Of course Donald Trump didn’t do anything to stop the Jan. 6 attack. He gave the order
A president’s refusal to stop an armed invasion of the U.S. Capitol was presented as shocking this week, and indeed it ought to be. All that could prepare us for such an abdication in Donald Trump’s case was everything that preceded it.
Despite the remonstrances of virtually every aide in the White House, at least half his adult children and a good portion of Fox News’ prime-time lineup, Trump refused to so much as amble over to the White House briefing room or lift a tweeting finger to stop the mob, as the latest hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee demonstrated. Trump’s incriminating inertia persisted for 187 minutes as the insurrectionists maimed police officers and mortally threatened a joint session of Congress led by his own long-servile vice president, Mike Pence. Even Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who pumped his fist at the rabble and led the insurrection’s legislative wing, was caught on video literally running for his life.
Trump’s inaction in the face of an assault on Congress — convened for the purpose of certifying the presidential election, no less — does seem contrary to the whole “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” part of the oath he swore, not to mention at least a couple sections of the federal criminal code and every claim to human decency. But there was no reason to expect otherwise.
Trump had, after all, provided the rioters with a fabricated motive, publicly summoned them to Washington weeks beforehand and sicced them on the Capitol once they arrived. Expecting him to object once blood was spilled would be like asking an arsonist to douse his own flames. No wonder the then-president not only made no effort to disrupt the riot but encouraged it by attacking Pence in a tweet that, as former Trump press aide Sarah Matthews put it to the committee, poured “gasoline on the fire.”
The committee has added much to our understanding of the context of the coup attempt, including the desperate, failed scheming to seize voting machines and worse just before Trump’s “will be wild” invitation to the insurrection; Trump’s knowledge that the crowd was armed and insistence on urging it toward the Capitol anyway; and the quantity and vehemence of the entreaties he ignored as the melee proceeded. But Trump undoes our standards and safeguards by flouting them openly and brazenly, and this was no exception: He orchestrated the coup in public.
That’s why, as this week’s hearing reminded us, even as notorious a sycophant as California’s own Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, offered an uncharacteristically clear condemnation of Trump in the immediate aftermath.
McCarthy’s quick subsequent ceasefire with the man who could have had him killed — along with that of most of the Republican Party and its media apparatus — is a reconciliation with violence and an endorsement of authoritarianism. Now that Trump and his party are doing us the favor of telling us their intentions all over again, let’s do ourselves the favor of believing them.