I guess Attorney General Pam Bondi felt that actually flipping Democratic senators the bird would be too much, so she let her sour expression and clipped expectorations do the equivalent when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. What a repellent snit, staged primarily for President Trump, who relishes any surrogate who can sulk, scold and rage as contemptuously as he does. He doesn’t want good-will ambassadors. He wants ill-will amplifiers. Bondi got the memo and spread the bile.
But I found the behavior of Republican senators at the hearing even more disturbing, because several of them used their remarks to travel back to Jan. 6, 2021, and demand that Democrats — yes, Democrats — answer for their conduct in relation to it.
That, of course, was the day when Trump, insisting without grounds that Joe Biden had stolen the presidential election, pumped up a horde of hellions he’d summoned to Washington. The day when they then proceeded to storm the Capitol, assaulting law enforcement officers and hunting down members of Congress. “Insurrection,” “invasion” — call it what you will, it was terrifying and unconscionable either way. And in a sane democracy, it would have ended Trump’s political career as Republican lawmakers barred the doors forevermore.
But the lackeys at last week’s hearing continued to prop him up and to pretty him up, to pamper and to please him, by misrepresenting federal investigators’ apparent examination of Republican lawmakers’ phone records from the period around Jan. 6 as the real scandal. That morally perverse switcheroo was no accident and no one-off. It belongs to an audacious mission to turn Jan. 6 on its head — to erase the shame of it by interring the truth of it.
Why does Trump drone on and on about a rigged, stolen 2020 election in settings — for example, his recent speech to military leaders — where it has no logical place? Partly because he can’t quit his claims of victimhood, which have potent resonance in this age of grievance. Partly as a justification for his vendettas. But also because it allows him, his Republican abettors and the MAGA faithful to think and talk differently about Jan. 6. Sure, the rioters spun out of control, but can you blame them? Thieving Democrats and a cabal of their co-conspirators had usurped voters’ will.
I think that at some point, on some level, Trump understood that his complicity in the violence of Jan. 6 — his responsibility for it, according to the articles of his second impeachment — was more damning than any of his other transgressions: an utterly inexcusable, definitively nullifying breach. I’m sure that some Republican members of Congress still, in the recesses of their dormant consciences, recognize it as such. That’s why they’ve questioned and recast Jan. 6 in so many ways, from so many angles, at such length. Trump and the Republicans who’ve hitched their political fates to him must defuse it, confuse it, make it go away.
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The post The Appalling Campaign to Erase Jan. 6 Never Ends appeared first on New York Times.
