No. of Recommendations: 12
I guess Attorney General Pam Bondi felt that actually flipping Democratic senators the bird would be too much, so she let her sour expression and clipped expectorations do the equivalent when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. What a repellent snit, staged primarily for President Trump, who relishes any surrogate who can sulk, scold and rage as contemptuously as he does. He doesn’t want good-will ambassadors. He wants ill-will amplifiers. Bondi got the memo and spread the bile.
But I found the behavior of Republican senators at the hearing even more disturbing, because several of them used their remarks to travel back to Jan. 6, 2021, and demand that Democrats — yes, Democrats — answer for their conduct in relation to it.
That, of course, was the day when Trump, insisting without grounds that Joe Biden had stolen the presidential election, pumped up a horde of hellions he’d summoned to Washington. The day when they then proceeded to storm the Capitol, assaulting law enforcement officers and hunting down members of Congress. “Insurrection,” “invasion” — call it what you will, it was terrifying and unconscionable either way. And in a sane democracy, it would have ended Trump’s political career as Republican lawmakers barred the doors forevermore.
But the lackeys at last week’s hearing continued to prop him up and to pretty him up, to pamper and to please him, by misrepresenting federal investigators’ apparent examination of Republican lawmakers’ phone records from the period around Jan. 6 as the real scandal. That morally perverse switcheroo was no accident and no one-off. It belongs to an audacious mission to turn Jan. 6 on its head — to erase the shame of it by interring the truth of it.
Why does Trump drone on and on about a rigged, stolen 2020 election in settings — for example, his recent speech to military leaders — where it has no logical place? Partly because he can’t quit his claims of victimhood, which have potent resonance in this age of grievance. Partly as a justification for his vendettas. But also because it allows him, his Republican abettors and the MAGA faithful to think and talk differently about Jan. 6. Sure, the rioters spun out of control, but can you blame them? Thieving Democrats and a cabal of their co-conspirators had usurped voters’ will.
I think that at some point, on some level, Trump understood that his complicity in the violence of Jan. 6 — his responsibility for it, according to the articles of his second impeachment — was more damning than any of his other transgressions: an utterly inexcusable, definitively nullifying breach. I’m sure that some Republican members of Congress still, in the recesses of their dormant consciences, recognize it as such. That’s why they’ve questioned and recast Jan. 6 in so many ways, from so many angles, at such length. Trump and the Republicans who’ve hitched their political fates to him must defuse it, confuse it, make it go away.
And to a shocking degree, they’ve succeeded. The outrageous actions by which Trump, at the end of his first term in the White House, sought to overturn the election results and cling to power are musty news, fuzzy memories, curiosities.
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There’s an audio recording — his voice, his words, no quarrel over the authenticity of it, no mistaking its intent — of a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call during which Trump orders Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to “find 11,780 votes” and thus convert Biden’s victory in the state to a Trump win. It became part of the Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis’s election interference and conspiracy case against Trump. But over time, that sinister conversation got less attention than questions about Willis’s professional conduct, about her personal life, about minutiae whose significance paled beside Trump’s intimidation tactics.
That was the handiwork of Trump and his minions. That was the plan: Use ancillary melodramas, blanket denials and sweeping counteraccusations to create a dense fog in which everything blurs together and nothing is clear. Trump impugned the integrity of Jack Smith, the special prosecutor whose investigation may be connected to the examination of Republican lawmakers’ phone records that came up last week. He went after judges. He combined all of that into a narrative of political persecution fashioned precisely for our tribal times, and he did that so relentlessly and so operatically — he was a bona fide martyr! — that it thickened the fog and no doubt left many Americans less and less sure about the actual facts, the real culprits. Would he be this worked up about absolutely nothing?
Would he go so far as to pardon or commute the sentences of more than 1,500 people charged with crimes in connection to the rioting on Jan. 6? To celebrate them as “patriots”? To fire federal prosecutors who pursued the cases against them? To claim that exactly 274 F.B.I. agents in plain clothes were “secretly placed” among the rioters to egg them on? That last flourish was so preposterous that even one of the president’s most slobbering sycophants, Kash Patel, the current director of the F.B.I., rebutted it.
But Republicans generally never correct Trump. They coddle him. Exonerate him. Which is what the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee did when Bondi dropped by. The tangent that they went on was no tangent at all. It was a purposeful, cynical distraction in the service of their irascible overlord and his biggest, most enduring lie. ——Frank Bruni, New York Times
