“Today we will begin to show the American people some of our evidence,” declared a steely and prim Lynn Cheney as she inaugurated the second day of hearings for the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. One of the billed stars of the mornings, Donald Trump’s baby-faced former political director and campaign manager Bill Stepien, failed to show up, since his wife had gone into labor that very morning.
Not one of this self-advertised corps of tough-minded election realists thought to inform the American public what was going on inside the White House.
Such last-minute formatting changes didn’t matter, though; the committee played Stepien’s videotaped depositions with House attorneys, together with a compelling mix of in-person and taped testimonials from the inner circles of Trump world. The composite picture depicted a singularly morose-to-petulant Trump White House on Election Night 2020. Ivanka and her brothers, along with first son-in-law Jared Kushner, were holed up in a reception room in the White House. Stepien sat in another executive-branch warren strategizing on how he might best deliver the bad news to the president. And an allegedly drunk Rudy Giuliani prowled the White House looking to have a chat with the president.
Eventually, Giuliani’s message got through. In a belligerent speech on November 4, Trump declared that a fraud had been committed on the American people. We now know that Stepien and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, along with a number of other Republican members of what Stepien has called “team normal,” had advised him to say something closer to “votes are still being counted.” But as the days went by, the prospects became, in Stepien’s words, “very very very bleak” for the Trump campaign—and none of the allegations of fraud were based on actual evidence. Even arch-Trump loyalist Attorney General Bill Barr declared in his taped deposition that Trump’s delusional account of rampant and coordinated fraud from a multiplicity of foreign and domestic actors suggested that “he was detached from reality.”
Watching this episode of the Committee hearings was nothing short of terrifying. Any momentary gratification that partisans of our embattled democracy might have felt in hearing Trump’s star cast of bullies admitting that the election was not a fraud evaporated a moment later, when one recalled the actual events leading up to the infamous siege of the US Capitol on January 6. Not one of this self-advertised corps of tough-minded election realists thought to inform the American public what was going on inside the White House. Instead, Trump’s lies were permitted to fester on, to the point where a surging number of Republican voters came to believe that Biden’s election came about at the hands of a vast criminal conspiracy.
The committee’s evidence should be damning but it is difficult to know whether they will be, given the advanced conditions of antidemocratic reaction we are now living through. It is tricky to parse whether the deafening silence of every member of Trump’s court was careerist self-regard or a darker cult-like devotion that uncritically accepts—and acts upon—whatever Trump decides to believe as unalloyed truth.
For all the delusion and chaos leading up to the fateful insurrection, the march toward the Trump-orchestrated coup effort was both elite-led and demagogic.
This failing in Trump’s team, which included well-regarded members of the political and legal establishment such as Barr and McCarthy, is a variety of the same ailment that plagues Trump supporters at the base of the GOP. Trump administration insiders understood that their leader lies for various complex reasons, but true-believing MAGA supporters, particularly of white-nationalist and evangelist leanings, accept all pronouncements from Trump as holy writ. This full continuum of right-wing deference to the Trumpian cult of personality is being brought to fresh light as these hearings proceed.
Still, it’s hard for anyone who’s lived through the past six years of political derangement on the American right not to feel at least a twinge of despair at knowing that, for all the delusion and chaos leading up to the fateful insurrection, the march toward the Trump-orchestrated coup effort was both elite-led and demagogic. The tragedy that shadows the crucial investigative work of the January 6 commission is that no influential figure in Trump world dared to flout the authority of either their boss or the mob gathering to do their boss’s bidding. Instead, they retreated to the sidelines and chose to watch while shady characters like Giuliani, conspiracy-addled lawyers John Eastman and Sidney Powell, MyPillow impresario Mike Liddell and other conscienceless grifters rushed to surround a red-faced and fuming Trump with a chorus of sycophantic assent. Is it any wonder that such spinelessness should have enabled the horrific assault on the Capitol—or goaded the raging Trump into speculating that maybe his own vice president might “deserve” to be strung up and executed for refusing to ratify Trump’s lies about the election? No more chilling episode could illustrate the stakes of the January 6 hearings for the future of our democracy—even as the vast retinue GOP insiders still prostrate before the hateful and mendacious leader of their party makes one fear the prospect of many mob executions to come.
Rafia Zakaria is the author most recently of Against White Feminism (W.W. Norton, 2021). She is also a columnist for The Baffler and Dawn (Pakistan).
