Jan. 6 hearings push Trump to tipping point

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/07/2022 (1214 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AT last Thursday’s so-called congressional “187 minutes hearings,” former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger stated that former U.S. president Donald Trump chose to “pour fuel on the fire” — rather than call the mob off — by issuing a derogatory tweet about the U.S. vice-president’s lack of “courage.”

In light of these and other devastating and disturbing revelations about Trump coming out of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, has he crossed a political line from which there is no return? Simply put, is it the beginning of the end for Trump’s quest for a second stint in the White House? One might think so.

But how many times over the last five years or so have you breathlessly heard others write off the 45th president of the U.S.? For heaven’s sake, the guy has more (political) lives than Wile E. Coyote.

Still, the damaging June 28 testimony of former top White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson — calmly describing Trump grabbing the wheel of the presidential SUV and trying to throttle his lead Secret Service agent in the run-up to the Capitol Hill insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — paints a picture of a highly unstable commander in chief.

Her stark recollections of temper tantrums and porcelain dishes being smashed against the Oval Office dining room wall only bolsters the notion of a president seemingly coming unhinged.

In Thursday’s prime-time hearing, we learned Trump consciously decided to not respond in any serious way to shut down the insurrectionists. The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, recalled thinking, “You’re the commander-in-chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?”

Looking back now, it’s hard to know for sure who was actually in charge of running the country.

Hutchinson’s remarks about Trump being briefed about the number and types of weapons detected during the Ellipse rally is particularly damning. So, too, is Trump’s apparent tirade demanding that armed members of the assembled mob be allowed in to the Ellipse unmolested by metal detectors, which only further cements his criminality.

So, is Trump’s life in U.S. electoral politics effectively over? In the eyes of the U.S. electorate, has Trump reached a critical tipping point?

Or, is this most recent calamity like all those previous crises — the notorious Access Hollywood tape, his outrageous response to white supremacists at the Charlottesville protests, his formal impeachment over blackmailing Ukraine’s president — from which Trump was able to escape largely unscathed?

If you listen to former Washington Post columnist and celebrated Watergate chronicler Bob Woodward, Hutchinson’s riveting testimony essentially wrote Trump’s political obituary. It was, as his sidekick Carl Bernstein confided, tantamount to Nixon’s “smoking gun” (that is, the hours of incriminating White House tapes) that eventually ended his presidency in 1974.

Other talking heads, even from more conservative outlets, have argued Trump’s political brand is irreparably damaged and that there is no way that the Republican party could allow him to carry the party’s presidential banner in 2024. They worry that it would lead an electoral bloodbath that would consign them to another four years outside of the White House.

There’s lots of chatter about Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida loving every minute of the Jan. 6 committee’s televised hearings. He probably believes Trump is a dead man walking, which opens the door for him to be the Republican nominee in 2024.

There is just one central problem with that thesis: DeSantis is not Trump. And thus there is an open question as to whether DeSantis can secure the electoral support of the formidable Trump base. If we have come to know anything about U.S. politics since 2016, it is that Trump’s backers are loyal to a fault; indeed, they don’t appear, as of this writing, to be wavering in their support of the man from Mar-a-Lago.

But can Trump maintain his iron grip on his base, given what’s coming out of the Jan. 6 committee and a likely criminal indictment that will follow? Or will enough “law and order” conservative Republicans get antsy and look for an alternative to Trump with a higher electability quotient?

It may be too soon to write off the seemingly Teflon-encased Donald Trump just yet. Remember, DeSantis’s record on the pandemic, including more than 76,000 COVID-19 deaths in the Sunshine State since 2020, doesn’t exactly invite voter confidence.

Moreover,

Trump — as any good grifter knows — has a number of political cards up his sleeves. He’s sitting on a political war chest in excess of US$250 million and continues to wield extraordinary control over the Republican conference and party machinery. That alone provides him with plenty of political levers to pull if he needs to torpedo a DeSantis challenge.

It’s hard to imagine, I know, but I wouldn’t bet on Trump quietly heading into that good night any time soon. He’s too hell-bent on revenge.

Peter McKenna is professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.