If a hearing falls in prime time, but it isn’t shown on Fox, does it make a sound?
I apologize for trying to make that lame joke work. I am sick of our political reality being circumscribed by “Well, Fox watchers don’t learn about reality and thus don’t care about it, so reality doesn’t matter.”
This is not true. Reality matters, and the reality the January 6 committee presented Thursday night will matter for a long time. It laid out all the details about how Donald Trump and his closest allies organized and ran the January 6 violent insurrection. Trump did it. We saw new devastating video of Capitol police and others beaten and stomped. Isolated at times, alone in a crowd. Those isolated cops… it felt so lonely.
We learned Trump was lonely too. Most of his closest supporters abandoned him. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough took great glee Friday morning repeatedly getting to repeat former attorney general Bill Barr’s assertion that Trump’s election fraud claims were “bullshit.” But sad-eyed Ivanka testified that she believed in Dad’s Roy Cohn, as he told the truth for the first time, and maybe the last, abandoning his boss.
That should matter. If only to make her father much more miserable.
I realize I’m just skipping around the details here. I didn’t expect this hearing to be so devastating. We’ve seen all kinds of video before. We’ve heard testimony. We know the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters were running up those steps. We know they wanted to hang Mike Pence and do God knows what to Nancy Pelosi.
As Cheney said: “Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
A female Capitol Police officer, Caroline Edwards, whom we hadn’t seen before, testified calmly: “It was carnage, it was chaos. I was slipping in people’s blood.… I’m not combat trained!” She described the fading away of Brian Sicknick, who died the next day. “He was ghostly pale.”
We then heard rioters chanting: “Nancy, Nancy, Nancy [Pelosi]… bring her here!”
We learned that GOP congresspeople sought pardons. For something.
“The love in the air…I’ve never seen anything like it.” Donald Trump tweeted mid-day.
And we saw Officer Harry Dunn weeping in the crowd, watching, not testifying this time.
Cheney was incandescent. I don’t like her. But she has a moral core. It’s not mine. But I respect it. She told her Republican “friends,” “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.”
Trump also opined that “maybe” the marauders were right to want to “hang Mike Pence.”
The chyrons continued all evening Thursday, and into Friday morning:
committee: trump oversaw attempted coup
trump tweet led planning for capitol attack
cheney: trump said pence “deserved” to be hanged
committee presents case: trump is at the center
“I don’t know how they sleep at night,” Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges said Thursday afternoon. He was talking about cowardly Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, who turned their backs on the terror they felt that day. We will get to that scandal eventually, too.
Also, why did four men die by suicide after that nightmare? I don’t understand suicide. I guess I’m relieved by that. It’s just not part of my makeup. But when I don’t understand four men dying by suicide after Januarya 6, I don’t feel relief. I want to know more.
We’re going to learn more about all of this in the coming weeks, whether Fox News wants us to know it or not.
