Seventeen months ago, apparently urged on by Donald Trump when the then president was in denial about his election defeat, a violent mob stormed the US Capitol. One police officer lost his life and four others died by suicide in the following months. About 140 were injured in what many Democrats have argued was nothing less than an attempted coup.
On Thursday evening, landmark House of Representative investigative hearings opened, broadcast in prime time. The aim is to attempt to address whether there was indeed a conspiracy and the degree of Trump involvement and culpability. The select committee investigating the attack, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, has already carried out about 1,000 interviews and reviewed 125,000 records, including texts between top Trump administration officials, members of Congress and protesters.
Republicans, most of whom are boycotting the public hearings, denounce them as a “witch hunt” and “show trial”. For Democrats, five months before midterm elections in which they face big losses, they are a high-stakes political exercise. Above all they are intended to remind voters of the scale of Trump’s efforts to suppress the presidential election result – what the committee has described as a “coordinated, multistep effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power” – and of his total capture of the Republican party. If they can also provide evidence of conspiracy for prosecutions of more than the rioters, all the better, they reason.
It is an uphill battle at a time when polls show voters preoccupied with inflation, rising coronavirus cases, gun violence and war in Ukraine. An NBC poll earlier this week showed just 45 per cent of Americans now say the former president was “solely” or “mainly” responsible for the attack on the US Capitol – down 7 per cent from the figure recorded in a similar poll in early 2021.
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Trump, who will not testify and who has urged allies not to co-operate, has a number of already proven charges to answer to: his persistence with the lie that the election was stolen despite overwhelming evidence, his attempt to subvert the election by illegally embroiling the justice department and browbeating election officials to deny the counts, his pressure on vice-president Mike Pence to throw out the electoral votes, his incitement of demonstrators to march on the Capitol, his refusal to act to stop the violence for more than three hours while the assault was underway.
But do these acts and omissions – some of them clearly illegal – rise to the provable level of conspiracy? In the end perhaps the best the hearings will achieve is a political indictment of a man who bewilderingly retains the support of nearly half of the electorate. Whether that could damage his future prospects is another question.