President Donald Trump supporters who have been watching the hearings from the U.S. congressional Jan. 6 panel may be feeling some mental conflict if their beliefs don’t align with the evidence. Or they may choose to ignore the evidence and take it on faith that “alternate facts” are a thing.
It’s understandable that people would believe a lie if they trusted the source. The evidence coming from these hearings shows that their trust was misplaced. Trump lost the 2020 election and it was not because the election was “rigged.”
Attorney General Bill Barr told him the Big Lie was BS. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and even Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, also knew that.
Trump wasn’t about to agree to a peaceful transfer of power. He indicated this even before the election. After the election, he tried to challenge the results in court – just as Al Gore did when he lost the 2000 election. But Trump didn’t have a case and unlike Gore didn’t let it end there. He lied to his base and the American public, spreading false and fraudulent information as he continued to claim the 2020 election was stolen from him. He raised $250 million that he said would go to an official election defense fund – but that’s not where it went.
He planned to replace Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, calling him nearly every day so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims. He pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
Then we get to Jan. 6, 2021. U.S. Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards was knocked unconscious by protesters breaking through a barrier. She compared the scene to a war zone. At the hearings on Jan. 9, she testified: “There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding, they were throwing up ... I saw friends with blood all over their faces, I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage, it was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw.”
DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone testified he was “electrocuted again and again and again with a taser.”
“It’s an important part of the record for this committee’s investigation and for the country’s understanding of how I was assaulted and nearly killed as the mob attacked the Capitol that day,” he said. “I said as loud as I could manage ‘I’ve got kids.’ Thankfully some in the crowd stepped in and assisted me." He was later diagnosed with a concussion, a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
There were mixed messages from the president during the riot and the rally the preceded it. It may be argued that he didn’t intend this to happen, but no one should believe the riot was a peaceful demonstration or that the events that led up to it, including attempts to present false “alternate electors” for Trump, was part of a “legitimate political discourse,” as the Republican Party officially declared on Feb. 4.
What we’re hearing now is not fake news; it’s the historic record. It is important now and for the future.
