If you want to understand Donald Trump’s mindset in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, it’s crucial to get a clear picture of the information ecosystem he was part of at the time. It’s not like the insurrection spontaneously erupted out of a singularity in the void. As much as it may have looked spontaneous, it wasn’t simply a case of “then one day Trump besmirched his Underoos and up from the ground come a bumblin’ coup.”
In fact, establishing Trump’s mindset is key to the success of these hearings—and, by extension, to the future health of our democracy. And to do that, you can’t just take a couple of X-rays of the Plinko machine in his head and submit them into evidence. You need to know what kind of information he was receiving about the election—and what he was doing with it.
So that’s why the House Jan. 6 committee’s decision on Thursday to air a clip of Ivanka Trump admitting she didn’t believe her own father’s shambolic election lies was not only fair, but essential. If Trump’s favorite daughter/child/person/de facto sister-wife was telling him he lost fair and square, what are the chances he actually believed Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell? They didn’t show the clip to get Trump’s goat—that was just a pleasing byproduct, like the warm, fuzzy glow a man gets after being spanked by a porn star who reminds him of his daughter. No, they showed it to make a point: Trump knew he’d lost, but his ego was far more important to him than his country.
But hey, even Big-Lie-refuting conservatives like National Review Editor Rich Lowry seem to want to get in on the bash-the-Jan. 6-hearings game. For his part, Lowry is going for the lowest of low-hanging fruit by admonishing all of us mean libs to leave Ivanka alone!
For the nontweeters:
LOWRY: “The Ivanka Trump clip has gotten a lot of attention, but its inclusion was entirely gratuitous and clearly meant simply to embarrass her—a committee purportedly devoted to saving our democracy shouldn’t be so petty and should do better”
Aww, did those big, bad pro-democracy peeps hurt Vanky’s feelings? We can’t have that. It’s not like she was one of her dad’s top White House advisers or anything. Out of bounds!
Needless to say, Lowry was slapped down like a MAGA mite’s money at a back-alley horse pharmacy.
I suppose if you’d spent four years trying to rationalize nearly every Trump outrage, you have to say something when his crimes against democracy are set to unfold in garish detail. But defending the doe-eyed White House ingenue against the meanies on the left? Is that really what William F. Buckley would do?
Maybe. But, frankly, I kinda doubt it.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.