The die was cast long before Trump took the stage at the Ellipse.
Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to hear a lot of dissection of what Trump said on the morning of January 6, 2020 — GOP reps, Senators, and mouthpieces claiming that nothing was said to incite the insurrection, and harping on his one-time use of the word “peacefully.” And Democrats breaking down what was said and why it led to what happened at the Capitol that afternoon. It is a distraction. It will be an endless debate that is not determinative of any issue in the impeachment trial.
What Donald J. Trump said, and didn’t say, on January 6 simply does not matter in determining the issues facing the country.
This may seem, to some, to be a controversial statement, or dismissive of the very real harm done by his words on that day. Let me skip, for a moment, to a different, completely unrelated story.
In a town near where I grew up, in a deeply red Southern state, a marriage between a 30-ish hardcore MAGA man and his wife of 4 years, a center-left woman who was deeply concerned over the direction of the county under Trump, had become strained. At times, the disagreements over political and social issues devolved into verbal abuse. The conflict expanded to include the husband’s MAGA-inflected friends and family, including his boss, something of a Trump Train conductor in the local community.
Beginning with the boss, this group of associates sought to influence the husband on the question of whether she should get a job when things got tight during the pandemic. Several suggested that working outside of the home would potentially present opportunities for unfaithful behavior, which was a trigger for the controlling husband. Now, many of these men, including the husband’s co-workers, were already leery of and did not like the wife… as she criticized their militia cosplay and tried to steer her husband away from their group activities. After she decided to take a job anyway, the campaign ramped up. Specific allegations of suspected infidelity became a regular feature of their conversations with the husband, but these allegations weren’t backed with evidence or anything more than speculative connections. Rather, they were backed with testosterone-poisoned exhortations that the husband “couldn’t let her get away with this” and had to “fight to keep what was rightfully his.”
As might be expected, this led to an escalation of the abusive behavior, culminating in a domestic violence arrest and a restraining order. All of this was fueled by the false allegations of infidelity and the urging to take action to stop it, but neither the boss nor the other friends or co-workers ever specifically told the husband that he should physically force his wife to stop whatever it was they claimed she was doing. They didn’t ever say “you need to hit her to keep her in line.” They merely gave him a reason they knew full well would lead him in that direction.
Okay, this story is a complete fabrication. But you get the point. It wasn’t any specific direction that led to the outburst… it was the ongoing drumbeat that the husband was being “wronged” and had to do something to stop it. Armed with that disinformation, he knew what to do without being given an order or direction to do so. And that is what happened with the insurrections.
It doesn’t matter what you, or I think about Trump’s inciteful speech. It doesn’t matter what other elected officials think of it, whether they believe it rose to a level what they would consider to be inciting insurrection. What matters is that the insurrectionists knew what they were being told. Ron Johnson may not find Trump’s words or actions to be encouraging insurrection. But the insurrectionists did. Trump isn’t being charged with inciting Ron Johnson, or Rand Paul, or Susan Collins. He’s charged with inciting the people who invaded the Capitol, and they considered themselves to be there because the President wanted them to be. And that is why they traveled to DC. Most of these people didn’t hear a speech on January 6 and then decide to attack the Capitol. They had decided to come ‘stop the steal’ before that speech was even written. Their own words and actions prove it. When the GOP Senators argue that the words were not enough to incite the rioters, the response needs to be simple, consistent, and repetitive — how could the words not be enough to incite when hundreds of the incited tell you, themselves, that they were present because the President told them to be there?
The insurrection wasn’t the result of the speech. That was little more than the locker-room speech before the game. The game was already scheduled and the game-plan was set. Don’t fall into the trap of debating whether those words, that morning, were enough to consitute incitement to insurrection. The incitement was the relentless, dishonest, and calculated selling of the Big Lie of election fraud for weeks before. And that incitement is going to continue, as the central pillar in the “defense strategy,” during the trial next week.
