The January 6 hearings, continued

How a pathological culture of lying tills the ground for a coup attempt

The January 6 hearings are not legal proceedings. They are political. I don’t mean that as an insult. The evidence they’ve uncovered could result in criminal investigations by the Justice Department. But the committee is not obligated to present “the other side.” Its obligation is to bring to light the depth, range and danger that the January 6 conspiracy represents.

Efforts by Trump supporters to debunk the evidence presented so far have themselves tended to fall apart upon the briefest inspection. That is proof enough of the overall integrity of the January 6 committee and its work. Compare that to the farcical nature of GOP-directed inquiries in recent years, including the Benghazi hearings. There, the purpose wasn’t to uncover an untold story of critical import to the functioning of our system of governance. The primary, perhaps sole purpose of the Benghazi hearings was to smear Hilary Clinton in advance of her run for the presidency in 2016.

I mention all this because Tuesday’s hearings were just another reminder of how all-encompassing an ecosystem of contempt for the truth has become to the modern GOP. Mother Jones released an audio clip yesterday of Steve Bannon, speaking days before the 2020 election. You can listen here. In it, Bannon crowed about how Trump was going to declare victory in the election, even if he was losing. Further, Bannon gleefully related, Trump would stir up an absolute shitstorm in the process. That all of this might result in violence and chaos was of no concern to Bannon. Indeed, this is what Bannon relishes, as was clear from his promise to his radio audience on January 5 that all hell was going to break loose the next day.

Bannon isn’t some fringe outlier. He was among the chief strategists behind Trump’s campaign in 2016. His sneering indifference to facts is characteristic of the culture that GOP elites have fomented and accommodated themselves to. This is reflected in the composition of the January 6 Committee itself, whose only two Republicans have sacrificed their political careers for refusing to accept the Big Lie.

Yes, we again saw that key members of the Trump team, including White House counsel Pat Cippolone, displayed ethical fortitude at the 11th hour. But what’s been normalized in all this is the willingness of so many to work for a pathological liar to begin with, to enable his toxic, astonishingly corrupt presidency right up until the very end, when attempting a coup was finally a bridge too far. That low bar was on full display when Cippolone asserted that Mike Pence deserved a Presidential Medal of Freedom for refusing to blatantly subvert the Constitution.

A relatively obscure but telling reflection of this ecosystem of contempt for truth is Katrina Pierson. We heard from the former Trump aide briefly yesterday via taped testimony she gave and via a text exchange with former campaign manager Brad Parscale. In that exchange, Parscale rued that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric got someone killed at the Capitol on January 6, while Pierson tried to make Parscale feel better about himself. Pierson first came to national attention as a spokesperson for Trump during the 2016 campaign. Back then, Pierson was notorious for two reasons. First, because she wore a necklace comprising bullets (yes, really). And second, because she blamed President Obama and Secretary Clinton for the death in Iraq of the American G.I., Captain Humayun Khan, whose father spoke so passionately at the Democratic convention in 2016. Why was Pierson notorious for that claim? Khan died in 2004 when, as a reminder, Obama wasn’t president and Clinton wasn’t Secretary of State.

That the rogue’s gallery of the impressively unrepentant Sidney Powell, John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani has taken clownishness to such new heights should not obscure the depths of dishonesty that has long been the GOP baseline. I’ve written before that the cheat code for the contemporary Republican Party is the 2011 statement from Arizona Senator Jon Kyl. In a speech on the Senate floor, Kyl denounced Planned Parenthood and said that abortions were 90% of their business. When fact-checkers quickly pointed out that the actual figure was *far* lower, Kyl’s press secretary told CNN that the remark “was not intended to be a factual statement.” This statement led to endless mockery, but it’s part of a sinister arc that has unfolded over many years. Karl Rove mocked liberals in the “reality-based community” to the journalist Ron Suskind in 2004. His point was that facts didn’t matter - all that mattered was imposing one’s political will for the purpose of perpetuating oneself in power.

From the Bush administration’s repeated falsehoods to justify its invasion of Iraq, to Kyl’s “not intended” statement, to Paul Ryan’s shamelessly fraudulent budget proposals, to Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” comment in response to embarrassing photographic evidence that, no, Trump’s inauguration day crowd was not bigger than Obama’s, to the Big Lie, to the imbecility of Herschel Walker, whose own staff assumes he’s lying all the time, an avalanche of untruth continues to gather momentum. Some instances and exemplars of blatant disregard for reality might seem cartoonish. Giuliani, for example, is a blithering idiot at this point. But all of these lies, repeated over and over again, add up to a sinister attempt to undermine the shared understandings that make living in community possible. They’re the foundation of a nihilistic fantasy that the Bannons of the world, with their allies among the increasingly emboldened militias, are desperate to bring to fruition.

They found a willing instrument in Trump, whose election in the first place was made possible, in significant measure, by all the lying that came before. And that foundation of lying made a coup attempt, if not inevitable, an unnervingly viable possibility.