Jan 6 hearings: can Trump supporters be returned to the American fold?

This morning Australia time, Chairman Bennie Thompson closed the fourth of what will be seven public hearings of the select committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.

Like the name given to the committee, the term “hearing” is a misnomer.

Instead, the committee has constructed a multimedia presentation for the public — and the Department of Justice investigators who are tuning in — broadcasting the evidence it has collected over the past year from more than 1000 interviews and 100,000 documents, emails and text messages.

The display is augmented by live and predominantly Republican witnesses recalling what they say caused an insurrectionist mob to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election by storming the Capitol building in Washington DC.

The hearing will also investigate how the storming of the Capitol was just one element of a seven-part plan devised by then president Trump and senior members of his staff and campaign to overthrow the results of a free and fair election. Plus, how the threat posed to democracy by those same forces continues to this day.

Viewers have so far been read into the astounding degree of attention and resources the Department of Justice spent investigating claims that Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, described during hearing three as “nonsense”, “silly” and “bullshit”. It’s a verdict the former AG delivered multiple times to Trump when he was president, as he simultaneously was receiving the same hard truth from his campaign leadership, the state election officials overseeing the multiple recounts and audits, and the courts, which were tossing out the campaign’s suits for lack of basis or evidence.  

Yet Trump kept repeating these lies, and his followers trusted him. It is this same principle — repetition — that the committee seeks to use to deprogram Americans who still believe such falsehoods.

It was the committee’s juxtaposition in the second hearing of claims that Trump was repeatedly told were false — say, the suitcase full of votes in Georgia — with spliced video of violent insurrectionists repeating them as cause for their presence at the Capitol on January 6 that brought home the depth of Trump’s betrayal.

It is a betrayal not of Democrats or never-Trump Republicans or independents, but of those who gave their heart to the man, who donated to his campaign, who came to the Capitol when he called and who, because of that, have copped fines or even jail time — while their leader, so far at least, walked away.

This is the most important and delicate of the committee’s tasks: finding a way to talk to, and about, the roughly 30% of Americans Trump took for a ride.

Yes, it’s doubtful their minds will be changed such that they stand up at the next family dinner and proclaim mea culpa — that’s never going to happen. But if the intensity of their preoccupation with the former president can be reduced, and allegiance to his false and distorted worldview weakened, they might stop sharing disinformation and threatening election workers with violence.

This is not the committee’s only public-facing agenda. The other is to paint the risks convincingly enough that if the Department of Justice can bring itself to lay criminal charges against the former president, the 37% of Americans who are telling pollsters they oppose such a move will at least desist from rioting in the street.

Certainly, that seems to be the endgame for Republican vice-chair of the committee Liz Cheney, who uses key phrases from federal statutes to describe Trump’s misdeeds. Cheney seems determined to drive a stake through Trump’s political future by demanding legal consequences for turning the Republican Party into what she labelled in hearing four as a cesspit of “conspiracy theories and thug violence”.

She had better hurry. CNN reported last week that Donald Trump is already agitating to announce his 2024 presidential campaign before the November midterms.