The Jan. 6 committee's final public hearing before the midterm election ended with a bang, not a whimper. At the conclusion of the hearing the committee's nine members voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify. After their two-and-a-half hour presentation, it's hard to imagine how they ever could have contemplated doing otherwise. They presented a meticulously documented case which showed that Trump had a premeditated plan of many months to deny losing the election, plotted a coup to overturn the results if he did, incited a violent insurrection when that was thwarted, and then refused for hours to respond to the violence as he watched it unfold on television. Whether he will respond to the subpoena remains to be seen, but either way it's another black mark on his uniquely corrupt and dishonest political career.
For most of us who closely followed events in real time, both on Jan. 6 and through the subsequent investigations and revelations, much of this was not news. But it's been a while since we focused on some of these details, and to see it presented in narrative form, with so much video and documentary evidence, is still powerful. For instance, the fact that Trump had planned to contest the election if he lost was no secret. Indeed, he had signaled back in 2016 that he would never concede defeat, famously declaring in the days before that election, "I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win." For years after that victory he insisted that he'd actually won the popular vote but had been victimized by millions of immigrants illegally voting in California. He even convened something called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to try to prove that case. Even his hand-picked hacks couldn't turn up any evidence, and the "commission" was quietly disbanded without even issuing a report.
