We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson’s analysis at The Washington Post of the January 6th committee’s damning evidence of Donald Trump’s lies for profit:
Trump’s campaign used the “big lie” to raise $250 million after the election, according to the committee’s findings. Much of the money was supposed to go to an “Official Election Defense Fund,” but no such fund existed. Instead, the big beneficiary was the Save America political action committee that Trump controls. According to Jan. 6 committee researchers, more than $200,000 found its way to the bottom line of the Trump Hotel Collection.
Who could have guessed that a big pot of money would be found at the heart of this whole sordid affair? Anyone remotely familiar with Trump’s modus operandi over his entire career, that’s who.
Susan Glasser at The New Yorker:
It’s not hard to decide which side to take in the contest between Team Normal and Team Rudy. The former New York mayor was effectively portrayed, on Monday, as a drunken buffoon who pushed Trump to claim victory on Election Night when it was obvious he had not won, and who offered worse and worse advice as the weeks dragged on and the courtroom defeats piled up. In Trump, Giuliani had a more-than-willing accomplice, as the testimony of Trump’s own former advisers so damningly showed. Team Normal presented the President the truth about many of Giuliani’s claims, but the truth did not matter. “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” Barr said.
More from Dana Milbank on Trump ditching “Team Normal” for a team that could turn a profit:
Giuliani, once America’s Mayor and Time’s Person of the Year, long ago became a national punchline, with his melting hair dye and his post-election news conference at Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping. But thanks to the select committee, we now know that people inside the Trump administration and campaign also thought him preposterous — with one key exception: Trump.
Max Boot says that the January 6th hearings are making an impact:
The committee’s hearings are exceeding expectations, because it is not behaving like a typical congressional committee. There is no grandstanding and no preening. There are no petty partisan squabbles. There is not even the disjointedness that normally occurs when a bunch of politicians are each given five minutes to question each witness. There is only the relentless march of evidence, all of it deeply incriminating to a certain former president who keeps insisting that he was robbed of his rightful election victory.
On a final note, Danielle Moodie at The Daily Beast has election advice for Democrats:
If Democrats want to win in November they need to showcase to the public that we are no longer living in a “rational” two-party democratic system. Instead, one of the major political parties no longer believes in the rule of law. It believes in violence, it believes in denying a free and fair election, and it believes in (at best) looking the other way when its own members engage in rank racism—when it isn’t blatantly encouraging bigotry itself.
To win elections you have to distinguish yourself and your platform from the other side.
And these dots aren’t hard to connect. But not making these very clear links between white supremacist domestic terrorism and the Republican Party is a choice, and it’s a bad one.