Dishonor: Trump and The Republican Party

Perhaps its because of my Catholic upbrining and the sense of right and wrong and the need for honor drilled into me by the nuns or perhaps it was my parents strong sense of right and wrong - especially my often tough and demanding father who was the product of an orphanage (founded by Alexander Hamilton's widow) that stressed personal responsibility and honorable behavior - that are part of the reason I could never be a Republican nowadays.  The Party leadership and the vast majority of the Party's members have jettisoned honor, the truth, and even basic morality in a quest to cling to power at any cost and in servile self-prostitution to Donald Trump, an individual who is the poster boy of amorality.  They have also thrown away any connection to objective reality.  During the House Committee on January 6th hearing on Thursday night one of the rioters made a remark that "after all Donald Trump has done for us" he felt compelled to join the sacking of the Capitol. I was struck by the comment since, if one looks at the Trump presidency, NOTHING was really done for average Americans.  A huge give away of wealth was given to the wealthy through tax cuts, the federal deficit exploded, several hundred thousand Americans needlessly died because of the mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and America's standing in the world was frayed and battered. The only thing individuals like this rioter actually received was pandering to their hatreds and bigotry, a mainstreaming of white supremacy and three religious zealots on the U.S. Supreme Court.  All honor has been abandoned with few exceptions, one being Liz Cheney who was remarkable on her delivery of the facts indicting Donald Trump for his seditious activities.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at Thursday night and Cheney.  Here are excepts:

There were many memorable lines, and even a few revelations, in the long-awaited House select committee prime-time hearing on the harrowing events of January 6, 2021. Viewers on Thursday night learned that Donald Trump’s own Attorney General, Bill Barr, had dismissed his “rigged election” claims as “bullshit.” They learned that Trump’s own daughter Ivanka agreed with Barr. And they learned that Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had been informed of the complete and utter emptiness of Trump’s false election claims by one of Trump’s own campaign lawyers. “There’s no there there?” Meadows asked the lawyer.

But the most unforgettable words were those of Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who, in defiance of her party, is helping to lead the investigation by the House panel. Speaking directly to her fellow-Republicans in Congress, the vast majority of whom have continued to support and promote Trump even after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and sent them fleeing for their lives, she concluded her presentation with a warning: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

In the course of a searing forty minutes, Cheney was given the starring role in laying out the select committee’s case against Trump. She marshalled the evidence—much of it new, much of it devastating—to show how the former President knew that his claims about the election were a lie but used them to inflame his followers and summon them to the Capitol anyway. She nailed it.

At the end of her presentation, Cheney showed what might have been the night’s most revealing witness statement—a short clip of Jared Kushner. In it, Kushner was asked about the repeated threats to resign made by Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and his staff, as they sought to stop Trump from unconstitutionally seeking to overturn the election. Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who served as one of the former President’s close advisers throughout his four disruptive years in the White House, said that he did not take Cipollone’s threats to resign seriously. He thought that Cipollone was just “whining.”

It was a brutal moment. Kushner did not believe Trump’s false claims about the election. But he, like so many others surrounding Trump, like so many of Cheney’s Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, who knew full well that everything Trump said about the election was a lie, chose to wash his hands of the matter. Instead of trying to stop the President, he and Ivanka purchased a 32.2-million-dollar lot on an exclusive private island near Miami, in December, 2020, and he started writing his memoir. Whining, indeed.

The hearing began and ended, as it should have, with Trump himself. “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said, consciously echoing an interview that she gave to Fox News on the afternoon of January 6th, while she and her colleagues were still in hiding from the pro-Trump mob. It said everything about where American politics are today that on Thursday night, a year and a half after the events in question, Fox News did not dare to broadcast Liz Cheney’s remarks—or to air the full hearing live, as the other networks did.

There is a moment, often replayed in the various January 6th retrospectives, that always hits me like a gut punch. It is the frantic call over a police radio at around 2:30 P.M. on January 6th. “We lost the line! We’ve lost the line,” an officer screams. It was the moment when the Capitol was overrun, ransacked, and occupied by a hostile force for the first time since the War of 1812. I wanted to cry listening to it again on Thursday night.

The January 6th committee hearings will continue throughout June and have been a year and a half in the making. . . . Cheney declared it a “sophisticated seven-part plan,” and future hearings will dive deeper into its components: Trump’s spreading of election misinformation; his plot to fire the acting Attorney General in order to get the Justice Department to further his false claims; his pressure on Vice-President Mike Pence to block the counting of the electoral votes; his pressure on Republican-led state legislatures to switch their electoral votes and scheme to send fake electoral certificates to Congress; his summoning of the mob to the Capitol on January 6th; and his refusal to do anything to stop them once they were there, rampaging.

Thursday’s hearing suggested that there is still much to be learned from the investigation, as the evening offered only a glimpse of what the testimony has uncovered. . . . .Another came when she noted that multiple Republican members of Congress who had participated in Trump’s plotting had unsuccessfully sought Presidential pardons for their roles.

After less than two hours, it was clear that much of the most damaging information from the committee’s probe will come from Trump’s aides, advisers, and even family members.

Before the hearings began, committee members had promised stunning revelations. . . . Already it is clear that the information gathered by this remarkable investigation will keep historians busy for years, sifting through the wreckage of an American political system battered by the former President’s unprecedented and unpresidential actions. But, unfortunately, the true scandal of January 6th had always been apparent, long before the House select committee made it clear once again on Thursday night: the mob never would have been there had Donald Trump not lied about the election he lost.