By Robert Reich
But
even now, almost a year later, Americans remain confused and divided about the
significance of what occurred.
Let
me offer four basic truths:
1.
Trump incited the attack on the Capitol.
For
weeks before the attack, Trump had been urging his supporters to come to
Washington for a “Save America March” on January 6, when Congress was to
ceremonially count the electoral votes of Joe Biden’s win. Without any basis in
fact or law (60 federal courts as well as the Departments of Justice and
Homeland Security concluded that there was no evidence of substantial fraud),
Trump repeatedly asserted he had won the 2020 election and Biden had lost it.
At
a rally just before the violence, Trump repeated his falsehoods about how the
election was stolen. “We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never
happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had
enough. We will not take it anymore.”
He
told the crowd that Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his
hands tied behind his back, respectful of everyone — “including bad people.”
But,
he said, “we’re going to have to fight much harder…. We’re going to walk down
to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen
and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of
them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to
show strength, and you have to be strong…. We fight like hell. And if you don’t
fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.“
He
then told the crowd that “different rules” applied to them. “When you catch
somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope
Mike [Pence] has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t
listen to the RINOs [Republicans in Name Only] and the stupid people that he’s
listening to.”
Then
he dispatched the crowd to the Capitol as the electoral count was about to
start. The attack on the Capitol came immediately after.
2. The events of January 6 capped two months during which Trump sought to reverse the outcome of the election.
Shortly
after the election, Trump summoned to the White House Republican lawmakers
from Pennsylvania and Michigan, to inquire about how they might alter the
election results. He even called two local canvassing board officials in Wayne
County, Michigan’s most populous county and one that overwhelmingly favored
Biden.
He
phoned Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes,” according to a recording of that
conversation, adding “the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the
country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um,
that you’ve recalculated.”
He
suggested that Georgia’s secretary of state would be criminally prosecuted if
he did not do as Trump told him. “You know what they did and you’re not
reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you
know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your
lawyer. That’s a big risk.”
He
pressed the acting US attorney general and deputy attorney general to declare
the election fraudulent. When the deputy said the department had found no
evidence of widespread fraud and warned that it had no power to change the
outcome of the election, Trump replied “Just say that the election was corrupt +
leave the rest to me” and to Trump’s congressional allies.
Trump
and his allies continued to harangue the attorney general and top Justice
Department officials nearly every day until January 6. Trump plotted
with an assistant attorney general to oust the acting attorney general and
pressure lawmakers in Georgia to overturn the state’s election results. But
Trump ultimately decided against it after top department leaders pledged to
resign en masse.
Presumably,
more details of Trump’s attempted coup will emerge after the House Select
Committee on January 6 gathers more evidence and deposes more witnesses.
3.
Trump’s attempted coup continues to this day.
Trump
still refuses to concede the election and continues to assert it was stolen. He
presides over a network of loyalists and allies who have sought to overturn the
election (and erode public confidence in it) by mounting partisan state
“audits” and escalating attacks on state election officials. When asked
recently about the fraudulent claims and increasingly incendiary rhetoric, a
Trump spokeswoman said that the former president “supports any
patriotic American who dedicates their time and effort to exposing the rigged
2020 Presidential Election.”
Trump
recently announced he would be hosting a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago
resort in Florida on January 6.
“Remember,”
he said in the announcement “the insurrection took place on November 3rd. It
was the completely unarmed protest of the rigged election that took place on
January 6th.” (Reminder: they were armed.) Trump then referred to the House
investigation: “Why isn’t the Unselect Committee of highly partisan political
hacks investigating the CAUSE of the January 6th protest, which was the rigged
Presidential Election of 2020?”
He
went on to castigate “Rinos,” presumably referring to his opponents within the
party, such as Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who sit on the
January 6 committee. “In many ways a Rino is worse than a Radical Left
Democrat,” Trump said, “because you don’t know where they are coming from and
you have no idea how bad they really are for our Country.” He added, “the good
news is there are fewer and fewer RINOs left as we elect strong Patriots who
love America.”
Trump
has endorsed a primary challenger to Cheney, while Kinzinger will leave
Congress at the next election. Trump and other Republicans have also moved to
punish 13 House Republicans who bucked party leadership
and voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill in November.
4.
All of this reveals a deep problem in America that must be addressed
Trump
and his co-conspirators must be held accountable, of course. Hopefully, the
Select Committee’s report will be used by the Justice Department in criminal
prosecutions of Trump and his accomplices.
But
this in itself will not solve the underlying problem. A belligerent and
narcissistic authoritarian has gained a powerful hold over a large portion of
America. As many as 60 percent of Republican voters continue to believe his
lies. Many remain intensely loyal. The Republican party is close to becoming a
cult whose central animating idea is that the 2020 election was stolen from
Trump.
Trump
has had help, of course. Fox News hosts and Facebook groups have promoted and
amplified his ravings for their own purposes. Republicans in Congress and in
the states have played along.
But
even with this help, Trump’s attempted coup could not have gotten this far
without something more basic: A substantial portion of the American population
feels an anger and despair that has made them susceptible to Trump’s swagger
and lies.
It
is too simplistic to attribute this solely to racism or xenophobia. America has
harbored white supremacist and anti-immigrant sentiments since its founding.
The despair Trump has channeled is more closely connected to a profound loss of
identity, dignity and purpose, especially among Americans who have been left
behind – without college degrees, without good jobs, in places that have been
economically abandoned and disdained by much of the rest of the country.
The
wages of these Americans have not risen in forty years, adjusted for inflation,
even though the economy is now three times larger than it was four decades ago.
The norm of upward mobility has been shattered for these Americans. Through
their eyes, the entire American system is now rigged against them.
This
part of America yearns for a strongman to deliver it from despair. Trump has
filled that void. To be sure, he’s filled it with bombast, lies, paranoia, and
neofascism. But he has filled it nonetheless.
The
challenge ahead is to fill it with a democracy and economy that work for
everyone. Unless we understand and respond to this fundamental truth, we will
miss the true meaning of January 6.
Robert Reich's writes at robertreich.substack.com. His latest
book is "THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged It, How To Fix It." He is
Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at
Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. He served as Secretary of Labor
in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the 10
most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written 17
other books, including the best sellers "Aftershock," "The Work
of Nations," "Beyond Outrage," and "The Common Good."
He is a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, founder of
Inequality Media, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and
co-creator of the award-winning documentaries "Inequality For All,"
streaming on YouTube, and "Saving Capitalism," now streaming on
Netflix.