In January 2021, when hearing that a mob, which had attacked the Capitol building in Washington, was calling for the vice-president of the United States Mike Pence to be hanged, then-president Donald Trump was quoted as saying, “He deserves it”.
This is just one of the more shocking revelations to emerge from the first days of explosive congressional panel hearings into last year’s January 6th assault on the heart of US democracy.
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There was more.
Everyone around Trump knew he had lost the election and told him over and over again that the wild allegations that it had been stolen from him were – in the words of his then attorney general William Barr – “bullsh*t”.
But, undeterred by reason or logical argument, Trump orchestrated – or at least was involved in – a multi-pronged campaign to overturn the election and, according to the hearings, posed a danger both to American democracy and his vice-president.
His team solicited money from supporters for a so-called election defence fund and raised hundreds of millions of dollars in just a couple of weeks. The fund never existed.
Martin Wall, Washington correspondent for The Irish Times, has been following the hearings and assesses what has happened and what might happen next.
