The House Jan. 6 committee, which reconvenes on Thursday for its ninth and likely final hearing, has been assiduous in its research, artful in its cinematography and almost wholly ineffective in shifting views about the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021 by a pro-Trump crowd.
A Monmouth University poll taken this summer during the committee’s hiatus found public opinion largely unchanged — even calcified, to use a word that has lately come into vogue among American political scientists. The 65 percent of Americans who in late June remembered Jan. 6 as a “riot” had become 64 percent a month later when the summer hearings ended. Twenty-nine percent thought Joe Biden had been fraudulently elected before, and 29 percent did after.
It is easy to see why minds have been so hard to change. Why would Democrats budge? There is incontrovertible evidence of Donald Trump’s misbehavior after Election Day 2020, and the committee members — wholly Democrat except for two Republicans hostile to Mr. Trump — are patiently laying it out.
On the other hand, the committee members are pursuing their case in a grandiose and ideological manner, tarring Mr. Trump’s voting base as a bunch of authoritarians and election deniers. Mr. Trump’s machinations and protesters’ misdeeds, it appears, are being used as a pretext for self-appointed guardians of democracy to reorient American politics to their liking. So why would Republicans budge?
There are two parties to Jan. 6 that the committee has had a hard time keeping distinct: the crowd and Mr. Trump. What the crowd did — to obstruct, through physical intimidation, the counting of votes — was a constitutional trespass of maximum gravity, for which the instigators deserve punishment.
But who were the instigators? The committee has focused on extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers that played an outsize role in storming the Capitol. But their violence, coordination and resolution were not typical of the broader crowd. No firearms were found on those who invaded the Capitol.
It was not a coup attempt. And even if you believe it was, Mr. Trump was not leading it.
For someone supposedly bent on overthrowing the government, Mr. Trump did an awful lot of television-watching and surprisingly little seizing of broadcast centers, mobilizing of commando units and issuing of emergency decrees. He certainly demeaned the office, embarrassed the country and behaved irresponsibly on Jan. 6. But to focus on that day distracts from his less dramatic but more consequential misdeeds.
Elections require of candidates a never-say-die optimism that can lead even levelheaded people to make bold claims. After the German national election of 2002, the conservative candidate Edmund Stoiber walked onstage as his prospects of winning dwindled, and announced, with a thrilled smile, “We have won the election.” In 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico City’s head of government, refused to accept the official tally showing him the loser in a national presidential race, camped out in the city’s central square and drew hundreds of thousands of supporters to the city, where they battled the police.
Mr. Trump’s loss was razor thin: A shift of fewer than 80,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin would have given him the victory. But his loss is different from the near misses to which it is sometimes compared. For one thing, Mr. Trump was an incumbent. While Samuel Tilden in 1876, Richard Nixon in 1960 and Al Gore in 2000 each lost the presidency by a whisker, they weren’t in the Oval Office and suffered no demotion in dignity.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, faced what the New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, the author of a new book on Mr. Trump, called “the worst predicament he could imagine: being turned into a loser by the entire country.” He took extraordinary measures, including a phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, four days before the storming of the Capitol, in which Mr. Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” This was an unambiguous act of constitutional wrongdoing.
But the Jan. 6 committee’s members are focused on something else. They have set themselves up less as investigators than as defenders of America’s democracy. This is the wrong venue for such a mission. The committee has wound up too partisan to carry it out. You can blame Republicans for nominating Trump defenders to the committee or Democrats for freezing them out, but the fact is the committee has seven Democrats and two Republicans, Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both in open rebellion against their Trumpified party (and both now on their way out of Congress).
The almost complete removal of oppositional checks leaves the committee ill suited to what is really a very delicate task. The Jan. 6 march on the Capitol was both a protest questioning the integrity of the 2020 election (protected by the First Amendment) and a violent assault on the integrity of the 2020 election (punishable by law).
On top of that, there are two different contexts for understanding the event: judicial and civic. In the judicial context, those judges who ruled against more than 60 Trump-initiated and Trump-linked lawsuits to reopen vote counts and reverse election results did exactly the right thing. A courtroom is the wrong place to reward doubts about the legitimacy of elections. Overruling elections from the bench would undermine democracy and provide tomorrow’s lawyers with incentives to undermine it further.
But in a civic context, matters are different. Citizens have a right to examine the matter as freely and doggedly as they wish.
The committee jumbles all these contexts together. Ms. Cheney recently complained that Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, “is, right now, campaigning for election deniers.” She went on: “Either you fundamentally believe in and will support our constitutional structure or you don’t.” But, of course, it is not unconstitutional to question the integrity of an election, and a person who does so is not necessarily an enemy of democracy.
In June the committee chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, opened the hearings by mentioning that he had taken an oath “to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” He added that “that oath was put to the test on Jan. 6.”
Certainly there were constitutional crimes that day. But the committee members have been too inclined to look at the Republican Party as a nest of subversives, much as certain anti-Communists did the Democrats at some of the colder points in the Cold War. The investigation into possible Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign — an investigation that on essential matters came up empty — reflected similar suspicions. Mr. Biden’s recent speech in Philadelphia, in which he described “MAGA Republicans” as part of an ideological threat to democracy and “the very soul of this country,” is evidence that he, too, views matters in this light.
This is to misunderstand the nature of the challenge to American democracy posed by Donald Trump. Any reader of Michael Wolff’s book “Landslide,” about the final days of the Trump presidency, will see that his unsuitability is a matter of psychology, not ideology — of character, not politics. He’s George III, not Hitler. We haven’t given enough thought to flawed personalities in recent years. Modern government structures may have seemed too complex to be run on gut reactions and private whims. For several generations politicians with Mr. Trump’s personality profile were incapable of going far.
That this is no longer the case ought to preoccupy us. After his defeat in November 2020, Mr. Trump began working the last available pressure point in the system — the Electoral College, as it turned out — to see if he could somehow lawyer and cajole his way to an alternative outcome. That a president would try such a thing required not just effrontery but also a colossal collapse in standards, integrity and public trust. But the requisite collapse had already taken place, by 2016 at the latest.
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