Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      The Myth of the Good Trump Official

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      A central theme of the Jan. 6 hearings has been Republican redemption. A parade of Republican witnesses has testified to being pushed beyond the limits of their loyalty to Donald Trump. For some, the breaking point came when he tried to enlist them in a scheme to overturn state elections. Others revolted at the former president’s attempts to corrupt the Justice Department, or at his role in inciting an insurrection. A rioter, awakened to Trump’s lies, testified about being misled; in a poignant moment after the seventh hearing, he apologized to the Capitol Police.Republican Representative Liz Cheney, the Jan. 6 committee’s vice chair, has been perhaps its most prominent voice. At Thursday’s prime-time hearing, the last until September, she painted die-hard believers in Trump’s big lie as noble victims. “Donald Trump knows that millions of Americans who supported him would stand up and defend our nation were it threatened,” said Cheney. “They would put their lives and their freedom at stake to protect her. And he is preying on their patriotism. He is preying on their sense of justice. And on Jan. 6, Donald Trump turned their love of country into a weapon against our Capitol and our Constitution.”It is a sign of the committee Democrats’ love of country that they have allowed the hearings to proceed this way. They are crafting a story about Jan. 6 as a battle between Republican heroism and Republican villainy. It seems intended to create a permission structure for Trump supporters to move on without having to disavow everything they loved about his presidency, or to admit that Jan. 6 was the logical culmination of his sadistic politics.If you believe, as I do, that Trump’s sociopathy makes him a unique threat to this country’s future, it makes sense to try to lure Republicans away from him rather than damn them for their complicity. There is a difference, however, between a smart narrative and an accurate one. In truth, you can’t cleave Trump and his most shameless antidemocratic enablers off from the rest of the Republican Party, because the party has been remade in his image. Plenty of ex-Trump officials have come off well in the hearings, including the former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, the former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and, in video testimony, the former White House counsel Pat Cipollone. That shouldn’t erase the ignominy of having served Trump in the first place.An image of Senator Josh Hawley gesturing to insurrectionists on Jan. 6.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesI have a lot of respect for Cheney, who is likely sacrificing her future in Republican politics in her attempt to hold Trump accountable, and for the bravery of witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified despite the Trump camp’s reported attempt to intimidate her. But whatever they say now, the witnesses who worked for Trump enabled his mounting authoritarianism. Each contributed, in his or her own way, not just to Jan. 6, but also to eroding our democracy so that Jan. 6 may be just a prequel. Each helped bring us to a point where, according to a recent survey, more than half of Americans believe a civil war will erupt in the United States in the near future.“It was a privilege to serve in the White House,” Pottinger said during his testimony on Thursday. “I’m also very proud of President Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments.”Pottinger worked for the Trump administration from its beginning until Jan. 7, 2021. He was one of many who didn’t resign over Trump’s defense of the rioters in Charlottesville, Va., his attempted extortion of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his claims to have won an election he clearly lost, to cite just a few milestones. During Pottinger’s testimony, he said that Jan. 6 “emboldened our enemies by helping give them ammunition to feed a narrative that our system of government doesn’t work, that the United States is in decline.” But there’s no way to separate that from the rest of Trump’s legacy, or from Pottinger’s own. He shouldn’t be proud.One of the few Trumpists who seems to have really reckoned with what she participated in is Stephanie Grisham, who is Trump’s former press secretary, though she never held a news conference. “I don’t think I can rebrand; I think this will follow me forever,” she told New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi last year. “I believe that I was part of something unusually evil.”They all were, everyone who kept that catastrophic administration functioning at a minimal level while Trump built the cult of personality that made Jan. 6 possible. It’s important to remember their culpability because Trump is probably going to run for president again, and he could win. If he does, Republicans who like to think of themselves as good people, who don’t want to spend their lives in the right-wing fever swamps, will be faced with the question of whether to serve him. They will see the former Trump officials who were able to rebrand despite sticking with him almost to the end, and they might think there’s not much to lose.In his bracing book, “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell,” Tim Miller, a former Republican National Committee spokesman, tries to understand why friends and associates who once hated Trump eventually submitted to him. “There were thousands of people who at some level complied with Trump who weighed the costs,” he wrote. “Who knew the dangers,” who might have chosen a different path if “they could have imagined a different, more fulfilling future for themselves.” The Jan. 6 committee is trying, against the suck of Trump’s dark gravity, to point the way to such a future. To do that, it has been liberal with absolution. That doesn’t mean absolution is deserved.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Jan. 6 Hearings Did a Great Service, by Making Great TV

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      Investigating a threat to democracy was always going to be important. But this time, it also managed to be buzzworthy.Every new summer TV series has to fight to get attention. The Jan. 6 hearings had more challenges than most.There was public exhaustion and media jadedness over a story that’s been in the news for a year and a half. There was the MAGA echo chamber that has primed a huge chunk of America to reject, sight unseen, any accusation against former President Donald J. Trump.Above all, the hearings, which aired a capstone prime-time session on Thursday night — a midseason finale, if you will — had to compete with our expectations of what constitutes a “successful” TV hearing. Not every congressional inquest can be the Army-McCarthy hearings, in which the lawyer Joseph Welch asked the Red Scare-monger Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”These hearings, in an era of social-media cacophony, cable-news argument and fixed political camps, were never likely to build to a cinematic climax that would unite the public in outrage. Yet by the standards of today, they have achieved some remarkable things.They drew an audience for public-affairs TV in the dead of summer. They reportedly prompted further witnesses to come forward. Polling suggests they even moved opinion on Mr. Trump and Jan. 6 among Republicans and independents. They created riveting — and dare I say, watchable — water cooler TV that legitimately mattered.And make no mistake: The hearings, produced by James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, succeeded not just through good intentions but also by being well-made, well-promoted TV. They may have been a most unusual eight-episode summer series (with more promised in September). But they had elements in common with any good drama.Visual storytellingThe hearings offset the testimony with graphics and other visual elements.House Select Committee, via Associated PressWhen you think of congressional hearings, you think talk, talk, talk. Hours of witnesses leaning into microphones. Countless round-robins of representatives grandstanding. The Jan. 6 hearings, on the other hand, recognized that TV is a visual medium, and that images — like the footage of the assault on the Capitol — can say more than speechifying.The editing and graphics were more the stuff of a high-gloss streaming documentary than anything we’re used to seeing from the U.S. Congress. Diagrams of the Capitol showed how close we came to catastrophe, metaphorically and physically. Using mostly interview snippets, deftly cut together, the July 12 hearing brought to life a White House meeting in which Trump loyalists floated “unhinged” gambits for seizing the election apparatus — the oral history of a cabal.Thursday, in a meta device befitting a president who was made and swayed by TV, the committee showed onscreen what the president saw in real time in the over two and a half hours he spent watching Fox News and letting the violence play out. A graphic dropped us into the executive dining room, from the point of view of the president in his customary spot facing the tube.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      Ryan Kelley Is Playing Up the Jan. 6 Charges Against Him

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      Ever since Ryan Kelley, a Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, was charged last month with trespassing and other crimes connected to the storming of the Capitol, he has openly embraced his status as a Jan. 6 defendant.On Friday, Mr. Kelley again leaned on a part of his biography that many candidates might have run from: He put a post on his official Facebook page demanding that “all the J6 prisoners” be released from federal custody.“Every American should be outraged,” wrote Mr. Kelley, who is not in custody as he awaits his trial. “Remember, you could be next for any reason ‘big government’ doesn’t approve of.”In early June, when he was charged with four misdemeanors connected to the riot at the Capitol, Mr. Kelley became the first person running in a major state or federal election to be charged in the attack. Prosecutors say he used “his hands to support another rioter” who was pulling down a metal barricade outside the building, and that he gestured “to the crowd, consistently indicating” that it should continue moving toward an entrance.With polls showing him lagging behind the front-runner, Tudor Dixon, a businesswoman and conservative commentator, and other candidates, Mr. Kelley, a real-estate broker, is unlikely to win the Republican primary on Aug. 2. The winner will face the incumbent, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat.As recently as Wednesday night, during a candidate debate, Mr. Kelley spoke openly about his Capitol riot charges, treating them as an asset, not a liability.He claimed, for example, that after his arrest, Airbnb shut down his account.“Look how hard these people are trying to silence me,” he said. “They’re not trying to silence any of the rest of you.” More

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      The Jan. 6 Panel After 8 Hearings: Where Will the Evidence Lead?

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      The House committee has set out a comprehensive narrative of the effort to overturn the 2020 election. But it’s unclear if that will be enough to achieve its legal and political goals.Comprehensive, compellingly scripted and packed with details, the eight hearings of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack have laid out a powerful account of President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The select committee assembled a mass of evidence and testimony — provided in large part by Mr. Trump’s aides and other Republicans — not only for the judgment of history but for the purpose of two more immediate and related goals that the panel’s leaders highlighted during the hearing on Thursday night.One, as Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is the panel’s vice chair, said explicitly, is to convince voters that Mr. Trump, who has made clear he is likely to run for president in 2024, should be disqualified from holding the office again.“Every American must consider this,” Ms. Cheney said. “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”The other goal, as the committee has been signaling for months, is to pressure the Justice Department to pursue a more urgent and aggressive investigation into whether Mr. Trump could be prosecuted for his actions.Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, concluded the hearing on Thursday by alluding to the likelihood that Mr. Trump would run for president again. “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?” she said.Doug Mills/The New York Times“There needs to be accountability, accountability under the law, accountability to the American people, accountability at every level,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is the panel’s chairman.“If there is no accountability for Jan. 6, for every part of this scheme, I fear that we will not overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy,” he said. “There must be stiff consequences for those responsible.”The extent to which the committee’s work imposes a political cost on Mr. Trump by changing views of him among persuadable voters might not be fully clear until the next campaign gets underway. And the committee has yet to decide whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, a step that would be entirely symbolic and would not bind federal prosecutors to the case against Mr. Trump, as it has been laid out in the hearings.But at a minimum, the committee’s hearings have created a backdrop to the early maneuvering around the 2024 campaign that presents challenges for Mr. Trump among independents and Republicans who might want a new face and a more forward-looking candidate. Indeed, the panel’s use of military leaders, top Trump aides and loyal Republicans to narrate its case has arguably been intended to speak to those potential voters.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Presents Evidence of Trump’s Refusal to Stop the Riot

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      The House panel painted a detailed picture of how, as officials rushed to respond to an attack on the United States government, the commander in chief chose for hours to do nothing.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, documented President Donald J. Trump’s inaction to call off the mob during the 187 minutes after rioters descended on the Capitol, before he issued a public response.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAs a mob of his supporters assaulted the Capitol, former President Donald J. Trump sat in his dining room off the Oval Office, watching the violence on television and choosing to do nothing for hours to stop it, an array of former administration officials testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack in accounts laid out on Thursday.In a final public hearing of the summer and one of the most dramatic of the inquiry, the panel provided a panoramic account of how, even as the lives of law enforcement officers, members of Congress and his own vice president were under threat, Mr. Trump could not be moved to act until after it was clear that the riot had failed to disrupt Congress’s session to confirm his election defeat.Even then, the committee showed in never-before-seen footage from the White House, Mr. Trump privately refused to concede — “I don’t want to say the election’s over!” he angrily told aides as he recorded a video message that had been scripted for him the day after the attack — or to condemn the assault on the Capitol as a crime.Calling on a cast of witnesses assembled to make it hard for viewers to dismiss as tools of a partisan witch hunt — top Trump aides, veterans and military leaders, loyal Republicans and even members of Mr. Trump’s own family — the committee established that the president willfully rejected their efforts to persuade him to mobilize a response to the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries.“You’re the commander in chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America, and there’s nothing?” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, told the panel. “No call? Nothing? Zero?”It was a closing argument of sorts in the case the panel has built against Mr. Trump, one whose central assertion is that the former president was derelict in his duty for failing to do all that he could — or anything at all, for 187 minutes — to call off the assault carried out in his name.Thursday’s session, led by two military veterans with testimony from another, was also an appeal to patriotism as the panel asserted that Mr. Trump’s inaction during the riot was a final, glaring violation of his oath of office, coming at the end of a multipronged and unsuccessful effort to overturn his 2020 election loss.In perhaps one of the most jarring revelations, the committee presented evidence that a call from a Pentagon official to coordinate a response to the assault on the Capitol as it was underway initially went unanswered because, according to a White House lawyer, “the president didn’t want anything done.”Matthew Pottinger, who was the deputy national security adviser, and Sarah Matthews, a former White House press aide, were the two in-person witnesses at the hearing on Thursday.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAnd the panel played Secret Service radio transmissions and testimony that showed in chilling detail how close Vice President Mike Pence came to danger during the riot, including an account of members of his Secret Service detail being so rattled by what was unfolding that they were contacting family members to say goodbye.Both pieces of testimony were provided by a former White House official whom the committee did not identify by name — and whose voice was altered to protect his identity — who was described as having had “national security responsibilities.”The witness described an exchange between Eric Herschmann, a lawyer working in the White House, and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, about the call from the Pentagon.“Mr. Herschmann turned to Mr. Cipollone and said, ‘The president didn’t want anything done,’” the witness testified. “Mr. Cipollone had to take the call himself.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      Amazon Acquires One Medical in Push Into Health Care

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      The internet giant acquired One Medical, a national chain of primary care clinics, for $3.9 billion.Twitter’s shares fell after the social media platform, which is locked in a legal battle with Elon Musk over its future ownership, reported that it lost $270 million in the second quarter. Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Microsoft will report their earnings next week, with many forecasters expecting more disappointing results. Now delivering diagnoses.Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJassy’s big bet on health careYesterday, Amazon announced its first major acquisition during Andy Jassy’s tenure as C.E.O., with the $3.9 billion purchase of One Medical, a national chain of primary care clinics that is backed by the private equity firm the Carlyle Group.Amazon’s ambitions in health care go back more than two decades, writes The Times’s Karen Weise. But none of its forays into the sector have had notable success, or have been as big as the One Medical acquisition. Its previous bets in health care include:Investing in Drugstore.com in 1999. (Jeff Bezos served on the company’s board.)Teaming up with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway in 2018 to start Haven, in an amorphous effort to explore new ways to deliver health care to their work forces. The venture formally ended last year.Buying the start-up PillPack, an online pharmacy that focuses on recurring monthly medications, in 2018 for $753 million. It later began Amazon Pharmacy, which, like PillPack, delivers medications, and it integrated discounts for customers with Prime memberships.Running its own primary and urgent care service, called Amazon Care, beginning in 2019, to treat its employees. Amazon Care has tried to get other employers to offer its service, with limited success.The One Medical deal gives Amazon access to more data. One Medical built its own electronic medical records system, and it has 15 years’ worth of medical and health-system data that Amazon could tap. Although individual patient records are generally protected under federal health privacy laws, the big data expertise that has fueled Amazon’s success can be powerful in health care — for predicting costs, targeting interventions and developing products and treatments.It could also test the new antitrust regime. Last night, Senator Amy Klobuchar said she was calling on the F.T.C. to “thoroughly investigate” the deal, citing Amazon’s previous investments in health care and its access to data. And while Amazon hardly dominates heath care, the Justice Department and the F.T.C. have sought to rewrite the rules for reviewing big mergers to broaden the scope for intervention. Lina Khan, who leads the F.T.C., has long contended that there is an antitrust argument against Amazon. She has not so far filed a suit against the company in her time as chair. Her agency reviewed and approved Amazon’s acquisition of the movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, though that was before Democrats held a majority on the commission.When asked by The Washington Post last month about Amazon’s push into health care, Khan said, “Our current approach to thinking about mergers still has more work to do to fully understand what it means for these businesses to enter into all these other markets and industries.”HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Turkey promises a deal to get grain out of Ukraine’s blocked ports. The Turkish presidency says that a signing ceremony will be held today for a deal between Ukraine and Russia aiming to allow millions of tons of Ukrainian grain to be exported, alleviating a global food shortage.President Biden has “very mild” Covid symptoms. Biden, 79, tested positive for the coronavirus yesterday. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said he would “continue to carry out all of his duties fully” while isolating.Snap shares plunge after a disappointing quarterly report. The company, which runs the social media platform Snapchat, said it would “substantially reduce” hiring and that revenue growth in its current uncompleted quarter was approximately zero. Jessica Lessin, the editor of the tech-focused news site The Information, said, Snap’s results “raise questions about digital advertising in the current macroeconomic climate.”The U.S. government files its first criminal case about crypto insider trading. A former Coinbase employee and two other men were charged with buying and selling digital assets based on confidential information from the cryptocurrency exchange. The three men, one of whom has fled to India, are said to have made $1.5 million on 14 trades over a 10-month period.China will faces severe heat waves over the next 10 days. Regions could be hit by temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher, forecasts suggest, and some cities in Zhejiang Province, which has many factories, issued red alerts today.Trump’s inaction in actionAs a mob of his supporters assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, Trump refused to stop them, according to former Trump administration officials, who testified yesterday to the House committee investigating the attack. Over 187 minutes, Trump sat in his dining room off the Oval Office, watching the violence on television, not just ignoring calls to respond, but repeatedly signaling that he did not want anything done.It was one of the most dramatic hearings of the inquiry, write The Times’s Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman. Still, the assertion that Mr. Trump was derelict in duty raised ethical, moral and legal questions, but it might not be the basis for a criminal charge, according to Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia, who led much of last night’s proceedings. The media critic Brian Stelter, of CNN, called yesterday evening’s hearing “the most Fox-centric hearing yet — and none of it was shown live by Fox,” underscoring how divided the U.S. media landscape is.Here were the takeaways:Trump ignored a torrent of pleas from inside and outside the White House to call off his supporters. Members of Congress, aides and his own daughter, Ivanka, pleaded with Mr. Trump to call off the violence as it unfolded in front of him on television, The Times’s Michael S. Schmidt notes. Representative Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who helped lead the hearing, said that the president, after learning of the Capitol breach, resisted putting out a tweet saying, “Stay peaceful.”Even the next day, Trump was not fully willing to concede the race. Outtakes from a taped address of the president’s speech on Jan. 7 showed the president saying he didn’t want to say “the election is over.”Members of Pence’s Secret Service security detail feared for their lives as protesters drew nearer. “I don’t like talking about it, but there were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth,” one official, whom the committee declined to name, said.Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, told the panel: “You’re the commander in chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America, and there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?”More hearings are planned for September.YouTube’s policy on pulling abortion-related content has skeptics YouTube said on Twitter yesterday that it would be removing videos over the next few weeks that provided instructions for “unsafe abortion methods.” Citing its medical misinformation policies, it also said that it would be removing content that promoted “false claims about abortion safety” and that it would start including information from health authorities alongside abortion content.YouTube’s announcement was a step in the right direction, but it should have happened a long time ago, said Imran Ahmed, the C.E.O. and founder of the nonprofit organization the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “Even though we welcome any change in their rule, why on earth were home remedies for abortion ever permitted on their site?” he told DealBook, citing the medical risks associated with using dangerous methods. He recommended that YouTube provided a hotline to groups that offer accurate information on reproductive health care.Since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, abortion has been banned in at least eight states, and videos offering home remedies to induce abortions have spread on YouTube, TikTok and social media platforms. Experts have urged caution, saying these methods may be dangerous and there is no data on whether they work. A 2020 survey published in the journal JAMA Network Open estimated that 7 percent of American women would attempt a self-managed abortion at some point in their lives.For YouTube, the challenge will be enforcement, said Katharine Trendacosta, an associate director of policy and activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. Trendacosta told DealBook that she questioned whether YouTube had the staffing and processes in place to pull this off. “I have trouble with these announcements because it doesn’t tell me if they’re going to hire enough people to implement it,” she said.THE SPEED READ DealsThe U.K. competition watchdog cleared a merger of the sports broadcasting businesses of BT Group and Warner Bros. Discovery. (Reuters)Malaysia’s AMMB, a financial services manager, is reportedly considering a sale of its asset-management unit. (Bloomberg)“Amazon Wants 100,000 Electric Vans. Can Rivian Deliver?” (NYT)The toymaker Mattel reported a 20 percent jump in sales. (NYT)PolicyRussia is keeping Germany guessing on gas shipments. (NYT)Truckers protesting a labor law have blocked roads that serve the Port of Oakland in California. (NYT)The E.C.B. has a new tool to keep bond markets in check. It doesn’t want to use it. (NYT)In good news for consumers, the economy and President Biden, gas prices are finally falling. (The Morning)Best of the restSwatch’s $260 MoonSwatch is helping to revive the brand. (Bloomberg Businessweek)A look at the PGA Tour’s lobbying effort against the Saudi-backed LIV golf league. (CNBC)A 35,000-acre forest fire in Spain was accidentally started by a Dutch carbon offset company. (Vice)Despite Putin’s efforts to destroy Ukraine’s economy, tech companies there are still thriving. (NYT)“Pro-Putin Biker Gang Rides Into E.U. Sanctions Roadblock” (FT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Bret Stephens: I Was Wrong About Trump Voters

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      Sean DongThe worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.What were they seeing that I wasn’t?That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.I was blind to this. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”No wonder they were angry.Anger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Trump they often took both. But that didn’t mean the anger was unfounded or illegitimate, or that it was aimed at the wrong target.Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome — became, more and more, not just passé, but taboo.It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.This was the climate in which Trump’s campaign flourished. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.For every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties.Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax — there’s just no other word for it — that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Trump’s current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of Jan. 6?Morally speaking, no. It’s one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. It’s another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the Republic itself.But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,” noted Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Prosecutors Rest in Contempt Case Against Steve Bannon

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      The government, seeking to hold Mr. Bannon to account for defying a subpoena from Congress, wrapped up its case after calling just two witnesses.WASHINGTON — The prosecution rested its case on Wednesday in the trial of Stephen K. Bannon, a former top adviser to President Donald J. Trump, as government lawyers sought to show that Mr. Bannon had repeatedly ignored warnings that he risked facing criminal charges in flouting a subpoena.Mr. Bannon was indicted in November on two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to provide information to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.The trial on Wednesday largely centered on the testimony of Kristin Amerling, the deputy staff director and chief counsel to the Jan. 6 committee, who offered a detailed accounting of the committee’s attempts to compel Mr. Bannon to testify last year.“There had been a number of public reports stating that Mr. Bannon had been in communication with White House officials, including former President Trump in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 events,” Ms. Amerling said. “We wanted to understand what he could tell us about the connection between any of these events.”Prosecutors continued to describe Mr. Bannon’s decision to stonewall the committee as a straightforward case of contempt. By declining to testify, Mr. Bannon not only “thumbed his nose” at the law, but he also may have withheld significant information about the coordinated effort to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election, Amanda Vaughn, a prosecutor, said.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More