The final report from the House Jan. 6 committee is a true gift to the American people.
In its 800-plus pages, the members have given us a cogent, chronological account of the incidents leading up to one of the most shameful events in American history: the storming of the Capitol by violent, misguided supporters of President Donald Trump, operating under the fallacy that he'd won the 2020 election.
Here is proof, for those who missed (or wanted to ignore) the committee's televised hearings, that Trump knew he lost but couldn't bear the humiliation and set about to ensure himself at least another four years in office. Who knows what other horrors he might have visited on our Constitution had his coup succeeded?
Dark but entertaining tidbits are sprinkled throughout the report, which places ultimate blame for the terrible events at the feet of Trump.
For instance, did you know that dirty political trickster Roger Stone coined the phrase "Stop the Steal"? Not in 2020, mind you, but in 2016, when he pretended that candidate Trump's Republican rivals were trying to steal the nomination from him. Or that right-wing provocateur Ali Alexander, a frequent collaborator of Stone's, launched the now-defunct event website wildprotest.com in December 2020, just after Trump tweeted out his invitation to the Jan. 6 rally? Or that Julie Fancelli, the 72-year-old heir to the Publix supermarket fortune, offered to spend $3 million to pay speakers and ferry protesters to Washington on Jan. 6?
Those stories are from Chapter 6, "Be There, Will be Wild!" The chapter examines the fascistic white nationalist groups — the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Groypers, QAnon adherents — who looked upon Trump's invitation to Washington as a call to violence and the chance to remake the United States into some demented version of greatness that never was.
They were, of course, completely delusional about many things — that the election was stolen, that Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to certify its results, that Trump could stay in office with their help, that they would escape the wrath of the justice system.
For example, Stewart Rhodes, the convicted seditionist who founded the Oath Keepers, told the committee he believed that Trump could have mobilized "unorganized militia" like the Oath Keepers to suppress an insurrection if he attempted to stay in power after losing the election.
"This fantasy reflected a warped sense of reality," the committee wrote in its report. "The Oath Keepers themselves were the ones contemplating insurrection."
Proof: In a message to colleagues, quoted in the report, Rhodes wrote, "Either Trump gets off his ass and uses the Insurrection Act to defeat the Chicom puppet coup or we will have to rise up in insurrection (rebellion) against the Chicom puppet Biden. Take your pick." ("Chicom" = Chinese Communist.)
As I read Chapter 6, it hit me that the faux patriots like Rhodes, who faces up to 20 years in federal prison, are nothing more than ridiculously over-the-top drama queens. They have persuaded themselves they are saving the Constitution (from democracy, I guess), when they are in fact lining their birdcages with it. They imagine themselves as battling forces of evil to inflate their self-worth. They would be laughable if they were not so dangerous. (And well armed: Rhodes, the report says, "amassed an arsenal of military grade weapons and equipment in the days leading up to Jan. 6" and stashed it in a hotel outside the District of Columbia.)
In another example of destroyers-posing-as-saviors irony, the report notes that the Proud Boys and their leader Enrique Tarrio imagined themselves to be reenacting the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. They took up the battle cry "Storm the Winter Palace," an allusion to the toppling of Russia's czarist order. As the Jan. 6 committee points out in its report, that event led to 70-plus years of communist rule.
"No historic event has been less American," the committee dryly noted. (Jury selection in Tarrio's trial for seditious conspiracy is underway in Washington.)
Online posts about what would happen on Jan. 6 were rife with predictions of violence.
"You can go to Washington on Jan. 6 and help storm the capitol," wrote a user on the QAnon website 8kun. "We will storm the government buildings, kill cops, kill security guards, kill federal employees and agents, and demand a recount."
Reading about the deluded warriors of Jan. 6, I was reminded of one of the great literary characters: Don Quixote, the man from La Mancha.
Four hundred years ago, Miguel de Cervantes invented him, a lowly nobleman whose love for romance and chivalry leads him to fantasize that he is a knight errant, riding across the Spanish countryside on his old hag, which he imagines to be a noble steed, in search of outlandish adventures and glory. Among his many misguided deeds of derring-do, he mistakes windmills for giants who must be slain with his sword.
He is a great character, and he is also a fool — paranoid and unable to distinguish between reality and his fevered imagination.
This brand of paranoia and self-aggrandizement, minus any of Don Quixote's endearing romanticism, lives on in the Roger Stones, Stewart Rhodeses, Enrique Tarrios and the many, many other foolish people who played roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
As for the man from Mar-a-Lago, he's still tilting at windmills, pretending he won the election, fantasizing about ruling over the land once again. Here's hoping he can do that from prison.
