Trump’s Wasn’t the Only Dereliction on Display During the January 6 Hearings

W hen last we left the January 6 committee, I assessed that it had reached a point of diminishing returns. It was trying to prove a violent crime against Donald Trump, but it actually did more to establish his defense than inculpate him. In Thursday night’s spectacle, which was supposed to bring down the curtain on this made-for-TV drama but turns out just to have been the season finale — the show is now set to return in September — the committee was back to its more familiar pace: running in place.

That’s because it was back to proving the impeachment case against the former president. The night’s theme was “dereliction of duty.” That’s ironic, not because Trump wasn’t derelict — he most certainly was — but because Trump’s impeachable malfeasance was patent 18 months ago, and House Democrats were derelict in their duty to investigate it and then draft impeachment articles that clearly spelled out his high crimes and misdemeanors.

On Thursday, in prime time, the committee presented its “exposition” of this malfeasance as if it were shocking news. This made me think of a smart friend of mine, who used to note that some people act like they’ve just discovered America even though the first thing they saw when their boat hit the shore was the big “Welcome to America!” sign.

In attempting to demonstrate Trump’s dereliction, Thursday’s hearing homed in on how he went AWOL while the Capitol was beset by a violent mob of his supporters — a mob that he himself had just whipped into a frenzy with his fiery Ellipse speech. Led by vice chairwoman Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), the committee spent about 160 minutes illustrating the commander-in-chief’s 187 minutes of willful inaction, with questions steered by military vets Elaine Luria (D., Va.) and Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.) — many of them hanging curveballs that were slammed out of the park by another heroic combat veteran, former Marine officer Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national-security adviser who resigned in outrage after the riot.

The committee’s big ratings-grabbing premise for Thursday’s hearing was that it would show what Trump was doing during those 187 minutes. There were two problems with this.

First, virtually all of it was old news. For all the hoo-hah about “never before seen photos” of Trump standing around his office doing nothing, we already knew he’d been doing nothing while the riot raged. Here is what I wrote almost exactly 18 months ago, when the House Democrats, in their partisan opportunism, were so hell-bent on branding January 6 as “incitement to insurrection” — the better to abominate Trump voters and other Republicans — that they missed the slam-dunk impeachment case that was staring them right in the face:

In Trump’s case, the truly indefensible conduct was not the arguable incitement. It was his utter failure — his perverse refusal — to respond as president and commander in chief to a forcible attack on the seat of government. Trump publicly rebuked his own vice president for refusing to tamper with the states’ electoral votes, even as rioters were storming the Capitol. While [Vice President Mike] Pence, lawmakers, and security personnel were under siege, Trump was glued to the television — seemingly thrilled that his supporters were fighting for him, refusing to take phone calls, and turning a deaf ear to staff pleas that he deploy forces to quell the violence. He outrageously refused to tell his supporters to desist and evacuate. When he did finally speak, hours too late, he could not find it in himself to condemn the rioters and instead expressed “love” and empathy for their passion over the supposedly stolen election.

This was a shocking dereliction of duty. Although impeachment does not require a prosecutable crime, a military commander would be court-martialed for such abdication.

That column was called “The Impeachment Trump Deserved,” so as to highlight the incompetence of the impeachment that the House actually gave him. So you’ll have to excuse me if I chafe at being hectored about not giving Trump my undivided attention well over a year later, while Democrats in Congress and the White House drive the country into a ditch.

The second problem for the committee, the reason it is running in place, has to do with the concept of dereliction that it has latently exposed. Dereliction is defined as “the shameful failure to fulfill one’s obligations.” There is no point in hyping up a presentation of what the former president was doing during the riot — and there wouldn’t have been any point in doing so, even if the committee’s revelations were previously unknown — when the relevant issue has always been what he wasn’t doing, to wit, his job.

Yes, Trump’s active behavior was indecorous. Condemnable. But what if it had been less nefarious? Let’s put Trump aside because he is a flawed man. What if a president failed to act in response to a violent attack on the Capitol, and also failed to delegate powers to the vice president and others who were more willing or able to respond, because that president was plagued by a terrible family problem, or was just in over his head and froze in the moment of crisis?

Such a president would be just as derelict, and thus just as impeachable, as Trump was. Constitutionally speaking, there are some things only a president can do. Indeed, the committee’s understandable praise of Vice President Pence’s decisiveness in filling the void and getting the armed forces dispatched tiptoed quietly around the inconvenient fact that Pence had no legal authority to take such actions.

I’m not knocking Pence. Trump, particularly in his post-2020-election phase, was a shock to the system, and in America, we can thank God that able people willing to confront danger tend to step into the breach when we face a moment of truth. My point is that dereliction of duty is heinous, standing out even among impeachable offenses, because of the awesome, unparalleled national-security responsibilities that the president alone shoulders. Presidential dereliction is dereliction like no other.

So, to repeat my monthslong refrain, the January 6 committee, without admitting it, is doing the impeachment investigation that House Democrats failed to do when it mattered. The case the committee made Thursday night was available to be proved as an article of impeachment 18 months ago. Though we knew a lot even then, we didn’t need to know exactly what Trump was doing in order to condemn him for what he blatantly, unapologetically, and in gross violation of his oath of office failed to do.

The committee “uncovered” that case Thursday night. Welcome to America!