January 6 Was No Hoax

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, October 11, 2021

 

Was January 6 an insurrection or a hoax? The answer is obvious: Neither. But having set up this false choice, really a choice of two falsities, one long-esteemed conservative writer and editor would have us choose “hoax.” The narrative built around January 6 was yet another piece in the long, lying resistance to Donald Trump and, by extension, to the “deplorable” voters who put him in power. So argues Roger Kimball.

 

Strangely, by the end of his essay, one suspects that the author believed an armed insurrection might have been justified. He predicts that historians “may well count the 2016 presidential election as the last fair and open democratic election in U.S. history.” He asserts that “every honest person knows that the 2020 election was tainted.” And that it amounted to “the first oligarchic installation of a president.” Of the man in whose name the vandalism of that day was committed, Kimball says, “Trump’s critical flaw was a deficit in guile.”

 

It’s a perverse kind of compliment, given the circumstances and context. It reminds me of Don McLean’s singing prettily of Vincent van Gogh, “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” That line justifies a suicide. But at least McLean is right that van Gogh cared for beauty. The antonyms of guile are “honesty” and “candor.” To try to justify the events of January 6 with Trump’s deficit of guile is like playing a Stradivarius with a Kitchen Aid hand-mixer. It’s not just an ugly sound, but something like a deliberate provocation.

 

The ugly scenes on January 6 were caused, I’d counter, by Donald Trump’s lies. If one searches for the political motivation behind Ashli Babbitt’s death, it is not in the perfidy of intelligence agencies and James Comey, but in what Donald Trump said about the election and about our Constitution. He repeated these lies that very day to people who would go on to disrupt Congress’s certification of the election and vandalize the Capitol building.

 

Despite what Victor Davis Hanson (among others) has said, National Review’s editorial position was never that the January 6 riot was an “armed insurrection.” And numerous National Review contributors have consistently described the events of January 6 as a riot and a deep disgrace, not a coup. It was clear that very day that the rabble was unarmed. Officer Sicknick, for instance, was not killed by a MAGA lunatic who bashed him with a fire extinguisher; he died of natural causes.

 

Nearly everything Kimball says about the ongoing resistance to Trump is true. It was meretricious, hysterical, and dangerous. Even before Trump won the election, I predicted the unprecedented subterfuge that would probably be aimed at him if he won the presidency. We saw the deep state as it really is: an ongoing class warfare against the democratic peoples and their representatives whose disruptions provide accountability. No one has to coordinate 50 former intelligence agents to issue a statement denouncing the New York Post’s Hunter Biden scoop as probable Russian disinformation, justifying suppression of the story just days before the election. The deep-staters know how to do it.

 

Some of us have spent the better part of the past two decades or longer arguing that conservatives should be more open to a populist and working-class core of voters, the losers of globalization. We have been arguing for putting “the forgotten man” at the heart of conservatism’s concerns. We’ve argued for reexamining the effect of our trade relationships on the American people themselves. We denounced the democracy project in the Middle East and Afghanistan as a waste of blood and treasure. We argued for getting control of our immigration system, and for immigration limits and moratoriums in order to make America cohere again. It was thankless work. And if we had known it was all to set the stage for opportunists and recent converts to make their riches and fly their freak flags, perhaps we wouldn’t have done it.

 

And now it’s time to be very firm. These working-class causes deserve better than what Donald Trump gave them. They deserve better than to be swallowed up by theories about Hugo Chávez using voting machines to elect Joe Biden. They deserve better than to have their complaints about the self-serving American political class displaced by the election-audit theatrics in Maricopa County, Ariz., which ended up yielding more votes for Joe Biden anyway. They deserve better than Lin Wood’s drawing little “Q’s” in the air.

 

After the election, the Trump campaign produced no evidence of serious, election-altering fraud in any of the states it wished to dispute. Instead, it proffered ever more bizarre legal theories. And it culminated in the most plainly insane one, that Mike Pence had the unilateral right to reject the electoral votes from Georgia, Arizona, and several other states.

 

This theory was setting the Q-anon sites ablaze in the days leading up to January 6. I know because I started following that phenomenon and could see it leading to danger. As I wrote on the morning of January 6:

 

Right now, the Q conspiracists — including President Trump — are setting up Mike Pence to be the fall guy, the man who betrayed them, if Pence does his duty and acknowledges the certified result of America’s democratic elections. How cynical must the senators and congressmen supporting this farce be, to participate in this effort?

 

Why can’t these men content themselves with the awesome power and prestige of their offices? Or more directly: Why can’t they just do the job we have paid them to do?

 

Yet at the Stop the Steal rally on January 6, Donald Trump told the crowd, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. . . . All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

 

This is bunk. Anyone who believes that protecting the Constitution of the United States is one of the missions of conservatism knows this theory to be bunk and knows that lies about the Constitution from a sitting president can themselves be dangerous. I can’t think of anything more disrespectful of Donald Trump than to call this a lack of guile.

 

Even as the awful scenes of Capitol Hill police being overwhelmed were on television, Trump sent out a tweet attacking his vice president:

 

Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!

 

According to the timeline of events as we know them now, Trump sent out this tweet after Republican senator Tommy Tuberville had informed him that Mike Pence had been evacuated. This warning may not have explicitly included the security personnel’s assessment of the danger that necessitated Pence’s evacuation, so Trump’s lawyers have claimed that the president didn’t know Pence was in harm’s way. If you believe that, maybe you can believe that Hugo Chávez runs elections in America.

 

We can all throw Trump the biggest pity party in history about the subterfuge he faced within the executive branch. He didn’t have the guts to clean house and make the government employees do their jobs. In other words, he didn’t do the job he was elected to do. For a president to take control of the executive branch, he must hire people he can trust to run one of the largest organizations on earth. Trump couldn’t or wouldn’t. Every account of the Trump White House’s operation tells us that Trump trusted and respected no one who didn’t have the last name Trump or Kushner. What his actions leading up to January 6 show us is that he didn’t respect his followers, either.

 

It’s true that the riot on January 6 was not a coup. It was not like the Civil War or Pearl Harbor or any other milestone from an overheated historical analogy. And I don’t want applause from people who think that it was. The Trumpers at the Capitol couldn’t have held on to a public library or a Chick-fil-A if they had tried. And mostly the charges that are being filed are exactly the kinds of charges leveled at other rioters (unless they are BLM/Antifa, who largely get a pass from our DOJ): charges of vandalism and trespassing.

 

But it was no hoax. This was a real disgrace, it led to real death — that of an unarmed Trump supporter. And it was caused by Donald Trump’s dishonesty. He abused the trust of his devoutest supporters. He assembled them to “stop the steal” of an election that he must know he lost, that he must’ve known he was liable to lose as he was running in it. He endangered his vice president, other members of Congress, and his supporters to protect his vanity.