‘Look at all of the people fighting for me’
Getting Donald Trump to repudiate the Jan. 6 violence he so gleefully watched on his West Wing television was like getting an infant to eat his strained vegetables. He fussed and batted away the spoon the next day. Metaphorically. There wasn’t a White House plate handy to throw against the wall as staffers insisted he suck it up and make the statement, responsible adult-style.
The Washington Post reports:
He struggled to do it. Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to individuals familiar with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
The public could get its first glimpse of outtakes from that recording Thursday night, when the committee plans to offer a bold conclusion in its eighth hearing: Not only did Trump do nothing despite repeated entreaties by senior aides to help end the violence, but he sat back and enjoyed watching it. He reluctantly condemned it — in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 — only after the efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed and after aides told him that members of his own Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
“This is what he wanted to happen,” Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who is scheduled to lead the questioning Thursday along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), said in an interview this week. “You might have earlier on said, ‘Was he incompetent? Was he someone who freezes in a moment when they can’t react to something? Or was it exactly what he wanted to have happened?’ And after all of this, I’m convinced that this is exactly what he wanted to have happen.”
Mr. “Knock the crap out of ’em,” the showman once invested in professional wrestling, loved what he was seeing on Jan. 6. Per former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham:
“All I know about that day was that he was in the dining room, gleefully watching on his TV as he often did, ‘look at all of the people fighting for me,’ hitting rewind, watching it again — that’s what I know,” Grisham told CNN’s “New Day.”
Only after it became clear the insurrection he inspired would fail did Trump issue a call to his “very special” mob to go home, Luria notes.
By then 187 minutes had passed. One rioter had been shot and killed by Capitol security, two others of natural causes, and a third of accidental acute amphetamine intoxication after collapsing amidst the violent assault. Hundreds of police officers were injured, some severely. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick suffered two strokes during the fighting and died the next day.
The House Jan. 6 investigating committee tonight will lay out a minute-by-minute chronicle of what Trump did and did not do that day.
The hearing is also expected to tie together details from prior hearings, including the inflammatory presidential rhetoric that drew thousands to Washington that day, Trump’s willingness to grant audiences to fringe figures peddling fabulist and unconstitutional theories on how he could keep hold of the presidency and the many times he was urged to intervene during the violence but refused to do so.
All of it points to one conclusion, which the committee plans to argue Thursday: Trump wanted the violence, he is responsible for it and his unwillingness to help end it amounts to a dereliction of duty and a violation of his oath of office.
Donald Trump violated his oath the moment he swore it. The only thing Trump swears fealty to is himself.
So looking forward to tonight’s season finale* of Only Coup Plotters in the West Wing.
*Not series finale.
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