I am going to use Elon Musk’s shitty machine to show you testimony provided by two top aides to Donald Trump to the January 6 committee. The first is from Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as assistant the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
The second is from Hope Hicks, a Counselor to the President, who resigned on January 12, 2021, “with officials saying at the time it was a previously arranged exit and not a resignation sparked by the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.”
There’s a lot going on in these two Tweets. Most obviously, the Hutchinson testimony provides clear evidence that Trump knew he had lost the election and was deeply embarrassed about it. One motivation for pushing bogus claims of fraud was to convince as many people as possible that he had not actually lost.
But the Hicks testimony takes this further into an attempt to stay in power despite losing. Yet the motivation appears to be the same. He couldn’t face a legacy of being a loser. He preferred to risk much worse condemnation by history than to simply accept his fate as the runner-up in the 2020 election. And, again, even if all his efforts failed, and even if he faced legal consequences for his actions, if he could convince a lot of people that he’d been robbed rather than beaten, he’d take that trade.
In this he has so far been quite successful. And that’s in part because he’s spent the last two years spending all his political capital on punishing any Republican who acknowledges that he legitimately lost the election and rewarding and promoting any Republican who will trumpet his dishonest claims of fraud.
It didn’t help the GOP at the ballot box. In fact, it clearly hurt them badly in the midterm elections when many Big Lie candidates lost what should have been winnable races. But it’s held a lot of Republican voters in line, and Trump’s false claims are still widely believed by the Republican base.
Perhaps this makes Trump feel better. But the time has come for him to go to jail. His ego does not need further protection. We need to make his face the consequences of his actions which have been deadly, expensive, and catastrophic for the health of our political cohesion as a nation.
