The Case against Trump--and the GOP

Liz Cheney's indictment as summarized by Amanda Carpenter:

1. Trump’s misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th.

2. Trump corruptly planned to replace the Attorney General of the United States so the U.S. Justice Department would spread his false stolen election claims.

3. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on January 6th.

4. Trump corruptly pressured state legislators and election officials to change the results.

5. The Trump campaign and other Trump associates instructed Republican officials in multiple states to create intentionally false electoral slates, and transmit those slates to Congress, to the Vice President, and the National Archives, falsely certifying that Trump won states he actually lost.

6. Trump summoned a violent mob and directed them, illegally, to march on the U.S. Capitol.

7. Trump failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol. 

That's the case, now the question is whether proving it over the next several weeks will disqualify Trump from running for office in '24.  It's still probably too much to hope that he'll be in jail by then. 

It's interesting that if the Republicans just bit the bullet and voted to impeach him last year, all of this would have been easier for them to put in the rear-view mirror. Instead their fate is very much linked to his. They wagered they could just make the hearings look like a partisan exercise, as their Benghazi hearings were. But the difference here is that while Benghazi was just a bad-faith effort in blowing smoke, the 1/6 hearings are all about about an outrageous criminal act of political arson.Most people can tell the difference. And more importantly, there are no Jim Jordans on the committee to obstruct the telling of the story with bad-faith irrelevancies.

It very well might be wishful thinking on my part, but holding these hearings now could be the one thing that prevents a GOP sweep in the midterms. It's up to the Dems to make the case that it's not just Trump who is culpable, but every GOP congressperson who refused to vote against his impeachment and conviction. They need to make that case that the vast majority of Republicans were essentially part of an effort to whitewash what was clearly a failed coup. That makes them as a group fundamentally unworthy of public trust. The committee has an enormous amount of evidence to make this case.

This might be enough to scare conservative-leaning independents and suburban Youngkin-adjacent Republicans from giving McConnell and McCarthy back their respective houses. At Charlie Syke's Newsletter, Terri wrote this in a comment about the first hearing last night:

I watched the whole thing. I will NOT look away. As a lifelong republican (no more), all I kept thinking was, THIS is what our government should be like. Serious people, not crazy, craven sycophants posturing for 'sound bites' and prostituting themselves for MONEY at the people's expense is what hundreds of thousands, millions even, of men and woman and given their LIFE for. We owe it to them and our children to STOP republicans and their dishonest and ugly vision for the future of our country. Am I naive to think that most Americans are capable of understanding what Terri does? That the GOP no longer has legitimacy? That some things are more important than inflation and baby formula? Maybe, but we'll see.  Cheney's close summed it up: I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain. Amen, sister. And kudos to the Dems who are grownups enough to stand back and let Cheney take the limelight.