A conspiracy-minded individual might wonder if the history-bending US supreme court decision on abortion last Friday was timed to knock Thursday’s mind-blowing January 6th committee hearings off the front pages. Nonsense, you say? Isn’t that precisely the problem with a deliberately politicised court and an amoral right-wing steeped in hypocrisy and internal contradictions yet convinced it is the voice of God? Everything is imaginable, everything is possible when extremists capture a mainstream party’s agenda.
In a 24-hour span last week, Americans experienced the whiplash of Donald Trump being lionised by veteran Republican Senator Lindsey Graham for stacking three conservative judges on the court expressly to strip a constitutional right from women, while just yards away parades of Trump’s own Republican political appointees were providing detailed accounts of his efforts to tear up the same constitution and steal the presidency.
In a functioning democracy, Thursday’s live testimony by former Georgia electoral worker Shaye Moss and her grandmother Ruby Freeman, describing their monstrous defamation by the president, would have instantly united a nation in a reset of its democratic values and public morality.
The president of the United States baselessly accused an ordinary woman and her grandmother of industrial scale electoral fraud, deliberately putting them in the crosshairs of a homicidal mob convinced — by him — that the election had been stolen from him. Freeman had to abandon her home for two months after thugs broke in to effect a “citizen’s arrest” and the FBI warned that her life was in danger. Her granddaughter quietly told the hearings that the constant threats, harassment and vile racism have turned her into a fearful recluse who has gained 27kg.
Equally staggering in its own way was the procession of former top Trump Republican appointees detailing how a losing president had tried to pull off a coup using the tactics of a crazed old ruler of a banana republic — and how he had come within a whisker of succeeding.
First he claimed widespread fraud by count officials, then tried to bully the Department of Justice to switch the electoral college vote to one that favoured him, then provoked the insurrection whereby organised thugs roamed the Capitol seeking to hang vice-president Mike Pence. All this was laid out in authoritative evidence, by Trump loyalists in many cases.
A couple of elements made many witnesses particularly compelling. These were the Trump loyalists still in his administration in the period leading up to January 6th but who finally put up a stout resistance to actions they deemed profoundly undemocratic, immoral and illegal. In doing so they drew the wrath of the mob upon themselves and their families. Rusty Bowers, Arizona House speaker and ardent Trump supporter, testified about a gunman who threatened Bowers’s neighbour. He spoke about people on pick-ups outside the family home with videos blaring that Bowers was a paedophile, a pervert and a corrupt politician while his daughter lay terminally ill inside.
They were unlikely heroes — as was Pence on the day — and much was made of their courage as saviours of American democracy. Yet Bowers has said he would vote for Trump again. If that sounds frankly deranged to anyone even lightly acquainted with basic morality and democratic principles, it serves to crystallise the American divide.
This is the time to remember all the quiet patriots who found the strength to resist or resign at the height of Trump’s carnage, the veteran public servants appalled by an administration that continually subverted the public interest to the criminal, power-crazed whims of a man who mistook himself for Putin, foreseeing where it would lead.
Consider the brave ones who stepped up to tell the truth at the two impeachment hearings — the first about extorting a Ukrainian president already at war with the Russian war criminal, the second about inciting the murderous riots in the Capitol — and remember that Lindsey Graham and his ilk voted to acquit on both.
Imagine the bravery of those dissenters in the face of president Trump’s sustained, public punching-down at perceived enemies, suggesting that “traitors” and “spies” deserved to have their lives and families destroyed.
Will the Department of Justice prosecute Trump for the alleged crimes compellingly outlined in the hearings? Reasons against: the department could appear to be a political tool and a precedent possibly created whereby every administration promptly prepares charges against its predecessor. Reasons for: What if he is not prosecuted? Where stands American democracy and its revered constitution?
Donald Trump will not simply go away.
This is what makes the supreme court timing so remarkable. What happens if the Trump so shockingly described in these hearings is indulged by the Christian right all the way through the 2024 elections and back into the presidency? What happens when every state is infiltrated with corrupt election officials who go where the money is — the ones who listen to the next Trump lookalike who says, “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican/AN Other congressmen”. How much extremist minority rule can a country take before it breaks? What price is too much?
Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the January 6th committee, made public a letter sent to his home threatening to kill him, his wife and his five-month-old infant. “There’s violence in the future, I’m going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”