No serious person can dispute that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol happened because of Donald Trump. Without weeks of false claims that the election was stolen (built on months of false claims that it would be) and without his advocacy and encouragement to show up in Washington on that day, there’s no mob and there’s no riot. He poured the gasoline and started throwing flares around; afterward he blamed the wind for where the flares landed.
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The highest price the former president paid for this role was losing access to Facebook and Twitter. To Trump, these were not small costs, as his recent machinations have made clear. But beyond that? He was impeached — and then acquitted by his allies in the Senate. He's unchastened, continuing to repeat ever more complicated and eternally incorrect claims about fraud. His party stands with him. Most Republicans believe that he was the election's true winner, which he wasn't. He has maintained a lead in 2024 presidential primary polling since the moment he left office. Republican officials have actively punished those who voted to impeach him or who criticized his role in the day.
From the outset, Trump was uncontained by the barriers America had built to limit presidential power. Someone with no loyalty to or even familiarity with accepted norms would not be bound by them. A candidate who had never been humbled by electoral loss wouldn’t know how to accept one. Impeaching a guy who didn’t care about being impeached was the functional equivalent of a news release. So he walked away from Jan. 6 a bit quieter but otherwise unchanged. In fact, earlier this year, he boasted that after being impeached twice, “I became worse.”
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A lot of people have been held accountable for the post-election period. Hundreds of those who were convinced by Trump that the election was stolen and who then participated in the riot have been arrested. More than 60 have been charged with the more serious offense of assaulting law enforcement officers. In the court hearings that are a now-daily occurrence or in interviews with the FBI, they often express contrition and embarrassment. They understand, at least emotionally, the consequences of their actions.
John Eastman, a lawyer who wrote a pair of memos outlining how Vice President Mike Pence could simply sidestep the cast electoral votes from the 2020 election, appears to be similarly chastened. Facing possible professional censure, Eastman spoke to the National Review in an attempt to disown those documents. His argument is weak, centered on the claim that he never actually endorsed the have-Pence-undo-it tactic — something he could have rejected publicly as Trump was touting his advice as a possible solution to his electoral-loss woes. He stood alongside Trump’s attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani at Trump’s rally on Jan. 6 as the president continued to volubly claim that Pence could do the thing Eastman said he could do. But now he says that would be “crazy.”
Giuliani was at the center of Trump's election-fraud nonsense and has been disbarred in New York and D.C. Eastman appears to want to avoid a similar fate. There is an accountability process in place.
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One of the reasons that House Democrats established a committee to look at what happened on Jan. 6 was to create a way in which those who contributed to the day's events might endure the accountability of having their roles exposed. (Eastman's tenuous position is a function of similar exposure; his memos were first reported in the book “Peril,” from The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.) The committee has sought testimony and information from a number of people who were involved in rallies and protests scheduled for the day as well as Trump allies who were reported to have spoken to the president about them. That includes former adviser Stephen K. Bannon who seemed to foreshadow the day's chaos in his podcast on Jan. 5.
On Thursday, the House voted to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress after he failed to present testimony before the committee. The vote fell largely along party lines, but there was an unexpected Republican who joined the majority, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.). She explained her vote in favor of censure in institutional terms.
“I’m going to fight for subpoena powers no matter who’s in power,” she told Politico’s Nicholas Wu, “because we’ve got to have the opportunity and the ability to investigate.”
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Put another way, Congress needs to have a process for accountability that cannot be sidestepped. Bannon now faces potential criminal charges.
Trump’s career has largely been one in which he avoids accountability. He ran a privately held company for decades: no boss, no board, no shareholders. As president, he stepped into a system where the constraints were largely bureaucratic and the reprimands verbal. Where Trump has often been held accountable over his adult life is in court, where he and the Trump Organization were generally able to solve problems with settlements. Again a private citizen, he’s again subject to similar situations.
Neither he nor his party are interested in any effort to hold him accountable for Jan. 6, though. The attitude of the GOP establishment was distilled neatly by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in an appearance on “The View” this week.
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“I said at the time January 6th was wrong. I called it an assault on law and order and an assault on our democratic processes. So, full stop: It was wrong. Law enforcement will determine what happened there, and those who violated the law ought to be punished,” she said.
Notice the boundary here: those who violated the law. What we know of Trump's role was legal; ergo, he's excluded from the group to be punished.
“I study countries that do this. I didn't think it would happen in my own country,” Rice continued. But: “when they filed back into the Capitol after it was secured and they certified that election, I had new faith in our institutions and the people who were protecting them. So we came through that as a country that ultimately upheld the law.”
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We “came through that.” It is over. The event was isolated and the criminals will be held accountable and that's that.
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Then the pivot to the party: “It’s time to move on in a lot of ways,” she said. “I’m one who believes that the American people are now concerned about their what we call kitchen table issues. The price of gasoline. Inflation. What’s happening to kids in school.”
It’s just so well-honed. It’s how Trump’s been treated by the party from the outset: Sure, he said something rude about John McCain, but that’s over, and we need to focus on the voters. Particularly voters in Virginia’s upcoming gubernatorial race where the issue of schools seems to be potent.
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If the Republican presidential nomination were contested tomorrow, Trump would win. If the general election were held on Sunday, he might well win that, too. Voters can make the decisions they want to make, of course, but that Trump’s party has never seriously challenged him for his role in Jan. 6 allows Republican voters to continue to view it as a nonissue — to increasingly view it that way.
The reason Rice was staggered by Jan. 6 is because a country where things like that day happen is not a country where democracy is healthy. The way a democracy maintains its health is not by ignoring it when its leaders foment days like Jan. 6.