The PR Wing Of The GOP

[Rev. Rye]

I get the feeling IA is trying to eat his cake and have it, too. Trying to minimise Trump's role in the horseshit while being merely 90-some percent full of shit and not 100%. Yes, Trump's speech was irresponsible, but to call it merely the tip of an iceberg does little justice to how much he was involved and how much of it was publicly known.

He spent the intervening two months promoting baseless conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen from him to a base that, to borrow an old saw, would strain at a gnat given to them by anyone a few angstroms to the left of Fox News, but gladly swallow a camel from Trump or Tucker Carlson or, well, anyone sufficiently batshit right-wing. And if their conspiracy theories kept failing, and if the attempts he made to overturn the election results legally (handily detailed in this article, published mere hours before shit got real), it couldn't be because Trump and his team were talking shit; it had to be because the Establishment was rigging things against him.

And Trump was known to try some really questionable shit to try and get the results of the election overturned; aside from his insistence (against all the constitutional scholars who disagreed with him) that Mike Pence could nullify the results of the election, the day before the riots, audio had been leaked of him strong-arming the governor of Georgia to find enough votes for him to win the state. This was briefly considered impeachment-worthy, until the next day rendered that issue little more than small potatoes.

The day of the rally, after Rudy Giuliani talked about "trial by combat", Trump gave his speech. One where he admitted he'd never concede and announced plans for his supporters to march to the Capitol and fight for him. And the rest is history, with the riot lasting for several hours (and many rioters claiming they were specifically ordered to do what they were doing by Trump), and only dispersing when Trump made a video telling them to leave the Capitol, but not before continuing to push the "stolen election" narrative and telling the rioters they were "very special" and that he loved them. Barely more than a token condemnation of their actions. Even something like this would have been better:



It reeked of mere damage control, something he had been ordered to do by staffers who were, to their credit, much saner than Trump is.

All the information in the preceding couple of paragraphs was part of the public record by the time America went to bed on January 6. And much more has come about in the intervening year and a half. Hell, in less than a week, we got a look at what went on in the White House that day which said that Trump had to be pressured into making that video statement, and, as dodgy as it was, it was apparently the most usable of three takes they made that day. And even that take still seems like the presidential version of this:



Only ignorance or sheer delusion can sustain these arguments at this point. Hell, the only reason Trump's second impeachment after the riot ended up failing was because, while seven Republican senators decided to cross party lines and vote for impeachment for once, the rest of the Republicans in the Senate prioritised partisanship over the law.