As Donald Trump remains the unequivocal leader of the GOP and the miles-ahead frontrunner in the way-too-early polling for the 2024 election, it is increasingly imperative that his fans and apologists both minimize the seriousness of January 6 and rationalize the ongoing effort to question the 2020 election results. Facts, however, are stubborn things, and the facts are increasingly revealing that President Trump was one Mike Pence “yes” away from nearly breaking this nation.
The minimalist case regarding January 6 is that it was yet another “hoax.” No, not that the event itself was a hoax, but that it was “hoax” that it was anything close to an insurrection. Instead, it was a protest that got out of hand and was quickly cleared. Some have even argued that the conflicts with police may have been provoked—that the police struck first and that caused the crowd to surge forward.
Writing in Hillsdale College’s popular Imprimis digest, Roger Kimball published an entire essay belittling claims of an insurrection and describing the real victims of the moment:
Someday—maybe someday soon—this witches’ sabbath, this festival of scapegoating, and what George Orwell called the “hideous ecstasy” of hate will be at an end. Perhaps someday people will be aghast, and some will be ashamed, of what they did to the President of the United States and people who supported him: the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, for instance, proposing to put Senator Ted Cruz on a “no fly” list, and Simon & Schuster canceling Senator Josh Hawley’s book contract.
More:
Donald Trump is the Emmanuel Goldstein (the designated principal enemy of the totalitarian state Oceania in Orwell’s 1984) of the movement. But minor public enemies are legion. Anyone harboring “Trumpist” inclinations is suspect, hence the widespread calls for “deprogramming” Trump’s supporters, who are routinely said to be “marching toward sedition.”
The issue now, according to Kimball (quoting Michael Barone) is that our “oligarchs” are now moving from impeachment to “canceling conservatism.”
Let’s put aside for just a moment the almost-astonishing (“almost,” because nothing is astonishing any longer) effort to minimize the extraordinary violent assault we witnessed with our own eyes. If you’ve forgotten, you can watch some of the footage here. And let’s instead provide the additional context we’ve learned in recent days and weeks.
First, we know that a respected former law school dean and the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence drafted a memorandum that purported to provide a constitutional pretext for Vice President Pence to either delay certification of the election or to unilaterally declare Trump the winner of the election on January 6.
Second, recent reporting indicates that this memorandum wasn’t merely a fly-by-night document floated to the White House but instead a legal argument prepared at the White House’s request. Here’s Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman in the New York Times:
On Christmas Eve, while Mr. Eastman was with his family in Texas, a Trump aide reached out to him about writing a memo about the Jan. 6 certification. Mr. Eastman wrote what became the two-page outline asserting the vice president’s power to hold up the certification, and then a lengthier memo, which he circulated to Mr. Trump’s legal team several days later.
Here the reporting gets even more interesting. According to the Times, Eastman met with Trump and Pence in the Oval Office on January 4. Eastman told the Times that the meeting “started with the president talking about how some of the legal scholarship that had been done, saying under the 12th Amendment, the vice president has the ultimate authority to reject invalid electoral votes and he asked me what I thought about it.”
Eastman says Pence asked Eastman if he had the power, and Eastman said he “might,” but it would be “foolish for him to exercise it until state legislatures certified a new set of electors for Mr. Trump—something that had not happened.” Eastman admits that he asked Pence to delay the certification. He told the Times, “What we asked him to do was delay the proceedings at the request of these state legislatures so they could look into the matter.”
Delaying the certification would have created a crisis. Declaring Trump the winner would have caused a catastrophe.
Third, at the same time, an independent drama was playing out at the Department of Justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee has released a majority staff report detailing the pressure the White House placed on DOJ to overturn the election. I’d invite you to read the entire report, but a few elements stand out. Among them, that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows allegedly pressed the department to investigate wild claims, including “Italygate,” a theory the report described as “promoted by an ally of the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and which held that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and an Italian IT contractor used military satellites to manipulate voting machines and change Trump votes to Biden votes.”
Even more troubling, the report details how a DOJ appointee named Jeffrey Clark tried to threaten Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen’s job if he didn’t press key state legislatures to appoint alternate slates of electors:
On December 28, 2020, Clark emailed Rosen and Donoghue a draft letter addressed to the Georgia Governor, General Assembly Speaker, and Senate President Pro Tempore. The letter was titled “Georgia Proof of Concept” and Clark suggested replicating it in “each relevant state.” The letter would have informed state officials that DOJ had “taken notice” of election irregularities in their state and recommended calling a special legislative session to evaluate these irregularities, determine who “won the most legal votes,” and consider appointing a new slate of Electors.
Rosen refused, so Clark upped the ante:
Clark eventually informed Rosen and Donoghue that Trump had offered to install him in Rosen’s place, and told Rosen he would turn down Trump’s offer if Rosen would agree to sign the “Proof of Concept” letter. Clark’s efforts culminated in an Oval Office meeting where Rosen, Donoghue, and Steven Engel, the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, informed Trump that DOJ’s senior leaders would resign if Trump carried out his plans.
To be clear, the three items above represent a 30,000-foot view of a comprehensive administration effort that placed enormous pressure on Mike Pence on the very day when a howling mob stood shrieking outside the Capitol’s doors. I described the stakes like this:
How close did we come to a monumental disaster? DOJ resistance hurt the president. Secretaries of state stymied his plan. But at the pivotal moment in history, even though he possessed a document that outlined a plan that would have made him a hero to the mob, Pence said no.
And if you think that the republic was never in danger, that Pence’s “no” was inevitable and easy, then you may have been living in a parallel dimension these past five years.
Still, Mike Pence may have wanted to yield to Trump, he may even have tried to find a way to yield to Trump, but at the end of the day he did not yield. That single decision saved our nation from a political fire that it might not have been able to contain.
Earlier this week, The Dispatch team floated an interesting podcast idea. What if we dedicated an entire episode to a single question—what if Mike Pence said “yes”? What if he had declared Donald Trump the winner on January 6?
If your snap response is “The Supreme Court would have fixed it, quickly,” then I think you’re minimizing the psychological and political shock that would have been unleashed on the country. America would have fallen instantly into two broad camps—the jubilant Trump voters who believed that justice was done and the country saved and the shocked and furious Biden supporters who would have watched a coup unfold before their eyes.
Does Trump then meekly surrender to a Supreme Court order removing him from office? Does he remain in the White House and enlist a friendly federal judge to swear him in, while the chief justice swears in Joe Biden at a secure facility somewhere else? Does Trump try to retain military control? Does Biden immediately order Trump’s physical removal from the White House? Is mob violence tearing apart the United States?
The questions continue. Assumed Biden takes power. Do red-state governors—captured now by a white-hot base that is convinced that there’s been a new coup—reject federal authority?
These questions aren’t mere matters of historical curiosity. The man who tried to engineer exactly this crisis is the current frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination. He is idolized by millions of citizens and embraced with both arms by GOP candidates across the nation. I mean, look at this:
I know there are readers who are frustrated whenever I discuss Trump. They want me to move on. But we literally cannot move on when an entire American political party won’t (yet) move on. It would be irresponsible to move on. And as terrible as it is to look hard at what occurred between Election Day and January 6, we have to investigate those dreadful weeks and absorb the lessons they teach us about our republic.
One more thing …
My Sunday essay, “A Whiff of Civil War in the Air,” triggered an overwhelming response. I’m truly sorry that I couldn’t respond to more of your letters and comments. I can tell you that I read every email, and I even tried to get through as many comments as I could. So many messages communicated the same point—readers love this nation, and they don’t want to see us tear ourselves apart.
Then there were some other responses. Dinesh D’Souza recorded a six-minute mocking video that made my points for me. If you want to see his video (and my tweet thread in response), you can click the tweet below:
One last thing …
I don’t normally watch horror television, but everyone is telling me to drop everything and watch the show below. In fact, it’s controversial in some quarters for being allegedly too religious. Looks intriguing. Tell me, Dispatchers, should I stream? I’m leaning towards yes.
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