reading from a script, Trump added, “All Americans were horrified by the assault on our Capitol. Political violence is an attack on everything we cherish as Americans. It can never be tolerated.”
In the months that followed, Trump struggled to keep up the pretense that he almost certainly never believed in the first place. By May 2021, the former president was suggesting the rioters were victims. He eventually started describing them as “patriots.” Around the same time, the former president broached the subject of extending pardons to convicted radicals.
And now, the multi-step process has brought Trump back to the beginning:
- Trump “loved” the rioters.
- Trump then condemned the rioters’ “heinous attack.”
- Trump then said the rioters may not have been so bad after all.
- Trump then said the rioters are innocent “patriots” and their attack “represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss wrote yesterday about what future Americans might say about Jan. 6, and the degree to which the answer depends on whether the United States is a democracy or an autocracy. “If the latter,” Beschloss wrote, “the nation’s authoritarian leaders might celebrate January 6 as one of great days in U.S. history.”
One former president apparently doesn’t need to wait for the future to draw such a conclusion.
