Yet again, the House select committee investigating Donald Trump’s attempt to seize presidential power by overturning the 2020 election has delivered a powerful image of our broken political order. During yesterday’s eighth and final summer hearing, the committee showed the iconic photograph of Josh Hawley, Republican senator of Missouri, raising his fist before Trump supporters who were protesting Trump’s defeat at the Capitol’s security gates. Hawley was signaling his solidarity with the violent cultists of the Trump movement moments before Congress met in joint session to certify electoral college votes and confirm Joe Biden’s victory. As one Capitol police officer on the scene recounted, Hawley’s militant gesture “riled up the crowd.” The committee then followed the photograph of Hawley’s raised fist with video footage of Hawley hotfooting his way out of the Capitol later in the day—keen to put as much distance as he could from the destructive and confrontational mob he helped to inflame.
The committee also chronicled the strategic retreat of President Trump himself from the consequences of his own mob-inciting actions. As the election-denying insurgents Trump had convened on January 6 laid siege to the citadel of American democracy, the president sat in his dining room in the White House, watching the violence unfold on his beloved right-wing propaganda network, Fox News. As the committee chronicled in painstaking detail, Trump pointedly elected to do nothing to quell the violence at the Capitol for more than three hours—and only released a grudging, grievance-laden statement on Twitter after it was clear that the coup attempt had failed. The committee also revealed footage of Trump the day after the insurrection, refusing to utter the truth of his political defeat. “I don’t want to say the election’s over!” Trump snapped at aides while reading a prepared statement, which was spoon-fed to him via a script.
Committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, said Trump, who irresponsibly tweeted far more than he responsibly governed, refused to tweet the phrase “stay peaceful” while his supporters assaulted police officers, ransacked the Capitol, and threatened to murder members of congress. Trump supporters brandished a Confederate flag in the Capitol, erected a gallows outside the building, and chanted “hang Mike Pence.” The carnage unleashed by insurrectionists compelled U.S. Secret Service agents protecting Mike Pence to call family members to offer final goodbyes.
According to a White House lawyer, Trump, who ignited the rage and violence that took place on January 6, “didn’t want anything done.”
The committee’s assemblage of damning testimony and documentation depicts how Trump’s lie and refusal to acknowledge the truth nearly resulted in the obliteration of democracy. More than that, though, the committee’s eighth session offered a deeper cautionary tale that should be familiar to anyone acquainted with our country’s actual history: the practice of democracy in the most powerful country in the world can be toppled by a fable. This means that should we witness the ultimate demolition of democratic governance in America, it will most likely occur not at the behest of a hostile foreign government. No, the final blow will probably come via a fiction conjured up and promulgated by domestic terrorist forces, steeped in the toxic mythologies of white nationalism.
This is far from the first time, after all, that America has reaped devastating political violence from the lies rooted in our preferred self-image as an exceptional and fundamentally innocent democracy. And as Josh Hawley did in the mayhem of January 6, the country at large has fled in uncritical panic before its own handiwork. The members of the January 6 committee have taken great pains to depict Donald Trump as a narcissistic, wannabe despot, who refused his oath to the Constitution to ensure laws are faithfully executed. The material consequences of that failure to act meant that the foundations of our republic were nearly toppled. And that’s why it’s crucial that as it resumes its work in September, the January 6 committee does not repeat the sins of Donald Trump and their political forbearers.
Consider, by way of edifying contrast, the last time that members of Congress systematically lied to credulous white Americans and nearly fomented the destruction of America. During the 1876 congressional hearings on Reconstruction and the South’s failure to enfranchise formerly enslaved Black Americans, structural changes were never implemented. That failure ushered in an era of violent terror from the southern planter class, the Ku Klux Klan and a racist judiciary that continued the disenfranchisement of Black Americans over the course of the next ninety years.
America lied to itself about its belief in “inalienable rights” for its citizens from 1775 to 1865, about emancipation and enfranchisement of Black Americans, and about civil rights. Each of these Hawley-like flights into self-administered civic fantasy led to war, death, or the near destruction of the country. Unless the committee’s work produces a different result—starting with, but by no means limited to, criminal charges for Trump and his enablers—the legacy of January 6 may also embody the historic inability of Americans to reckon with the lies embedded in our origin story as a democracy in which “all men are created equal.”
Indeed, Trump and his loyalists’ inability to face the truth nearly turned America from a flailing formal democracy into something much closer to a full-blown fascist state. As Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified, “we were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.” Hutchinson offered this appraisal as she described for the committee the unseemly rush of lawmakers to petition Trump for blanket pardons for their role in promoting Trump’s lie about the election. This, too, was a lurch into authoritarian impunity with a clear historical precedent in our racial past—the virtually identical (and successful) campaign among Confederate soldiers to obtain pardons from the Andrew Johnson administration for their seditious participation in the civil war.
At the core of Trump’s lie about voter fraud is a deeply related lethal fable that has so far largely escaped sustained mention in the House committee: the lie of unchallenged and unlicensed white political entitlement. And we don’t need to reach back to the nineteenth century for an instructive illustration of this fable of power in action. After a far closer contested presidential election in 2000, 68 percent of Black Americans said they felt “cheated” after the election, compared to 55 percent of white Democrats, and Blacks were much more likely than white Democrats to say that Bush “stole the election.” There are partisan divides about the legitimacy of the 2000 presidential election, but a more central fact remains: despite the historical and contemporary evidence of disenfranchisement, Black Americans did not engage in the level of violence that white Trump supporters demonstrated on January 6—even though they were more likely than white Democrats to feel cheated by the malfunctions of democracy in critical swing states such as Florida.
Instead, the battle over the outcome of the 2000 balloting sparked “the Brooks Brothers riot”—a confrontational uprising among GOP political apparatchiks in the Sunshine State, orchestrated by future Trump political consigliere Roger Stone. Legal assistance to the GOP effort to disrupt the Florida recount was furnished by future Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett. Clearly, the prevailing narrative about this country’s origin and rightful functioning resonates in a far different way for over-advantaged white people than it does for most Black Americans.
This dynamic should evoke a twinge of fear when we transpose it into the scenes evoked before last night’s committee hearings: “there seems to be a narrative about the destruction of America that resonates with white Trump supporters.” The committee used witness testimony to demonstrate that Trump never contacted heads of law enforcement or national security departments to enforce “law and order.” For Trump and his followers, Black votes in Georgia, Michigan and other states that swung into Biden column on election night were simply additional, self-evident fodder for fascist plotting and the decapitation of democracy.
Trump’s decision not to end the violence of January 6 also offers a stark and unmistakable contrast with Trump’s belligerent and race-baiting response to protests of George Floyd’s murder. Trump sent National Guard troops to Washington, D.C to mobilize against Black Lives Matter protests, Trump endorsed the use of chemical spray and rubber bullets to remove protesters from Lafayette Square in order to stage a Trump photo op—and Trump threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to crack down on the protests, thereby allowing him to order active-duty troops into American cities.
The public hearings of the January 6 committee have revealed an ensemble of villains who stoked Donald Trump’s manic plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election. For the past two months, witnesses before the committee cast Donald Trump as the apex antagonist of American democracy—someone whose nefarious aims were defeated mostly by the honorable conduct of a clutch of patriotic Republicans in and around his White House who in the final hour resisted Trump’s pressure campaign. But the denouement of the hearings cannot be a prosecution of Trump alone. Individual accountability cannot come at the expense of substantive and structural accountability. Without that baseline directive in view, our systems of oversight and justice will have fled the scene of the crimes committed on January 6—and 1876 and beyond—just as dishonorably as Josh Hawley did.
Anthony Conwright is a writer and AAPF fellow living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @aeconwright.
