Trump is fighting tooth and nail to keep Jack Smith’s report from being released to the public and you have to wonder why. He beat them all. He’s not going to be prosecuted. But as Bill Kristol points out, there is a good reason for him to want to keep it out of the public record:
Trump knows how crucial his rewriting of the history of January 6th was to his victory in November. If most Republicans had held to their original judgment of January 6th as a day of shame—if they had continued to believe that it was what Trump the very next day called a “heinous attack” that “defiled the seat of American democracy”—Trump would not have been the 2024 GOP nominee. If most Americans had thought January 6th not just an unfortunate event but a disqualifying disgrace, Trump wouldn’t have won the general election.
The whitewashing of January 6th was key to Trump’s political comeback.
And Trump has the sense—and I think he’s right about this—that he must make sure that January 6th stays whitewashed for the sake of his political success going forward.
Kristol goes on to note that the Southern segregationists of the mid-20th century understood very well that it would not be enough to defend their racist policies and that in order to maintain legitimacy they needed to defend their “nobility of the Southern effort in the “War Between the States,” the depredations of Reconstruction, and the historic legitimacy of states’ rights.”
Trump also must defend his traitorous behavior on January 6th and to do so he’ll demand that everyone around him are election deniers and that they will attack those who tried to hold him accountable. And as he says, plenty of otherwise “respectable” types may not extoll the virtues of January 6th, but they’ll find plenty of ways to make sure it’s minimized.
Sadly, as Kristol concludes, even if the report is released:
In a sense, the release now of Smith’s report will simply signify the failure of the effort, over the last four years, of accountability and truth-telling about January 6th. It will be the last gasp, for now, of a lost cause.
As I write this, the report is supposed to be released on Friday pending the decision by the 11th circuit which is reviewing the stay issued by none other than Trump’s judicial poodle Aileen Cannon. We’ll see.
If they decide to bury it, I just hope there’s a Daniel Ellsberg out there brave enough to leak it anyway. We just can’t survive as a nation if this total collapse of accountability continues. The record must at least be preserved and the only way to do that is to make it public.