Month: February 2021

Trump’s attorneys say he had nothing to do with inciting the insurrection on January 6th:

“The words of President Trump’s January 6 speech speak for themselves. President Trump did not direct anyone to commit lawless actions, and the claim that he could be responsible if a small group of criminals (who had come to the capital of their own accord armed and ready for a fight) completely misunderstood him, were so enamored with him and inspired by his words that they left his speech early, and then walked a mile and a half away to ‘imminently’ do the opposite of what he had just asked for, is simply absurd.”

The WaPo’s Philip Bump brings up something I haven’t heard before that refutes that fact:

That’s the crux of the argument. But the flaw is obvious: The “criminals” who stormed the Capitol did not come to the capital entirely of their own accord. They came, according to all available evidence, because Trump highlighted Jan. 6 as a date on which pressure would be applied on Congress to overturn the results of the election. They came that day because Trump asked them to and they interfered with the effort to finalize the 2020 election because that was what Trump wanted them to do.

The evidence reflects this. On Sunday, The Washington Post walked through evidence collected by federal investigators in which those involved in storming the Capitol linked their actions to Trump’s desires. Others had said as much to media outlets before their arrests. But what the existing evidentiary record shows is that attention turned to the 6th only after Trump highlighted it. It wasn’t just that people came that day because of Trump, it’s that the day didn’t become a focus of attention until Trump highlighted it.AD

On Dec. 14, members of the electoral college met in all 50 states to formally cast their votes for president, confirming Joe Biden’s win. What was scheduled to happen Jan. 6 was simply that Congress would count those votes, a formality that in elections past attracted little attention. This year, though, there were rumblings that Republican elected officials would oppose the counting of the electoral votes, claiming that irregularities had marred the vote counting. On Dec. 17, Trump highlighted one such objection by retweeting a One America News story about a plan by then-Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) to object.

It’s possible that Trump learned about the vote-counting only because he saw an ad created by the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans. That ad aired Dec. 10 and prominently featured then-Vice President Mike Pence’s role in confirming the final electoral-vote count. Trump was reportedly furious when he saw the spot and was soon insisting that Pence could simply stand in the way of the final vote counting. (He couldn’t.)

Trump’s first tweet about a rally or event Jan. 6 came on Dec. 19. He shared a news story on Twitter about false claims of fraud being presented by a member of his administration, then telling his millions of followers that there would be a “big protest in D.C. on January 6th.”

“Be there,” he added, “will be wild!”

Over the next few weeks, he kept up the drumbeat: Big rally Jan. 6, up to the people to stop the finalization of the election.

On Dec. 26, he lashed out at the Justice Department for not reinforcing his false claims about voter fraud.

“They should be ashamed,” he said on Twitter. “History will remember. Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.

A review of charging documents compiled by the department doesn’t indicate that any of those arrested in the storming of the Capitol had identified Jan. 6 as a date for travel to D.C. In fact, several of the documents show that plans changed only after Trump identified the date.

A statement of facts related to the arrest of Karl Dresch, for example, alleges that Dresch had posted information on Facebook focused on Jan. 6 by “no later than December 16, 2020” — before Trump’s first tweet about the rally. But the alleged Dec. 16 post from Dresch appears to have been simply “Stop the Steal,” a phrase broadly related to Trump’s false fraud claims. Four days later, after Trump identified the 6th as a target date, Dresch allegedly posted about it: “7-4-1776 = 1-6-2021.”

An indictment charging members of a self-described militia group in Ohio in connection with the violence shows a similar shift. Jessica Watkins allegedly told an acquaintance Nov. 9 that, “I need you fighting fit by innaugeration [sic],” suggesting an emphasis on Jan. 20. By Dec. 29, the focus shifted to the 6th: “Trump wants all able bodied Patriots to come.”

A number of others arrested in connection with their alleged involvement in the storming of the Capitol similarly announced plans to attend only after Trump had emphasized the date.

Kenneth Grayson allegedly wrote Dec. 23 that he would be “there for the greatest celebration of all time after Pence leads the Senate flip!!”

That same day, Ronald Sandlin allegedly posed a question to his Facebook friends: “Who is going to Washington D.C. on the 6th of January? I’m going to be there to show support for our president and to do my part to stop the steal and stand behind Trump when he decides to cross the rubicon.” He later organized a GoFundMe fundraiser to pay for people to attend.

Gina Bisignano allegedly replied to a Trump Facebook post calling for people to come on Jan. 6 with “I’ll be there.”

Other timelines are less clear. A witness who spoke with the FBI alleged that Jacob Lewis had said to “watch what happens to the Capitol on the 6th.” The alleged conversation took place in December 2020, suggesting that it may have followed Trump’s initial focus on the date. Albert Ciarpelli allegedly told the FBI that he made plans to travel to Washington after seeing television ads promoting the rally that day, although it’s unclear when the ad aired.

But this highlights another important point: Organizations focused on promoting rallies in Washington on Jan. 6 began to do so only after Trump’s initial tweet.

On Dec. 13, for example, the website for the group Stop the Steal was promoting a rally in Washington held the day before. It wasn’t until Dec. 20 that the main page of the site promoted the Jan. 6 event. The day prior, its website showed no information about a rally in Washington.

On Jan. 2, Trump retweeted a message promoting the rally near the White House, organized by an activist associated with the website TrumpMarch.com. It had put together a bus tour in November and early December to champion Trump’s false claims about the election. As of Dec. 18, the day of Trump’s first tweet, the site was still promoting the end of that tour. By Dec. 23, it had shifted to a bus tour ending in D.C. on Jan. 6.

It’s important to note, as journalist Marcy Wheeler did Monday, that those already arrested by federal agents probably are among those least likely to have been part of coordinated plans to commit acts of violence Jan. 6. They were, instead, people who promoted their involvement in the attempted insurrection on Facebook, where acquaintances could see — and report — their boasts. There may be others who’d focused on overrunning the Capitol on Jan. 6 even before Trump first elevated the day in that Dec. 17 tweet.

Of course, it’s not likely that the Capitol could have been overrun were there not a crowd of thousands pushing against the inadequate barriers that had been constructed around the building. It probably required a large mass of people to work, a large mass that was there because Trump had demanded that it be.

It is true that some of those present at the Capitol were not inspired by Trump’s speech that morning. In the criminal complaint targeting Garret Miller, the FBI claims that Miller had written on Facebook that “we where [sic] going in. … No matter what. … Decided before the trump speech.”

The first alleged mention of the day came Jan. 2, when the FBI indicates that Miller wrote on Facebook that he was “about to drive across the country for this trump s—.”

The prior afternoon, Trump had again tweeted an explicit call for attendance that day.

“The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”

He brought them all to Washington on that specific day, reiterated his Big Lie that the election was stolen and told them to march to the Capitol where a joint session of congress was certifying the presidential election to “Stop The Steal.”

What more do we need to know?

I happened to watch this video again while doing some research. It was taken before the rally, not after, which I already knew. But I was listening to the song and realized that once again, just like with “YMCA” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”they didn’t have clue what the lyrics said:

Gloria, you’re always on the run now
Running after somebody, you gotta get him somehow
I think you’ve got to slow down before you start to blow it
I think you’re headed for a breakdown, so be careful not to show itYou really don’t remember, was it something that he said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?
Gloria, don’t you think you’re fallin’?
If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody callin’?
You don’t have to answer
Leave them hangin’ on the line, oh oh oh, calling Gloria
Gloria (Gloria), I think they got your number (Gloria)
I think they got the alias (Gloria) that you’ve been living under (Gloria)
But you really don’t remember, was it something that they said?
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?

Lol.

The era of Donald Trump is not over, unfortunately. Yes, he has retreated to his compound in Southern Florida and has been uncharacteristically out of the public eye since he left office on January 20th. But his presence still hovers over the Republican Party like an evil genie pulling the party leadership’s strings and keeping the rank and file under his spell despite the fact that he’s been banned from social media and is refusing to appear on TV or talk radio.

This week, Trump will be very much at the center of our political world once more when his second impeachment trial begins.

As exhausting as it may seem to have Trump on the stage again, it is vitally necessary. The man tried to overturn the election and illegally install himself in the White House for four more years. While it’s still unlikely the impeachment managers from the House of Representatives will be able to get 17 Republicans Senators to put their country before their party, the record will be kept for posterity and hopefully the country will figure out a way to close the holes in our system that Trump exposed during his four years in office. The impeachment managers had better get to work doing that because just as it is highly unlikely they will be able to convict Trump of his abuse of power it’s equally unlikely that they will be able to disqualify him from running again (although that is disputed). God forbid, it is possible that we could have President Trump again on January 20th 2025.

There has been a lot of back and forth on the issue of whether or not it’s constitutional to even hold an impeachment trial of a president who is no longer in office. The brief Trump’s lawyers submitted suggests that they will be leaning hard on the idea that it’s unconstitutional as their defense, which is understandable since the GOP senators signaled that was the ticket out when 45 of them voted for a resolution saying that it was.

Interestingly, there has been pushback on this from some highly respected conservative legal scholars from the Federalist Society, notably former federal judge Michael McConnell and Charles J. Cooper, who is as stalwart a right-winger as exists in the Republican legal world. Cooper has worked closely with Ted Cruz of Texas and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as well as provided counsel for every conservative legal crusade from anti-abortion cases to gun rights. Writing in the Wall St Journal on Sunday, Cooper points out that the idea a president cannot be impeached after leaving office makes no sense considering the provision that allows the Senate to bar him or her from holding office again. He says, “it defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders.”

There was a time when an opinion from Charles Cooper would hold great sway with Republican Senators. But they have mostly been immune to reason when it comes to Trump for years now and that hasn’t changed since he left office. Still, if there are any conservatives looking for some back-up to argue the point, he’s given it to them.

The House managers will be presenting a case that says, “you all know what you saw, here’s a reminder.” They will air video clips showing that for weeks Trump riled up his voters with the Big Lie about the election and then called them to Washington, promising it would be “wild,” and then incited them to storm the Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral votes. He told them he was going up there with them but went back to the White House instead. Did he suspect there was going to be violence? It’s a question worth asking.

Back at the White House he watched the insurrection on television and did nothing for hours until he reluctantly issued this video:

"Go home, we love you, you're very special"

President Trump repeats false claims the US election was 'fraudulent', following one person shot and an improvised explosive device found on #Capitol grounds.

Follow live: https://t.co/9WUWn0WfmL pic.twitter.com/5gWVrb3tBz

— Sky News (@SkyNews) January 6, 2021

And then, with the Capitol building still engulfed in tear gas and smoke, windows shattered, people wounded and the country in shock, he tweeted this which resulted in Twitter finally locking his account:

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

That is basically the case right there. In a courtroom with an unbiased jury, it would be a slam dunk.

But this won’t be a normal courtroom and it’s anything but an unbiased jury. It’s nearly the same jury that ignored Trump’s embrace of illegal electoral behavior going all the way back to 2016 when he was warned that the Russian government was interfering in the election and his reaction was to invite them to hack Hillary Clinton’s email and spend the next four years denying the interference had ever happened. When asked in the presidential debate that year if he would accept the results of the election, he refused to say. Days later he told his rally crowd that he would accept it — but only if he won.

Fast forward two years and Trump is caught trying to extort the Ukrainian president to sabotage Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in exchange for military aid, a gross abuse of power for which he was impeached and acquitted by the Republicans in the Senate. Many of those Senators argued that since it was only a year from the election they should let the people decide.

And then came the Big Lie that the election of 2020 was stolen and the incitement to insurrection on Jan. 6th. Many of those same senators who suggested the people should decide joined Trump in his post-election fantasy, refusing to admit that it was over, objecting to the results on the most specious of grounds.

From almost the moment Trump entered politics, he’s been telegraphing that he had no intention of following the rules or laws that govern our democracy, especially those pertaining to elections. Once he learned how the Electoral College makes it possible to win despite losing he clearly thought he could game the system to his advantage and might well have succeeded if it had been just a little bit closer in some states. At some point, he became convinced that he could overturn the election if he intimidated Mike Pence and the Congress with a violent mob. And all the way along, a majority of Republicans have collaborated with him, in the process normalizing this democratic dysfunction.

Republicans have shown us in living color that they will not forthrightly stand up against an assault on our democracy by one of their own. A handful voted to impeach in the House and it’s possible another handful will vote guilty in the Senate, but the number who stood by Trump, openly and boldly, to object to the election results despite massive evidence that the election was fairly decided is chilling. They now seem determined to let Trump off the hook once again. At this point, you have to wonder if it isn’t because at least some of them think he was on to something.

Salon

Perry Bacon at 538 answers that question. You’ll never guess who it is:

In his inaugural address, President Biden described America as in the midst of an “uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.” His invocation of a civil war and the American Civil War was provocative. It was also accurate. There is no formal definition of an uncivil war, but America is increasingly split between members of two political parties that hate each other.

In the same speech, Biden warned of the dangers of “a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.” This too was accurate. Biden was delivering his address exactly two weeks after a group of supporters of then-President Trump, riled up by his false claims about voter fraud, stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the results of a free and fair election, an act of political extremism and domestic terrorism carried out by at least some people who believe in white supremacy.

Biden didn’t explicitly say that the extremism, domestic terrorism and white supremacy is largely coming from one side of the uncivil war. But that’s the reality. In America’s uncivil war, both sides may hate the other, but one side — conservatives and Republicans — is more hostile and aggressive, increasingly willing to engage in anti-democratic and even violent attacks on their perceived enemies.

The Jan. 6 insurrection and the run-up to it is perhaps the clearest illustration that Republicans are being more hostile and anti-democratic than Democrats in this uncivil war. Biden pledged to concede defeat if he lost the presidential election fair and square, while Trump never made such a pledge; many elected officials in the GOP joined Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results; and finally, Trump supporters arrived at the Capitol to claim victory by force. But there are numerous other examples of conservatives and Republicans going overboard in their attempts to dominate liberals and Democrats:

<blockquote>Republican officials at the state level have engaged in a sustained campaign to make it harder for liberal-leaning constituencies, particularly Black people, to vote.</blockquote>

<blockquote>GOP officials have used aggressive gerrymandering and attempted to manipulate the census-taking process to ensure GOP control of state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives, even if Democrats are winning more votes.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Trump supporters and conservatives have threatened not only to physically destroy institutions they view as hostile to conservative causes, such as CNN, but to kill or injure prominent Democratic politicians, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And, in attempts to intimidate liberal protesters, these conservatives sometimes show up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations wearing military gear and brandishing extensive weaponry.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Trump, conservative lawyers and most Republican members of Congress tried to disqualify the election results in some swing states, which would have in effect invalidated the votes of millions of Americans, particularly Black people and residents of large urban areas. And, as mentioned earlier, that effort culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.</blockquote>

<blockquote>State-level Republican officials have tried to criminalize the types of protests organized by liberals who support Black Lives Matter and oppose the expansion of oil and gas pipelines. In fact, conservative lawmakers in Missouri and other states are considering provisions that would limit legal liability for people who drive into protesters blocking traffic.</blockquote>

<blockquote>State-level GOP officials have limited cities and other localities from enacting policies meant to reduce the spread of COVID-19, essentially preventing elected officials in cities (usually Democrats) from taking measures to save the lives of their constituents.</blockquote>

<blockquote>GOP officials at the state level are engaged in a broader effort to preempt laws passed in Democratic cities, meaning that mostly white GOP state legislators elected in conservative, rural areas are often determining education, economic and other policies for heavily Democratic cities with large numbers of people of color.</blockquote>

We could also compile a long list of anti-democratic and hostile actions taken by Trump himself against Democrats. At the top of that list would be his attempt to coerce the Ukrainian government into announcing it would investigate the Biden family — essentially a scheme for Trump to use the power of his office to tilt the upcoming presidential election in his favor.

It’s important to be specific here, however. Many of the most aggressive actions against liberals have been taken not by Republican voters but largely by Republican officials, particularly at the state level.

“Many Republicans do not accept Democratic governance as a legitimate outcome” of elections, said Thomas Zimmer, a history professor at Georgetown University who is writing a book about political divides in America. “America is nearing a crisis of democratic legitimacy because one side is trying to erect one-party minority rule.”

Gretchen Helmke, a political scientist at the University of Rochester who studies the state of democratic governments around the world, said, “There is a marked asymmetry between the two parties,” with Republicans more engaged in “playing constitutional hardball and taking actions that are still within the letter of the law but [that] may violate the spirit of the law or common-sense ideas about fairness and political equality.”

Those types of actions are much harder to find on the Democratic side. There is no campaign by Democratic elected officials to disenfranchise white evangelical Christians, a constituency that overwhelmingly backs GOP candidates, just as Black voters overwhelmingly back Democratic candidates. There was no widespread, systematic attempt by Democratic officials four years ago to disqualify the votes that elected Trump or to spur Democratic voters to attack the Capitol to prevent the certification of his presidency. While the left-wing antifa movement has violent tendencies, it isn’t an organized group — nor is it aligned with Biden or Democrats. And at least right now, national security experts describe right-wing violence as a much bigger danger in America than any violent behavior from the left. In an October 2020 report, the Department of Homeland Security called violent white supremacists the “most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.”

And, of course, Democrats did not embrace an anti-democratic figure like Trump as their standard-bearer. There are no Democratic politicians in Congress implying that conservative politicians are such dangers to the country that they should be killed.

He follows up with these quotes from various academics, all of which are somewheat alarming:

“The GOP is a counter-majoritarian party now, every week it becomes less like a ‘normal’ party,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University who has written extensively about the radicalization of the Republican Party. “The GOP has to make it harder to vote and harder to understand what the party is all about. Those are two parts of the same project. And it can’t treat its white supremacist and violent wings as extremists who should be isolated because it needs them. They provide motor and momentum.”

“The GOP has radicalized (and is still radicalizing) on its willingness to break democratic norms and subvert or eliminate political institutions. Don’t expect restraint where you’ve seen it in the past,” said Charlotte Hill, a Ph.D. candidate at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducts research on election and voting laws.

Because of this deep conservative antipathy for the liberal version of America, Joanne Freeman, a professor of history and American studies at Yale University, has compared the state of America today to the 1850s, right before the U.S. Civil War.

“Mass violence in Congress seemed possible in 1850. Now, 171 years later, it’s in the national mindscape once again. And for good reason. The echoes of 1850 are striking. We’re at a moment of extreme polarization when outcomes matter, sometimes profoundly,” Freeman wrote in a recent essay in The New York Times.

“The Republicans,” she continued, “whose ironclad grip on the Senate has dominated the federal government, feel entitled to that power and increasingly threatened; they know they’re swimming against the demographic tide in a diversifying nation. They have proven themselves ready and eager for minority rule; voter suppression — centered on people of color — is on the rise and has been for some time. And some of them are willing to protect what they deem right with threats of violence.”

He points out that most Republicans aren’t participating in acts of violence. Which is true. But they sure don[‘t seem to be bothered by it either.

Susan Hyde, a political scientist at University of California, Berkeley, who studies democracy and democratic backsliding both in the U.S. and abroad, said that Republican voters tolerated the party’s anti-democratic tendencies because the party’s elites signaled that it was OK to do so. “Republican politicians have been lying to their own voters, and they need to stop doing that if we are going to have peace,” said Hyde, who was referring specifically to the false belief among a large bloc of Republican voters that Trump won the election.

Meanwhile, Democrats are aggressively trying to enact what Bacon calls an “equality agenda” and are being ungracious with people who oppose it by referring to them in derisive terms.

Of course, some conservative behavior, like trying to make it harder for Black people to vote, probably should be both shamed and called out as racist. That said, it’s important to understand that some liberal and Democratic policies will require conservative Christians in particular to live in a changed America that they simply do not wish to live in. And the liberal focus on ideas like systemic racism and white supremacy has left many conservatives feeling that their individual behaviors and choices are being unfairly cast as racist.

Conservatives “are reacting to something real,” said Zimmer. “Their version of ‘Real America’ — a white, Christian America — is under threat. Republicans are convinced they are waging a noble war against the demise of ‘Real America.’ Conservatives think their backs are against the wall.”

It isn’t. The world is changing. It always has. And human civilization relies on people’s ability to adapt and evolve.

More pertinently, they are not being asked to give up anything but intolerance for sharing this country with people who are not like them and giving everyone an equal shake which used to be one of the bedrock American ideals, even if we never lived up to it.

“[On the left] there is a demand for more redistribution and laws and programs that help some people and not others,” said Vasabjit Banerjee, a political scientist at Mississippi State University who studies political conflicts. For example, he described Black Lives Matter as a “form of status redistribution,” that might be threatening to non-Black Americans because the movement’s goal is to, in effect, make Black people truly “full citizens” in America, equal to white Americans.

Reflecting on the actions of both sides, you can see why conservative attacks on liberals are much more problematic than the inverse. And that’s why it is hard to imagine Biden being able to unify America or end this uncivil war — his side is not the one feeling most aggrieved and taking anti-democratic, even violent, measures to win.

In his inaugural speech, Biden said, “We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”

He didn’t quite say why we had learned that democracy is precious, why it is fragile, or who or what it had prevailed against. But the reality is that some Republicans in America are so intent on defeating liberals that they are willing to erode America’s democracy, or even end it, along the way to victory.

No doubt about it.

Once again, Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech illuminates the problem:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

It’s their way or the highway. Always has been.

Just watch this. It’s cathartic:

This is 🔥 🔥 🔥. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) drags Utah’s new Trump-supporting Black Republican (@BurgessOwens) for coming in on his first day and lecturing Democrats about patriotism when Owens voted to overturn the November election even after the Capitol insurrection. pic.twitter.com/mJ7cUJ0RSH

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) February 6, 2021

National Public Radio this morning reviews timelines to insurrection assembled by Ryan Goodman and colleagues at Just Security. Former president Donald J. Trump goes on trial in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday for inciting the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

“While we should be focused on the events of January 6th, we should not be hyper-focused on them,” Goodman says. “The groundwork was laid well in advance.” He spotlights events from the previous year leading up to the insurrection.

Trump tweeted support for armed protests in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia last April. In a May fundraising email, Trump urged followers to join “the Trump Army.” In a Wisconsin speech in August, Trump said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged, remember that.” He repeated that during the Republican national convention.

Trump supporters who arrived for the Jan. 6 rally came because Trump told them to be there. It would be “wild.”

“Let’s have trial by combat,” Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer blustered.

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” Trump said when he took the stage. “You have to be show strength and you have to be strong.”

Trump urged the crowd to go to the Capitol. At 2:24 p.m. Trump tweets, essentially, that Vice President Mike Pence had betrayed them by failing to deliver the election to Trump. The crowd went wild. There were calls to hang Pence.

Steve Inskeep: Later, when many alleged attackers were under arrest, political violence specialist Robert Pape read many of the statements they had made to the FBI and the media.

Robert Pape: A woman from California said — and these are in the court documents, and I quote — “She felt called upon by President Donald Trump to travel to DC to change the outcome of the election because she believes it was stolen.” We have a man from Arizona who said he was in Washington as part of a group effort with other patriots from Arizona at the request of President Trump. We have another woman from Texas who said she entered the rotunda because, “He said be there, and so I went, I answered the call of my President.” We have dozens of such statements.

Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler said:

The video contains strong evidence that Trump did incite the insurrection, regardless of whether that was his intent. The rioter’s words “we were invited here” were exactly right, and the refrain “fight for Trump” was directly responsive to Trump’s demand. In criminal law, we would say this video proves the act but perhaps not the mental state – that Trump intended to cause the insurrection or knew it would happen as a result of his words. 

It would be difficult to convict Trump in a criminal court because of the high level of proof required but the standard for impeachment is different. The circumstantial evidence, including Trump’s bellicose words, his reported glee at the invasion of the Capitol, and his failure to immediately speak out against the violence, and his ultimate stunningly weak admonition to the insurrectionists to “go home” should persuade most Senators that he was either intentional or extremely reckless. His culpability is enhanced because the stakes were so high – Trump seemed willing to risk people’s lives and our democracy in service of a lie about the integrity of the election. 

At minimum, the video makes a strong case that everyone who illegally occupied the Capitol should be prosecuted – no member of that angry mob was an innocent bystander (plus the idea that prosecuting roughly 800 people would overwhelm the courts is ludicrous in a country where more than 10 million people are arrested each year)

I have no illusions any of this will persuade Republican senators to fulfill their oaths to render impartial justice any more than they were faithful in Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Delusions are not the exclusive domain of the political right. The left’s are no less delusions because they are more reality-based. A principle one is that facts matter.

Hoping to erode GOP support by 2022, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) intends to tie QAnon around Republicans’ necks like an albatross, Politico reported last week. “They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters,” said new chair Sean Patrick Maloney of New York. “They cannot do both.”

Another delusion belied by facts, writes Osita Nwanevu at The New Republic:

Of all the “big lies” distorting our politics, one of the largest and most popular—back in 2010 and now—has been the notion that our political divisions are the product of under- or miseducation. The Republican Party’s flight into lunacy, it’s often suggested, has a fairly simple cause. The unwashed aren’t getting The Facts in school or from their media sources, and it’s up to the enlightened to shower The Facts upon them …

Actually, no. More and better Facts will not set them free. Polls show few differences between between QAnon believers with or without college degrees. Nwanevu writes, “Civiqs’s latest survey, for instance, registers 72 percent opposition and 5 percent support for the theory among graduates. The split is 71 to 5 among nongraduates and 78 to 3 among postgraduates. And, notably, Americans without college degrees are less likely than graduates to have heard of QAnon in the first place.”

Economic dislocation and under-education have little to do with support for efforts to toss aside the 2020 election results, Greg Sargent notes in considering a mid-January Washington Post-ABC News poll. Sargent writes:

Bubbling underneath all this is the fact that there really is a serious anti-democratic movement afoot among the class of intellectuals who are trying to carve out a purportedly respectable version of Trumpist post-liberalism.

As Laura Field and Damon Linker demonstrate, this movement is getting darker, more desperate and more radical, and some strains of it appear to be contemplating a fundamental and permanent break with liberal democracy’s most basic core commitments.

“Intellectuals,” not yahoos. Linker wrote in late July:

Just how dark and desperate is the right becoming? So much so that it is now increasingly common to find conservative writers flirting openly with ideas that clearly point in the direction of outright political radicalism — including talk of civil war, permanently  purging liberals from political office and positions of cultural influence, the need for revolutionary action, and hopes for a “refounding” of America using “regime-level power.”

It is liberal arrogance to dismiss by its most clownish spokespersons what is happening on the right.

Intellectuals aside, Nwanevu cites a report that 40 percent of people charged so far in the insurrection were not unemployed, but “CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants.” In fact, studies show that more knowledge actually deepens political disagreements on the right. The problem is in fact that many “will believe what they want to believe in spite of available data and evidence.”

What they want to believe is that conservative hands are the only ones that may legitimately steer the ship of state. Democracy is useful to them for appearances only; even authoritarian regimes hold elections. Popular sovereignty be damned if it delivers the “wrong” outcome, e.g., Democrats in charge. More and better facts will not neutralize that kind of motivated reasoning among neither conservative intellectuals nor the hoi polloi.

Nwanevu again, critiquing the DCCC’s strategy (emphasis mine):

Doing something about the power of the Republican Party seems more plausible—as long as those fighting it frame the battle as right against wrong rather than smart against dumb.

Democrats should try campaigning on the truth: The Republican Party is controlled by intelligent, college-educated, and affluent elites who concoct dangerous nonsense to paper over a bigoted, plutocratic agenda and to justify attacks on the democratic process. That agenda and those attacks are supported by millions of reasonably intelligent voters who will believe or claim to believe anything that furthers the objective of keeping conservatives in control of this country forever. Simply pointing to figures like Greene and hoping the indignation of college graduates will do the rest is a mistake. Instead, Democrats should present voters with a material choice between a party that has nothing to offer the majority of Americans but abuse and conspiratorial flimflam and a party committed to building a democracy and an economy that work for all. If they don’t, the lizard people who run the GOP will be running the government again in no time.

The will to power is all the GOP has now. They do not want to govern. They want to rule. Republican party members hanging onto the old ways have already lost control. They have nothing to offer their authoritarian base.

“You cannot win the battle for the soul of your party with that platform because no one actually wants it. No one in the base wants it, swing voters don't want it, no one wants it,” says @chrislhayes on the platform of “Chamber of Commerce Republicans.” pic.twitter.com/RGxKLhODMA

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) February 4, 2021

In 2019, John Dean and retired professor of psychology Robert Altemeyer worked with a Monmouth University study measuring subjects’ right-wing authoritarian “RWA” and “social dominance” traits:

The Monmouth poll overwhelmingly found that most Trump supporters are both highly authoritarian and highly prejudiced, and revealed that authoritarian views are deeply embedded in the belief system of many Republicans who would seek another strong leader to take Trump’s place whenever he departed the national political stage.

Trump’s followers don’t care about his dishonesty and questionable actions because their primary concern is the perceived corruption of the purity of American society, write Dean and Altemeyer. Trump’s base is oblivious to his unpresidential behavior, endlessly forgiving of his incompetence, and stands “ready to give Trump all the power he wants” in exchange for his promise to reverse societal change and protect them from the purported danger posed by “lawless” minorities and immigrants.

In that pursuit, adherence to democratic principles are as situational as American traditions like the peaceful transfer of power are disposable. The period between Nov. 3, 2020 and Jan. 20, 2021 illustrated that in violence and in blood.

Arrestees so far include a mother of eight, a messianic rabbi, a couple of realtors, a couple of fitness club owners, a young farmer, a couple of corrections officers, and more. Male, female, younger and older. Americans in name. Everyday anti-Americans at heart.

Adam Schiff had some tough, well deserved words about Kevin McCarthy this morning:

John Amato at C&L makes it clear just how fatuous McCarthy’s lame threats really are:

Since Republicans have shown no mercy, comity, or any form of civility and morals when they took back the House in 2010, and the Senate soon afterwards, their threats are meritless.

House Republicans held eight separate hearing on the Benghazi incident to smear Hillary Clinton and wreck her chances of the presidency.

Majority Leader McConnell immorally blocked Pres. Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, lied to the American people about why he stopped the nomination, claiming 8 months out of an election cycle was too short a time.

When RBG died, he along with Trump danced on her grave, and within a few weeks of an election filled her seat with another Christian right evangelical.

Now he is arguing that no matter what your actions or your statements were no matter how anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic, seditious, and QAnon-inspired, as soon as you’re sworn in as a Congressperson, they no longer matter.

Ad anyone who calls for the execution of their political rivals simply should be disqualified. But since it isn’t, the least the Republicans could have done is exercise a tiny bit of discipline and deny Greene her committee assignment. But McCarthy is so weak and spineless — so attached at the hip to Donald Trump, eve now — that he punted and made the Democrats do the dirty work.

Fine. And yes, if they win the majority in 2022, I fully expect that they will strip a dozen Democrats of their committee assignments over nothing. That’s how they roll. But they can’t be allowed to let these insanely radical conspiracy theorists run wild and you cannot let their threats and intimidation have free rein. If they do their worst in two years, they do their worst. It doesn’t change a thing.

They damn near destroyed the goddamn country. Unprecedented death and destruction and misery and mourning. Absent some apology and honesty nothing they have to say is worth anything at all at all at all.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) February 7, 2021

Amen, amen, amen.

As I have been saying, shamelessness is their superpower. They accuse the other side of hypocrisy and laugh in your face if you do the same to them. They are not held responsible for anything they say or do and as a result have become like marauding pirates or ruthless gangsters, answerable only their own rules, which are based solely on power and hierarchy and have nothing to do with greater civilized norms and laws.

This isn’t new but they’re taken it to bold new levels of smarmy hypocrisy. Take this for instance:

Rand Paul previews Trump's impeachment trial defense: whataboutism and false equivalencies pic.twitter.com/I5MPfHEW4N

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 7, 2021

I love the fact that his dead-eyed response to the facts Wallace lays out is just, “well yes, that language was bad but others have said bad things too.”

Apparently, the fact that Donald Trump’s “political speech” resulted in an assault on the Capitol during a joint session in which five people were killed, many police were injured and there have been hundreds of arrests, is the equivalent of Sarah Sanders being asked to leave a restaurant and getting a free cheeseboard.

It’s actually more like this, which was the precursor to what they did on January 6th.

It’s really rich that Rand Paul brings up Booker saying “get in people’s faces” considering that it’s his people who wrote the book.

Trump lit the match, but they have been throwing gallons of gasoline all over our politics for a good long while. These entitled assholes constantly scream hysterically “you work for US!” as if they are the only people in the country. Well, they are not.

I’ve been covering the Capitol attack for a month now and I’m still regularly coming across astonishing video I haven’t laid eyes on before. The amount of raw material investigators have to sort through is just overwhelming.

The footage just goes on and on and on.

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Originally tweeted by Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) on February 6, 2021.