Gone Too Far

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

 

As cable television broadcast the scenes of Trump supporters breaking past police lines and even smashing their way into the Capitol on January 6, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., texted Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff: “He’s got to condemn this sh** ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”

 

A little later, Don Jr. texted again: “We need an Oval office address. He [then-president Trump] has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

 

It’s that last statement that reveals the whole truth of January 6 for Trump’s supporters. Donald Trump’s claims of massive election fraud (only in the states he lost, btw) were treated by people around him as a kind of naughty habit that had to be tolerated or indulged. When the people who treated these claims very seriously started acting like they were true — when they tried to “Stop the Steal” by interrupting the ceremony in which Congress certifies the results of the presidential election — then it had “gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

 

For those few hours, several people in the conservative media world who had influence with the president tried to intervene on behalf of reality. “Please, get him on TV — [the Capitol riot is] destroying everything you accomplished,” Brian Kilmeade texted Meadows.

 

Also Laura Ingraham: “The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

 

“Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?” pleaded Sean Hannity.

 

Just as Tucker Carlson had once traveled to Mar-a-Lago to ask the president to take the Covid-19 pandemic more seriously, these Fox hosts were intervening with a man who they knew took television seriously, more seriously than his constitutional duties.

 

Hearing the texts read aloud at this late date in the year does provide a sense of clarity. Many of Trump’s lies before this seemed to have little cost at all. Many of them had been brazened out until they produced a kind of success. The lies that Trump told that day to that crowd had produced this specific, televised disaster. Unfortunately, it was a predicted disaster. But almost everyone knew it was wrong while it was happening. It took effort to forget.

 

In the months after January 6, the politically correct move for Trump’s cable-news apologists has been to ignore the fact that the people who set about “investigating” the supposed vote fraud have turned up nothing of consequence or merit. Or, it has been to focus obsessively on the potential involvement of the FBI or other intel agencies in the riots, to speculate about who may have been planted as agent provocateurs in the crowd. This is worth inquiring about, especially after the FBI’s cack-handed work trying to instigate a kidnapping plot against Governor Whitmer went south.

 

But the riot at the Capitol happened because President Donald Trump simply lied, and lied, and lied. On that very day he lied about what the vice president’s powers were. “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,” he told the crowd.

 

Presidents have a duty to protect the Constitution; on that day Trump was subverting it. Even as the ugly scenes were unfolding, Trump seemed to be instigating the crowd even further, as if he were trying to put more coercive pressure on his own vice president. He tweeted:

 

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!

 

There is a kind of partisan kick-reflex that is surely active in many people reading this. The reflex kicks: The Left is at war with the Right. It kicks again: Stop punching to your right. It kicks again: Stop trying to police the Right and stop trying to make it respectable to the Left.

 

But it’s not them I care about. It’s simply the truth. Treating Trump like a baby whose feelings had to be coddled at the end resulted in Ashli Babbitt’s getting shot as she tried to break into Congress against a lawful order to desist. He could no more Stop the Steal than make Mexico pay for the wall. But, pay for his actions? Some people did.