The Jan. 6 committee's been busy

“The democracy America has cultivated for 230 years is slipping away, leaving us in danger of becoming a system in which political differences and elections are not resolved by the rule of law but “decided in the streets”…

We didn’t arrive at this precarious moment solely because of Trump. Trump couldn’t have happened if Fox News and Republican elites hadn’t normalized his threats to democratic traditions. Now they continue to do so with their breezy dismissal of the breathtaking revelations of the Jan. 6 hearings.

The conservative elites surely know we are moving toward instability and violence. Yet rather than grapple with the threat, they excuse Trump’s lawlessness once more by resorting to tribalism: There’s nothing new here. The needle isn’t moving.

This has been the Fox News refrain from the start of its brownout coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings…

The pendulum of history is swinging toward the autocratic, at home and abroad, and Republican elites are nattering about “the needle” of short-term partisan gain…

Now, Trump is claiming the Jan. 6 probe is “fake and phony” and the testimony from his former advisers “doctored.” And Trump allies and supporters are helping him get away with it — again.

In doing so, they are effectively guaranteeing more violence. And no side is immune from the growing threat, as the arrest of a man planning to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh reveals.

During Tuesday’s hearing, the committee also heard from Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia election official who, incensed by threats against elections workers, lashed out at Trump and other politicians in a December 2020 video: “Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. … All of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this.”

And all who are silent now are complicit in assuring that the horrors of Jan. 6 will recur.”

“Until now, Trump’s supporters have told themselves an exculpatory story about Jan. 6 that goes like this: The president sincerely believed he had been robbed of the election. His efforts to reverse the outcome were the result of honest indignation. His “Be there, will be wild!” tweet inviting people to the Jan. 6 rally was just his usual hyperbole, not a threat.

So too — to continue with this story — was his call at the rally itself to “fight like hell,” which was ordinary free speech, not an incitement to riot… Congressional Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory were no worse than the congressional Democrats who questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s four years earlier.

But the committee’s work made nonsense of that narrative. Trump knew perfectly well that fraud hadn’t caused his defeat: So he had been told, in no uncertain terms, by his loyal attorney general, Bill Barr. The theory that Pence had the authority to stop the counting of electoral votes struck even the author of that theory, John Eastman, as a nonstarter in any court. We heard that Rudy Giuliani admitted he had no evidence of significant fraud. Republicans who aided the president’s attempts sought pardons for themselves, hardly admissions of innocence. Among them, according to Hutchinson, was Meadows himself. Maybe Hutchinson is lying, but she was under oath. Trump supporters may find it easy to dismiss Democrats like Adam Schiff or even anti-Trump conservatives like Judge J. Michael Luttig.

But Hutchinson is a source from within the inner sanctum. On Tuesday, she was a picture of credibility. If Meadows continues to refuse to testify to the committee, that credibility will be enhanced.

Maybe this is where the cult of Trump will begin to crack…

I doubt there will be any sort of moment when the Sean Hannitys and Laura Ingrahams of the world will tell the faithful: We were wrong; we made an idol of the wrong man. But there may be a quiet drifting away. In a moment like this, that might be just enough.”