The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
It was very difficult to begin this essay: where to start; what to include; what to leave out. The entire proceeding brought back agonized memories, tangled emotions, relentless dread, and a deep concern for the future of our country.
The chairman and vice-chairwoman of the committee told us that in these hearings we would hear and see things we had not heard or seen before, and that was true. Eyewitnesses made new claims, and videotaped voices provided new evidence of a carefully orchestrated attempt to overturn an election by establishing the first autocracy in the history of our nation.
Polls indicated that twenty million people watched the first hearing. In the predictably endless aftermath on such occasions, the liberal news people were thrilled with those numbers. That is as many as watch a big NFL football game, they emoted.
There are 335 million people who live in this country. It was 20 million out of 335 million, or about 7% of Americans who watched on Thursday evening. More to the point, about 20% of likely voters watched. That isn’t anything to write home about, and frankly, that greatly concerns me. They predicted that from now on, especially when some of the hearings are during the day, there will be far fewer viewers. The most important congressional hearings in the lifetime of anyone now living, and only 10 to 15% of voters will be paying attention. Dismaying.
Somehow the evidence produced by the whole evening did not seem nearly as convincing as I had thought it would. Was it because since that fateful day we had heard The Big Lie repeated so often by so many people, particularly by the Prince of Lies himself, that January 6 no longer seems so bizarre, or so incomprehensible or volatile? Previous revelations should have convinced most Americans that this was a long-planned coup that almost succeeded, but nearly half of us still think Donald Trump is, if not terrific, at least tolerable. Will these new revelations finally bring the great majority of Americans to their senses?
Do you recall that many times during his campaign for the presidency in 2020 Trump said if he lost the election, it would mean it was stolen? If a candidate says that often enough before an election, most of his addicted acolytes will accept it as truth as their man has lost.
Trump did not plan the January 6 abortive coup attempt after he lost; he was planning it long before he lost. He lost the election by over seven million votes, but he thought he could somehow overturn the results in a few states, pushing him into the win-column. Accomplish that with the worst minority of the votes cast in presidential election history, and he might pull it off with a deeply flawed majority in the Electoral College, which itself has been deeply flawed from the moment it was written into the Constitution. Happily, the ex-president failed, thanks to the decisions of several highly-placed Republican officials, particularly the vice-president of the United States (although truth be told he had no other choice), and the votes of 81,200,000 American voters, who chose Biden, compared to 74,200,000 who, somehow, went for Trump.
Mike Pence refused to try to postpone the approval of the Senate in accepting the obvious and irrefutable results of the Electoral College vote. For his insistence on following long-established law, and for his integrity, the vice president faced the prospect of being apprehended by the madding crowd who were racing through the Capitol building. There is a slim chance he might even have been hanged. After all, a noose awaited him on the Capitol lawn, as we all saw on that frightening, fateful day.
At 6:03 in the evening of January 6, after the coup had failed, Trump said of his thwarted hangmen, “Maybe our supporters had the right idea.” Did the president actually intend to have his vice-president executed if Mr. Pence did not follow his wishes? Or was it merely another example of his macabre and infrequent sense of humorless humor?
I was somewhat disappointed in the demeanor of the two primary presenters on the committee, the chairman, Mr. Thompson, and the vice-chair, Ms. Cheney. It was obvious what their thought, but what did they really feel? What is the nature of the response of the whole committee, particularly the Republicans, to the hundreds of witnesses they heard and the thousands of documents they read? For my part, too little disgust and too much lawyerly, for-public-consumption blandness, came through. Where was the prosecutorial zeal? Do they think that Republican waverers will be won over with their moderated behavior? Ms. Cheney showed some controlled rage, but Mr. Thompson seemed a bit too behaviorally bland. (Could that be because he is a Black from Mississippi?)
The two “live” witnesses on the opening night of these hearings were the most compelling speakers, Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards and the British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested. What she said, and the videotape he showed, told how over-the-top the carefully planned riot actually was. The Stormtroopers’ treatment of that young woman was vicious, and the scenes shown on the video displayed how close America came to losing its democracy on January 6, 2021. It was reminiscent of film footage from the 1930s in Nazi Germany. I hope that January 6 was as close to Nazi Germany as we will ever get. The federal election of 2022 will be the best prognosticator of the direction of American democracy in the third decade of the 21st century.
On the evening of the Capitol attack, Sean Hannity of Fox News feverishly alerted people in the Trump administration and some of the key Republican members of Congress that there was serious talk of invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. It lays out the process by which two-thirds of both houses of Congress may remove the president from office if it is deemed he is unable or unfit to remain in office. Hannity knew how distraught many congressional members in both parties were at what happened earlier on that devastating day, and he wanted to make sure The Base stood firm.
Fox News decided some time ago not to broadcast the first hearing of the Investigation Committee. I presume it will not telecast any subsequent sessions. And who was the anchor on Fox news while the hearing was shown in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, in complete silence? Why, Sean Hannity of course! Let Fox Newsers see that the hearing is going on, but don’t let them know what is being said! Who would be foolish enough to risk that?
By January 7, 2021, Hannity had lost whatever mild reservations he might have had regarding Donald Trump, like most other Republicans, and he was spewing misinformation and his usual malice as the committee was trying to convince him and his viewers that they were wrong. Vice-President Pence declared as much on January 6; he said that the president was wrong in his failed attempt to highjack an election whose results would later be verified many times in subsequent failed attempts to reverse the election by judicial appeals.
I fear that very few of the people who watch only Fox News will ever watch any of the hearings. In that they would be like too many gullible Germans prior to and during World War II. And since Fox News will not carry the hearings, most of the people who deny that January 6 was a coup attempt will continue to believe that Donald Trump did nothing wrong, and that he was correct in saying of the rioters that he never saw so much love exhibited by so many out-of-control trolls (although he didn’t say that last part; I did.)
Unless there is a healthy majority of Democrats in both the Senate and the House after November 8, 2022, the presidency of Joe Biden will be an exercise in political futility for the following two years, and Donald Trump might be elected president again in 2024.
However, as Alexander Pope said, hope springs eternal in the human breast. Other hearings will be held, and other powerful evidence will be presented which will convince every sensible American in the court of public opinion that we just barely averted a fate worse than death in the failed coup of Donald Trump. The trouble is, most sensible Americans were certain long before January 6, 2020, that Donald Trump was a fraud, and a very dangerous fraud at that.
But who knows: maybe a sufficient number of committed Republicans will forego their commitment to a man who should be, and might be, behind bars, and they will summon up the courage to cast ballots against any Republican incumbent running for office again who supported The Man Who Would Be Fuehrer.
In a line never to be forgotten, Liz Cheney said of her fellow Republicans “who defend the indefensible: someday Donald Trump will be gone, but your dishonor will remain.” What a brave woman for saying that! And how indefensible was the behavior of her father, especially as vice-president, through far too much of his long political career!
Another daughter in the televised hearing admitted that the actions of her father were wrong on January 6, and since then. Ivanka did not appear in person before the committee, and she looked a little like a deer in the headlights on Zoom. She truthfully answered many of the questions that were put to her. Ivanka said she believed Attorney General William Barr when he told her it was wrong for her father to try to reverse the results of the 2020 election. The daughters had the honesty and courage to say what their fathers would never have said when pushed into a corner.
In 2022, if Republicans refuse to vote for a Democrat, then perhaps they will have the decency not to vote at all, thus allowing enough Democrats to defeat Trump Republicans, thus preventing Trump Republicans from taking complete control of Congress. That would be a miracle. But, as the lyric from Flower Drum Song proclaims, “A hundred million miracles are happening every day.”
We don’t need a hundred million miracles. All we need are a numerically relatively small number of Republican voters in enough key states and congressional districts to admit that Donald Trump tried, but failed, to steal the election of 2020, which before and since he has, ad nauseum, called a stolen election. No one has ever been a greater threat to the United States of America than Donald J. Trump - - - not Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, Mao, or Xi, and certainly not Ho, Saddam, or Bin Laden.
If you are able to do so, watch all the hearings. If you have not decided to do that before now, I hope that now you will.
In closing, I quote the prophet Isaiah: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and shrewd in their own sight.” (Isaiah 5:20-21)
Amen.
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.