The second of the televised January 6 Committee hearings occurred Monday, and I was immediately struck by something that Rep. Zoe Lofgren had placed into the record. She presented a timeline which showed that Donald Trump had begun inserting—one could say planting—the idea of a stolen 2020 election months before the election took place. By the evidence, the earliest he began doing so was April 2020.
This struck me because, back in February of this year, I happened to catch a segment of Nicolle Wallace’s Deadline: White House where she had Michael Steele as a guest. The former RNC chair has had no love lost for the GOP; he generally gives solid commentary as an MSNBC contributor. (At times, I wonder exactly what he underwent interpersonally to bring him to this current understanding. I believe something happened, because he once toed the line with the best of the prevaricators.)
The date of the interview was February 2nd, and it so struck me that I wrote a diary that very day. I felt that Steele had broken news, which was that Trump had twisted his Covid response into an election wedge issue, and that he did this intentionally.
Keep in mind that Nicolle Wallace was originally speaking, at the top of her hour, about Phil Waldron and the White House effort to seize voting machines. It was Steele that brought in this other end of the thread and tied these two ideas together.
I’ll quote from the previous diary, as much of it was transcription.
Wallace asked Steele when Trump may have come up with the idea for planting doubt about the results of the election. Steele directed her all the way back to—not August, as she had conjectured—but April, when Trump had apparently seen internal polling data showing American sentiment regarding Covid souring rapidly.
I had found a clip of the show, but it was not directly from MSNBC and soon the YouTube video had its privacy settings changed so as to no longer support public view. (I just now tried to track down an official MSNBC clip and I still am unable to find one. I wish I could so as to supplement this recounting of the storyline.) However, in the meantime, I had managed to transcribe the interaction between Steele and Wallace.
Wallace: So the problem with the Waldron-Gohmert-Trump axis of—I don’t know what to call it—disinformation, is that we know it’s BS because Bill Barr, who acknowledged being willing to investigate voter fraud before the election. Highly unusual. (Not illegal—unethical.) Couldn’t find any, before, during, or after the election. We know that the only person who called who called on his voters to commit voter fraud was Donald Trump, in North Carolina: he told them to vote twice. That’s a felony there. We know that Chris Krebs, lifelong Republican, was fired for declaring that what Waldron alleged back in “August, September and October” didn’t happen. There was no interference; it was, quote, “the most secure election in American history.”
So I think it’s remarkable that Trump’s attention was turned toward the liars and not the truth-tellers in his own ranks. But it does suggest that the plot . . . it started way before Election Day. It started way before the defeat. It started—they started laying the ground to do this, it would appear, in August.
Steele: I would take you one better, Nicolle. It started, that ground became fertile, in April, in May, when Trump indicated that, “You know, if I don’t win this election this November, it’s because of fraud.” I mean, he was—this was— You go back and you listen to what the President was saying at his rallies, what he was saying in his engagement with reporters around this issue of the election, Trump had made it very clear. We know internal polling back at that time showed a great vulnerability for the President on the issue of Covid; that as this process began to unfold, these narratives around the health and safety of the nation began to take its grip on the families and communities across the nation, where people were getting sick and dying. Their attitudes were changing. That was reflected in the internal conversations and polling inside the White House.
So you can begin to track where the President’s thinking evolved to lay down the predicate about this election. This was not a recognition of his failure as president to keep safe the American people but rather a way to address that failure and still win the day, win the argument. So it began long before we got into the fall—
Wallace: Mm.
Steele: —where it became critical mass for the President to lay out a narrative that would rally his troops to the polls and then, ostensibly, afterwards. But then also begin to utilize the mechanisms and controls of government along the way.
Note that the timeline that Rep. Lofgren presented also began with a clip from April.
(Cue to 35:21. Trump, on April 8, speaking from the White House podium: “You know the things with bundling and all of the things that are happening with votes by mail where thousands of votes are gathered. And I'm not going to say which party does it, but thousands of votes are gathered and they come in and they're dumped in a location. And then all of a sudden, you lose elections that you think you're going to win.”)
As I said in my previous diary:
Thinking back to April, that was when Trump was pushing aggressively to open all the churches and to have people singing Easter hymns at full volume near each other. So that was a pivot point, according to Steele.
But let’s think back.
News began trickling out of China late in 2019 about a strange, rapid-fire contagion. (I first noticed the story in a small news blurb in December, and soon thereafter there were stories about the doctor who’d tried to warn the world at least a month earlier.) In January, IIRC, advisors to Trump told him in no uncertain terms that this was potentially a pandemic and that confronting it would be the most difficult issue he had faced. A monumental task.
What did Trump do? He sat on the information.
By February late January, people on our mainland began falling ill. Trump minimized the danger. He confirmed to Woodward that he did this purposely.
In March, Tom Hanks fell ill, and the NBA suspended all games, the same day. The impact jolted the public, and Trump clearly realized that he could not politically afford to let the situation go without appearing to confront the issue.
I say appearing because all the way from at least January until March, all Trump wanted to do was minimize and ignore. He simply pretended like it wasn’t happening.
Because he is a child. Mentally, he is a toddler. His first instinct, on hearing about how hard the task was going to be, was to hide it like a terrible mistake. Like a two-year-old, he thought pretending that he didn’t break something and putting it behind a dresser would mean that no one would notice whatever he was hiding. But sometimes you hide something, and it begins to stink. Or it sparks and catches the entire place on fire.
So, by my estimation, he realized he’d fucked up deep-doo-dooed it in February. That was when he decided to intentionally pretend like Covid would not become, or had not even the potential to become, a serious issue (let alone a deadly one).
Compounding his error was something he did in April, which was nonchalantly and ambivalently introduce the new CDC recommendations for mask wearing. Later, he refused to wear a mask while in public (touring an assembly plant, for example). These instances were live on TV, and they communicated that it simply was not important to wear a mask: that it was optional, like fashion. In fact, it was speculated at the time in political rumor mills that Trump had disdained the mask because he thought it might smudge his bronzer.
So, I’ll recap: Trump intentionally condemned nearly a million people to die of Covid because he wanted to pretend it had nothing to do with him. At several key junctures, he doubled down on his efforts. Finally, in April, it seems (according to Steele’s interpretation) Trump consciously made the decision to use Covid as a device to win re-election. He created his own wedge issue, by way of his vanity, and led people to death.
Now, in the wake of the second hearing, several commentators on various stations brought up the fact of this timeline. Indeed, MSNBC happened to have Michael Steele on as one of the pundits in the hearing’s aftermath. He repeated what he had told Nicolle Wallace about how this was all cooked up in April and that it was important to establish that as the timeline. But he was not able to tell the anchors why, as Katy Tur, who was co-anchoring with Andrea Mitchell, dismissed his concerns by lumping Trump’s efforts with his pre-emptive whining from 2016.
Someone here, too, brought up Trump’s assertions from way back, where he said that if he lost in 2016 it would be due to fraud. Now, it’s certainly true that he’d said the same thing back then; I’ve never accused Trump of being original. However, as I explained a couple of days ago, the difference is that in 2020 he was already in power and was devising a way to retain that power. Completely different circumstances. His words take on new meaning.
So what I mean to impress is that
- Trump received terrible internal polling, all the way back in early April 2020, about how his handling of Covid was going awry and that the American public was turning on him.
- Either with cold calculation or his usual cunning, Trump decided to deflect from his incompetence on Covid by transforming Covid into a device, a way to divide the American public at the very time we needed to pull together to save lives.
- While doing so, he explicitly began to say that the only way he could possibly lose was by malevolent intent.
As time went on, that thread simply got folded in, so that by the time we got to January 6th, all we saw was the violence.
These two things need to be tied together.