Did you see episode three? The president calls his deputy a “pussy” and “wimp” for refusing to support his coup. An angry mob then goes after said deputy wanting to hang him. A legal scholar who cooked up the plan asks the president for a pardon.
Thursday’s congressional hearing into the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol veered into you-couldn’t-make-it-up territory. But while political aficionados were agog, it remained less certain how many citizens were paying attention at lunchtime on a midweek workday.
As the panel’s sessions near the halfway mark, their explosive narrative about Republican president Donald Trump’s failed power grab is struggling to break through to an American public consumed by economic anxiety. Democrats could find that gas at $5 a gallon, not the threat to democracy, looms largest in November’s midterm elections.
“People are much more concerned about living day to day,” said Joni Bryan, 59, a non-profit founder and store manager who did not watch the third hearing and was attending a gathering of religious conservatives in Nashville on Friday. “Just this year my gas, my food and my rent has increased a thousand dollars a month so I’m having to take another job to try to pay just for what I had last year. It’s really hard out here and right now it seems like the administration couldn’t care less.”
There are seven Democrats and two Republicans on the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee. After a year of painstaking work and more than a thousand interviews, it wanted to make a splash in the public arena. The committee enlisted James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, to help its presentation.
The committee chairman, Bennie Thompson, and vice-chair, Liz Cheney, have sought to make a methodical case that Trump’s lies about the 2020 election led directly to his supporters’ insurrection. The sessions have drawn comparison with true crime TV series or podcasts, with each “episode” having its own theme and ending with a tantalising preview of the next (though there is no mystery about whodunnit).
The panel has shown clips from the violent assault on the US Capitol and also from closed-door interviews with Trump aides and associates who were trying to dissuade him from spreading falsehoods about an election he lost. The former attorney general, Bill Barr, describedhis claims of fraud as “bullshit” and remarked that Trump was becoming “detached from reality”.
On Thursday, Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, Julie Radford, was seen telling the panel in a deposition that Trump called Vice-President Mike Pence the “P-word”, meaning “pussy”, for refusing to overturn the election. Other witnesses have appeared in person. Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards described a bloody “war scene” and hours of hand-to-hand combat.
Not all the details are new but Democrats hope that, by weaving them together, the cumulative effect will provide a wake-up call to America about the continued threat to its democracy. Many election deniers are running as Republican candidates in the midterms and Trump appears poised for another presidential run in 2024.
Donna Brazile, a former acting chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The hearings so far have been very compelling and informational. This is just as important as the Iran-contra hearings, the Watergate hearings, the 9/11 hearings. It’s to encourage the public to follow all of the facts and understand what happened because the American people should be once again reminded that the United States of America was under attack.”
It was not necessary to “join the dots” right away, Brazile added. “We know, that as a result of the pandemic, the entire global economy is facing strains and stresses in terms of the demand for fuel and food but this notion that we can’t do two things at one time is just political spin. This is about the future of American democracy.”
The first hearing, held at 8pm to receive maximum exposure on primetime television, was watched by an estimated 20 million people, according to the Nielsen ratings agency. This ranked below other political events such as Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, which pulled in 38 million viewers in March, but higher than the first televised hearing of the impeachment inquiry into Trump, which attracted about 14 million in 2019.
The first January 6 hearing also beat the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys and Golden Globes, all of which drew fewer than 10 million viewers last year. The opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games attracted 15.1 million and 14 million viewers in 2020 and 2021 respectively.
But Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, cautioned: “Twenty million watching, that’s great, but you’re still talking about a tiny fraction of the actual voting pool. If they’re not watching, they’re not going to be very influenced by it. Even if they are watching, it doesn’t mean that you can somehow put the emphasis on January 6 or the plot to steal the presidency rather than inflation and potential recession and all the other problems on the plate right now.”
The riot happened nearly 18 months ago and, to many voters, democracy can seem like an abstract, intangible concept. Sabato added: “If they’re concerned at all, they say, ‘That’s esoteric, we’ll get to that eventually, let’s worry about that in 2024. Right now, I want something done about my gas prices. I can’t believe I’m paying $6 a gallon.’ They don’t even think about anything else.”
Friday marked the 50th anniversary of the arrest of five men for breaking into and bugging the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, triggering a scandal that led to the resignation of the president, Richard Nixon. It is estimated that the average household watched about 30 hours of the Senate Watergate hearings during the summer of 1973.
The January 6 committee faces a tougher task to cut through and shape the national conversation in a fragmented landscape of cable news, social media and “alternative facts”. Republican leaders have denounced the hearings as a partisan, politically motivated witch-hunt designed to deflect attention from Biden’s economic troubles. The conservative Fox News network refused to show the first hearing in prime time, although it did broadcast the second and third.
Frank Luntz, a pollster and political messaging expert, believes that the committee has made some missteps, for example by starting the all-important first hearing with speeches from Thompson and Cheney before playing a video of what happened. “If you want to influence people you show them the facts, you show them the evidence, and then you do the interpretation, not the other way around,” he said.
Trump loyalists who backed his election lies were denied places on the committee. Their absence makes it easy for Trump voters to dismiss, Luntz added. “It’s not about being fair, it’s actually about how you change the minds of people. If I’m a Trump person, all that I’m seeing is the negativity and they’re trying to jam him. My reaction is, well, this is one side of the story, I haven’t heard the other side.”
At the Faith & Freedom “Road to Majority” conference in Nashville on Friday, such views were commonplace. Tommy Crosslin, 54, a singer-songwriter, said: “It’s unfair. The story has two sides but I think we’re only hearing one side. Americans have open minds, but they know the truth and the whole truth is not imparted into the January 6 hearings. The American people are smart enough to discern what’s going on.”
A national survey this week by Navigator Research found 28% of registered voters have heard “a lot” about the hearings, 35% have heard “some” and 37% have heard “a little/ nothing”. Two in three Republicans say the committee is too focused on the past and there should be a focus on issues facing the country today. A Washington Post headline observed: “Some feel hopeful, others angry. Many aren’t watching at all.”
Michigan congressman Fred Upton, a Republican, had a more optimistic look. He said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that he believed the hearings have had “some impact” on moderate Republican voters and independents, even if hardcore faithfuls belonging to “your different factions … are not going to tune in and watch”.
Nonetheless, in such a context, few Democrats believe the hearings will make a significant impact in the midterm elections, where the party holding the White House traditionally fares badly. Biden, whose approval rating is in the doldrums, acknowledged in an Associated Press interview this week: “People are really, really down.”
But the committee’s findings may have longer-term consequences by putting Turmp at risk of criminal prosecution.
David Rudolf, a leading trial lawyer seen in the true crime TV series The Staircase, said: “The committee is aiming at one audience and that’s the Department of Justice. What they’ve put together is a very compelling opening statement, laying out, just like you would for a jury, what the case is going to be, a prediction of the evidence.
“From my perspective, it is as persuasive and well put together as any opening statement I’ve ever seen. It’s exactly the kind of opening statement that I would make if I was prosecuting Trump and [lawyer John] Eastman and [adviser Peter] Navarro and various others and I think that’s what they’re aiming for.”
