A question for you GM:
How do you assess Trump's actions during this time?
Entirely correct, or something other than that?
Here is the piece-- for the record there are passages in here with which I disagree, and there are others in search of an analysis more nuanced than simply Trump Good or Orange Man Bad:
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To say the president’s condemnable behavior triggered the riot is not the same as saying he intended or incited a riot.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
On this January 6 anniversary, I most vividly remember the shock and fury of watching the Capitol riot unfold, the instant recognition of a blight on our history. It is America’s proud boast to have made the transition of power through peaceful, lawful means a norm for modern republics. One needn’t buy the Democrats’ politicized “insurrection” distortion to grasp that something precious is forever tarnished.
It’s not gone. The norm endures. The media-Democrat complex’s “insurrection” pap is designed to exaggerate a rare episode of politically motivated violence by the incoherent populist Right, the better to obscure the thrum of violence commited by the radical Left, where “by any means necessary” is a venerated strategy for destroying norms. But unlike the months-long siege of looting, deadly brutality, and antinomian madness that followed George Floyd’s killing (at the hands of a racially mixed group of cops, from a Minneapolis Police Department then headed by an African-American progressive), the Capitol riot was a flash in the pan.
It lasted a little over five hours. The violence was real, but the spectacle was more adolescent tantrum than existential threat. There was never any chance that our democratic republic would be extinguished, that the 2020 election would be reversed. The Constitution, no frail thing, easily prevailed. It’s seen a lot worse.
Had doing so been necessary, lawmakers would have reconvened at an alternate location. It was unnecessary because damage to the Capitol was minimal — as opposed to damage, say, to the World Trade Center on 9/11 or the Oklahoma City federal courthouse in 1995, the targets of terrorist attacks that the Left risibly says pale in comparison to January 6; or as opposed to, say, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and Portland, following the Left’s anti-police riots. On the very evening of January 6, Congress was able to reconvene in the seat of government. There was never any chance that the state-certified electoral votes would not be counted, or that Joe Biden would not be acknowledged as the next president.
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Security forces were undermanned due to supervisory incompetence. Absent that provocative laxity, the melee probably would not have happened — or, at a minimum, any forcible trouble would have been put down rapidly. In the event, 140 police were reportedly injured, and though some of those injuries were serious (bone fractures, concussions, burns, a mild heart attack), most were comparatively minor contusions and lacerations. Although Democrats persist in exaggerating the death toll — precisely because the uprising was nothing like a terrorist attack, much less an actual insurrection — only one killing is inarguably attributable to the uprising: that of Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trump-supporting female rioter who was gunned down by Capitol Police lieutenant Michael Byrd, who was guarding a lobby leading to the House chamber.
Democrats strain to inflate the lethality of the event by attributing to it the deaths of four police officers who committed suicide in the months after the riot — despite the absence of any proven connection. Also added to the tally are the deaths of three pro-Trump fanatics — two who expired in the excitement from cardiac episodes, one who appears to have a history of abusing drugs but who may also have been beaten and trampled — even though they are better understood as perpetrators, not victims.
Most scurrilously, Democrats claimed that rioters killed officer Brian Sicknick by bashing him in the head with a fire extinguisher, a claim they repeated in an impeachment-trial brief weeks after it was known that Sicknick, whose remains showed no evidence of blunt-force trauma, had died from two strokes suffered many hours after the riot — he returned to his office after the riot and complained (as did many other police) that he’d been pepper-sprayed but told his brother that he was otherwise fine. Democrats have never explained why they continued to peddle the false story about the circumstances of Sicknick’s death (which they seared into the nation’s consciousness by having the officer’s remains honored in a solemn Capitol rite — see, e.g., NPR: “Brian Sicknick, Capitol Officer Slain by Mob, Lies in Honor in Rotunda”). But not only has the Justice Department charged none of its 725 January 6 defendants with slaying Sicknick; the complaint filed against two men allegedly complicit in assaulting Sicknick with pepper spray does not even mention that Sicknick died.
This is not to minimize the gravity of January 6. That should be clear by our reference to the Capitol riot. How ironic to have to make this point given the umbrage that Democrats take when their own riots are described as riots rather than “mostly peaceful protests.” The point here is to place January 6 in its proper context, to combat its distortion into either an insurrection or, as Trump acolytes would have it, a display of patriotism, of the real America’s lashing out against Washington’s progressive consensus — unless, of course, it was an inside job.
January 6 was an unpatriotic infamy in two acts. The first involved political and legal subversion, the second forcible subversion. The two are factually intertwined: The latter doesn’t happen without the former. But the insurmountable problem for Democrats and others whose understandable loathing of Donald Trump has shorted out their analytical facility is that Trump, the driving force of Act I, is not criminally responsible for the violence of Act II.
The oddity here is that Trump’s best defense is that his actions were “merely” impeachable, not actionably seditious.
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And they surely were impeachable — and would have had a better chance of being accountable as such, by a more broadly bipartisan House impeachment article and a conviction at the Senate trial, if Democrats had not incompetently undermined the impeachment in their zeal to brand the riot as a white-supremacist “insurrection” that Trump “incited.”
In the weeks following the election, the then-president conducted a relentless campaign of deceit (which appears to have morphed into self-delusion along the way), hoping to maintain power. To be sure, it would be perilous were such a thing to be done by any president, given the immense power of the office. Still, this president’s campaign never had a prayer.
Trump’s gambit faced overwhelming bipartisan congressional opposition (outside a core of opportunistic loyalists who may hope to benefit politically from his ardent supporters). The armed forces would not have supported him in a million years. For all his bravado, he lacked the nerve to attempt a real coup — the kind that requires political and military allegiance. Instead, as was his wont, he laid waste to the political norms by which, for the good of the country, the clearly defeated candidate concedes to the victor and helps transition the government to a new administration.
For the most part, Trump’s charade was limited to lawsuits that were largely frivolous. That is, they were top-lined by allegations of massive fraud, from which his legal team retreated whenever invited by judges to prove them; beyond that, the legal claims mainly involved arguable election-law irregularities that even if provable (and most weren’t) would not have been sufficient to reverse the election result in contested states. Does this mean the election was free of fraud concerns? No election ever is. What was alarming about the 2020 election, though, were the Covid-driven voting procedures that were legal but imprudent. That may be a reason to amend or clarify the law before the next election; it is not a basis to overturn the election that the dubious but lawful procedures controlled.
Beyond futile litigation, Trump’s “stop the steal” theater involved putting pressure on Republican officials — elected and bureaucratic, federal and state — to run roughshod over their legal and constitutional duties. In the contested states, the Trump team tried to persuade legislators and Trump-dominated GOP organizations to delegitimize and undo the popular vote. This included having these collaborators purport to appoint alternative slates of Trump electors, a laughable ploy that had no legal effect — these ersatz slates having been neither elected nor certified under controlling state law. The point of this escapade was to pretend that these states won by Biden had designated competing Biden and Trump electoral slates; therefore at the January 6 joint session of Congress, the thinking went, Trump loyalists would have grounds to object to the counting of electoral votes from these states. It was a daft scheme, which had no more chance of succeeding than the Democrats’ similarly inane objections to state electoral slates pledged to Presidents George W. Bush and Trump after their election victories.
The former president tried to co-opt the Justice Department into his plot, but he backed down fecklessly when the adults at DOJ challenged him. He tried to coerce, for example, state election officials in Georgia to flip votes based on unsubstantiated fraud claims, and state lawmakers in Michigan to throw the election to the Republican-controlled legislature. He was firmly rebuffed at every turn. By Republicans.
The big legal theory, if you want to call it that, involved empowering Vice President Mike Pence to reject state-certified electoral votes. That is the constitutional significance of January 6: the convening of the joint session, at which the vice president’s role (and, for that matter, Congress’s) is strictly ministerial. The heretofore unknown theory that the vice presidency — which John Nance Garner, one of FDR’s veeps, famously described as “not worth a bucket of warm piss” — is actually the repository of unilateral control over the most powerful office in the world is so cockamamie that no one involved in it will stand behind it now. In the post-riot memory, the notion is said to have been merely a topic for discussion, not . . . you know . . . action. Pence is rightly commended for dismissing it out of hand, but he dismissed it out of hand because it was unserious. Even if he had been crazy enough to sign on, there were not nearly enough lawmakers willing to go along for the ride.
Though the exercise was farcical, it is credibly undeniable that Trump violated his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He tried to undermine state sovereignty over presidential elections, claiming that the federal government had the power to countermand state certification of state results. He tried to browbeat Congress and the vice president to violate their duty to acknowledge the state-certified results. He tried to delegitimize Biden’s presidency (and no, the fact that Democrats did this to Bush and to Trump is not a defense — not to people who presume to call themselves constitutional conservatives). He undermined national security and stability by impeding the transition to Biden’s administration rather than assisting it. This would have been impeachable conduct even if the riot hadn’t happened.
Nevertheless, to say Trump’s condemnable behavior triggered the riot is not the same as saying Trump intended or incited a riot. What the former president wanted was reprehensible, but it was a different kind of reprehensible from the species portrayed by Democrats.
Yes, Trump vigorously encouraged a rambunctious crowd of tens of thousands to descend on Washington on January 6, and he misled them with a big lie about election fraud. Indeed, it is just staggering to compare Team Trump’s (a) public rhetoric about a stolen election and (b) quiet admissions in court that fraud could not be proved. But Trump was not purposely promoting violence, even if he recklessly disregarded the distinct possibility of violence. Rather, Trump was trying to stoke political pressure on Pence and congressional Republicans in order to coerce them into flouting their constitutional duties.
That is saliently different from inciting violence. Trump is impeachably responsible for the riot because his performance leading up to it was a betrayal of his public trust. He is morally responsible for the riot because he created the conditions without which it would not have happened. But he is not legally responsible for it — in the sense that Democrats and other critics invoke when they call for his criminal prosecution — because there is a dearth of evidence that he intended violence, much less called for it.
However grudgingly he may have done it, Trump explicitly called for peaceful protest. He may not have been upset when the riot broke out; in fact, there’s reason to believe he was gratified by it, and that this is why it was so difficult to get him to ask his supporters to stand down. But legally speaking (and with all due respect to Laurence Tribe), that is very different from seditious conspiracy, proof of which requires — beyond a reasonable doubt — a preexisting agreement to levy war against the United States or attack our government by force. There is no evidence that Trump is guilty of that.
Moreover, with proof lacking that he conspired to inflict force against the Capitol, one can easily grasp why the Justice Department has not charged the former president with conspiracy to obstruct Congress — the charge brought against many of the most culpable January 6 defendants. Conspirators, as judges routinely instruct juries, tend not to reduce their criminal agreements to writing. The nature of the agreement is proven by the actions taken in furtherance of it. The actions by which the rioters obstructed Congress were violent. The actions by which Trump tried to obstruct Congress involved rhetorically ratcheting up political pressure. It’s a critical difference. Not all obstruction is illegal. Violent obstruction is always and obviously criminal. Rhetorical obstruction, in a free society with a First Amendment that safeguards even noxious political speech as long as it does not incite violence, is not criminal — even if it is disgraceful, dangerous, and if done by a high public official, impeachable.
In the event, the violence of the rioters actually undercut Trump’s tactics. Once Congress reconvened, with the country outraged by what it had seen, Trump’s supporters lost their nerve, offering only the most half-hearted objections, which were promptly swept aside.
That is the legacy of the Capitol riot. It will remain a dark episode in American history, but not anything remotely close to a potential extinction event for American democracy. Beyond that, it’s a political boon for Democrats. Not because they’ve convinced the country that there’s an ongoing rampage of white-supremacist domestic terrorism, but because Donald Trump retains a grip on a sizable, energetic plurality of Republicans. Though I have to think people will eventually come to their senses, this could be GOP suicide: Trump can’t conceivably win a national election, but it is not out of the realm of possibility that he could win the Republican nomination. I doubt it — I believe electability will be the most important attribute when it gets down to brass tacks — but I wouldn’t bet the ranch against it.
Donald Trump already gave Democrats full control of Congress for the start of Biden’s term (the Georgia special election, in which his “stolen election” canard cost Republicans two Senate seats, happened the day before the riot). A year later, Trump’s potential nomination is emerging as President Biden’s best chance, maybe his only chance, of being reelected.
