Desperate to avert a midterm disaster, Democrats have decided to play their Trump card. It won’t work.
Desperate to avert a midterm disaster, Democrats have decided to play their Trump card. It won’t work.
T he New York Times could not have been more unseemly in its table-setting piece about the January 6 committee’s extravaganza scheduled to begin tonight: The Gray Lady has her pom-poms out because the Democrat-dominated panel is producing a prime-time television special that will masquerade as a bipartisan congressional hearing.
The hearings could better be understood as a 90-minute political ad, slickly produced by a former top ABC executive. Their objective is unabashedly partisan: Break the spell of soaring prices and woke-progressive failure that has Democrats careening into a midterm rout that would cost them control of Congress by refocusing voters on Donald Trump and the Capitol riot.
Good luck with that. Trump derangement still seizes the media–Democrat complex and some Republican pockets, but the vast majority of Americans have moved on from Trump and the events of January 6. That includes Republicans who approved of much of what Trump did — those many of us who appreciate that the Trump administration was far better for the country than the train wreck that is the Biden administration, but who have no use for Trump the man and no interest in a reprise of Trump the president.
No one approves of rioting — not the five-hour riot by Trump fanatics at the seat of our government, but also not the months of lethal rioting, looting, and arson perpetrated by the radical Left after George Floyd’s death in police custody. The problem for Biden and the Democrats is that no one is fooled by their claptrap about how the Insurrection™ was different because it was an attack on democracy itself. Not when they are no longer content just to avert their eyes from the jack-booted neo-Marxists on their own side, but now go the extra mile to coddle violent radical lawyers who firebomb police cars.
Down here on Earth, where all political violence is to be condemned regardless of what “ism” ignites it, we’re not very interested in further hysteria about the Capitol riot. Not from people who go out of their way not to notice that our streets have been torched. Not when our cities are engulfed by crime because those people won’t enforce the laws against anyone other than Trump and his myrmidons.
I really have no time for lectures about how Trump poses an unprecedented threat to American democracy. That wasn’t Trump plotting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh yesterday. Trump is out of office. He has no ability to influence events. Populist Republican opportunists? Sure, he can influence them, because they’re hoping to inherit — or at least to not be eaten by — his supporters. But he can’t influence events: not inflation, gas prices, food prices, interest rates, Putin, Xi, crime, gun laws, deficits, Ukraine, the Taliban, the Iran deal 2.0, Covid variants, Monkeypox — none of it.
Nor are Americans even panting in anticipation of what Trump might say about events. Trump would be irrelevant if it weren’t for the people helping Democrats in their desperation to keep him relevant.
Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign was shameful, but it was also utterly incompetent. I covered it here closely, day after day, for two months. The reason the media have so confidently, bracingly reported that the president of the United States was peddling lies is that his own attorney general said so publicly. The lack of substance to his claims of election fraud was manifest because, as I repeatedly pointed out, every time a court gave his lawyers the chance to prove those claims, they folded like a cheap suitcase. It was a con job: Trump & Co. knew they couldn’t prove in court what they were saying on television.
In the abstract, the specter of a president’s using the awesome powers of his office to remain in power despite losing an election is horrifying. But the reality is that Trump’s bumbling effort to do so was a clown show. It had no chance of success.
The January 6 committee apparently intends to do a big song-and-dance about Trump’s attempt to use the Justice Department to coerce state officials, such as those who ran Georgia’s GOP-controlled government, into reversing Biden’s victory in their popular elections. But even the committee’s portrayal of it as an attempt is extravagant. It never had a prayer of working. After Attorney General Barr, just before leaving his post, made the obvious explicit by declaring the lack of material election fraud, his successors in DOJ leadership told Trump to pound sand. And Trump fecklessly retreated.
Moreover, as DOJ’s leaders well knew, had they idiotically done anything other than tell the president to take a hike, state Republicans would still have rebuffed his efforts. Put aside that Democrats, whether in Washington or in the states, were not going to roll over and let Trump steal the election. No Republican-controlled legislature would have dared do it, either.
There is also a reason the January 6 committee will be training its sights on faux electors — those goofy cabals of Trump supporters that the former president and his minions gulled into pretending that they were slates empowered to cast their states’ electoral votes for him. It’s got to be faux electors because there weren’t any real electors. No one outside of Trump’s inner circle of “Green Bay sweep” delusionists paid any attention to this stunt. None of these slates was certified by its state. There was no chance Congress was ever going to recognize one, because federal law forbade it. You’d find more convincing “electors” at a politics nerd’s Halloween party.
Even the congressional Republicans who shamefully supported the initiative to delay the counting of certain states’ electoral votes on January 6 were unserious. To their discredit, several Republican senators, applauded by scores of Trump allies in the House, proposed a delay so the states could “audit” their election results. In their lawyerly press release, these senators were careful not to claim that there was actual evidence of material fraud, saying only that some voters were concerned that “the election was rigged” — which was natural, given that the president had just spent nearly two months telling them it was rigged. So the audit proposal was a cynical exercise: These Republicans knew it was inconceivable that their gambit would be taken seriously. They knew they weren’t close to having the votes. They were putting on a show for Trump supporters, and when the riot shockingly broke out, the show was shut down quicker than a Broadway bomb.
While it surely testified to Trump’s unfitness for office, “stop the steal” was not a coup; it was a futile tantrum. Yes, it was atrocious that many police were injured and the Capitol was temporarily shut down. The deaths of four of the fanatics Trump misled were tragic. But there was no chance Biden’s victory would not be acknowledged by Congress. If the military had intervened, it would have been to put down the riot — something that proved unnecessary since the law-enforcement authorities had substantially quelled the uprising by the time some National Guard forces finally arrived on the scene in the early evening. At no time did the commander-in-chief dare ask “his generals” to aid in his inane, inchoate plan; he knew that they’d have scorned him, and that a bipartisan congressional consensus, supported by Vice President Pence, would have expeditiously impeached and removed him.
That didn’t happen because there was no existential threat to our democracy. The riot, if we were to dignify it as a strategy rather than a petulant outburst, was ineffectual. It probably wouldn’t have happened, and would certainly have been rapidly contained, if the security forces had been adequate and competent. As it was, Congress was able to reconvene in the Capitol that very night and make Biden’s victory official. Democrats then went home for a week, rather than attending immediately to Trump’s impeachment, because everyone knew the Constitution had flexed its muscles and the republic was safe.
Today, Trump’s avid followers are crowing because his successor’s approval ratings have sunk slightly below Trump’s at a comparable time in their terms, 42.4 to 40.7 percent. They conveniently overlook, however, that when he left office, Trump’s approval stood at a miserable 34 percent. That is why the vengeance campaign he is contemplating for 2024 is the Democrats’ best chance of retaining the White House, and why they and their media allies are highlighting the Capitol riot, Trump’s indelible disgrace.
Most of the country, though, will flip over to Seinfeld reruns or watch a ballgame. They’ve already made up their minds about January 6 and Donald Trump. The Democrats’ problem isn’t the voters’ apathy, it is their own woke progressivism. It is that, in those few forays out of his basement, campaign-trail Joe Biden posed as a nineties-style moderate Democrat who would face down his party’s radicals, but President Biden’s administration does the radicals’ bidding. Prime-time melodrama can’t fix that.