When House January 6 select committee chairman Bennie Thompson swung his gavel to open the panel’s final public meeting on Monday, it marked the beginning of the end of its investigation into the riotous attack on the US Capitol fomented by former president Donald Trump as he sought to remain in power against the wishes of the American voters.
After approximately 16 months of work — including deposing hundreds of witnesses, examining countless documents obtained from the National Archives after a precedent-setting court fight, and a series of blockbuster public hearings this past summer — the nine-member panel is set to release its long-awaited report on the attack on Congress, and voted on referrals to the Department of Justice advocating Mr Trump’s prosecution on a series of crimes stemming from his role in egging on the attack and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election that it was part of.
Nearly two years after the disgraced former president encouraged a mob of his supporters to assault police officers, break into the House and Senate chambers, and even chant aloud about hanging the then-sitting Vice President of the United States, committee members used Monday’s session — the panel’s last official appearance and possibly the last time outgoing Republican members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger will speak publicly as members of the US Congress — to recommend that Mr Trump be prosecuted on charges of obstructing the quadrennial certification of US electoral college results, defrauding the United States, and potentially even more serious violations of the American criminal code.
It will get worse for Mr Trump from there. On Tuesday, the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to convene for the purpose of considering what to do with the six years of Mr Trump’s tax returns it recently obtained after a four-year court battle. And the next day, the full eight-chapter report from the January 6 committee is scheduled to be made public.
Although a criminal referral from Congress has no legal significance — particularly since the Department of Justice is already running multiple investigations into Mr Trump’s conduct — the symbolic weight could add to the effects of the political gravity that have been evident on the twice-impeached ex-president in the month-plus since he announced his third campaign for the presidency last month.
A succession of polling results show the ex-president is no longer the preferred presidential candidate for a significant share of GOP primary voters. Instead, his onetime ally and endorsement recipient, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, appears to be capturing the hearts and minds of Mr Trump’s base as far as a head-to-head matchup is concerned.
When Mr Trump declared himself a candidate for president in the 2024 Republican primary one week after a lackluster midterm result for the party he is still widely considered the de facto leader of, it was widely seen as both a cynical ploy to dissuade the federal government from taking any action against him in criminal probes stemming from his alleged involvement in the Capitol riot and his alleged unlawful retention of national defence information at his Palm Beach, Florida home.
Some people in Mr Trump’s orbit also described the early announcement as an attempt to freeze the GOP primary field by keeping putative loyalists such as his ex-secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and other rivals such as Mr DeSantis or ex-vice president Mike Pence, from announcing bids of their own.
But the weeks since he officially became a candidate for president once more have been filled with nothing but disaster for Mr Trump. Within two weeks of announcing his campaign, he drew widespread scorn for hosting rapper and notorious antisemite Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago club for dinner. Making matters worse was Mr West’s guest, avowed neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Mr Trump has also held not a single campaign event since his launch speech on 15 November. And though he did tease a “major announcement” in a video posted to his bespoke social media platform, Truth Social, early last week, that also turned out to be a dud, consisting only of the launch of a digital trading card set his supporters could purchase for $99 per card.
It was the bizarre set of limited-edition non-fungible tokens featuring Mr Trump in various heroic poses as an astronaut, a superhero, a fighter pilot, and other outlandish scenarios, that appears to be the biggest indicator of how far the ex-president has fallen, with even his most reliable boosters ridiculing the idea.
Mr Trump’s niece, clinical psychologist and author Dr Mary Trump, said in a phone interview that the trading card stunt shows Mr Trump is “behaving like a loser” because even his most ardent right-wing fans have panned the concept.
“When you have somebody like the Baked Alaska [white nationalist social media personality Anthime Gionet] complaining that he went to jail for participating in January 6 on behalf of this guy who's now selling digital trading cards, then you know you’ve definitely done some damage to yourself,” she said.
Dr Trump said it was an indicator of the extremism rampant within the GOP that the NFT release drew more opprobrium from Mr Trump’s base than his dinner with Messrs West and Fuentes, which she said would have ordinarily represented “a political death for anybody”.
Steve Schmidt, the ex-GOP strategist who ran the late Arizona senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid and who was one of the founders of the Lincoln Project anti-Trump Super PAC, told The Independent it was obvious that Mr Trump is a “spent force” from his anaemic campaign launch event.
“Who's he got in the front row? He's got Madison Cawthorn. He's got the MyPillow guy and he's got Dick Morris, which leads to me ask where all the hedge fund guys are. Where’s Lindsey Graham?” he said, adding with more than a touch of sarcasm that the “great lions of integrity and character” in the conservative movement who’d “stood tall” with Mr Trump from scandal to scandal were nowhere to be found.
“Those people don’t fear him anymore, they think he’s done,” he said.
Mr Schmidt said the twice-impeached ex-president’s impending criminal referrals from the January 6 select committee were indicative of the corner Mr Trump has painted himself into as a result of long-fought — but ultimately unsuccessful — efforts to place himself above the rule of law in the US.
“When it was said, you can't outrun the long arm of the law, that's true. We're a society of laws. The United States of America is the most complex society in human civilization, 250 years nearly as a nation of laws and endurance in these institutions, and he's run up against them in a way that is going to lead to accountability,” he said, adding that Mr Trump is now “cornered” and has “defenestrated himself”.
He also noted that the Trump NFT debacle brings the ex-president full circle to his 2016 campaign, which even Mr Trump reportedly believed to have been a branding exercise that was destined to end with his loss to Hillary Clinton.
In a statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said Mr Trump’s largely eventless campaign is still best-positioned to defeat Joe Biden in two years.
“After years of biased media coverage and Big Tech meddling in an election to help Joe Biden and the Democrats, President Trump continues to be the single, most dominant force in politics and people— especially unnamed sources who purport to be close to him— should never doubt his ability to win in a decisive and commanding fashion,” he said.
But Mr Schmidt suggested the recent polling showing most Republicans would prefer Mr Trump to stay out of the next presidential election is a harbinger of a definitive shift from the ex-president to Mr DeSantis among the GOP faithful, who he said are driven by a need to rally behind a singular figure.
“There is a demand for order,” he said, adding later that that demand can only be fulfilled by someone with a recent record of winning. He cited as an example the shift in GOP circles from 1998, when Newt Gingrich’s leadership ended after a disastrous midterm election cycle, to 2000, when Republicans rallied behind George W Bush, who’d won a resounding reelection victory in Texas just two years before.
He suggested Mr DeSantis has “outsmarted” Mr Trump by choosing not to fight him and not compromising himself for the ex-president, unlike potential rivals who served in his administration.
“Trump's like a giant fat f*** at the bottom of a mountain trying to scramble up it. You know? He never gonna reach the top, he’s just out of breath and out of shape,” he said.
Yet despite the signs that Mr Trump may have lost his momentum for good, Dr Trump, the ex-president’s niece, said her uncle is incapable of realising when it’s time to exit the stage and predicted that he will burn the GOP down rather than accept a scenario in which his status as a former president and the loyalty he engenders among roughly a third of the Republican faithful can allow him to be kingmaker because he believes he should always be the king.
“There's no such thing as graceful anything. There's no such thing as bowing out or making concessions or acknowledging missteps. He can only double down so he will ride out this wave to the apocalypse,” she said.
She added that the January 6 select committee’s impending criminal referrals will push him to lash out even more in the belief that he can avoid consequences for his alleged lawbreaking because he has avoided any thus far.
“He's always going to think that there's something you can do to fend off any kinds of real accountability. And why wouldn't he say that he has so far, he's done. He continues to get away with everything. So it makes perfect sense to me that he wouldn't be, you know, cowering in a corner,” she said. “What these referrals accomplish is informing those of us who live in reality, just how serious this is”.
