The House of Representatives’ Select Committee, formed to investigate President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, is now weighing whether to pursue essential evidence contained in call logs from the Trump White House on the day of the riot, which could be subject to executive privilege.
A growing body of evidence points to former Trump’s direct involvement in multiple attempts to stage a coup in his attempt to remain in power despite losing the November 2020 election. According to notes taken by former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, during a Dec. 27 phone call between Trump, Rosen and Donoghue, Trump said, “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me” and Republican allies in Congress. State of Georgia officials are investigating Trump’s recorded call with Georgia’s then-Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where the president sought to overturn Job Biden’s victory there, saying to Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Here, Stanley considers what’s at stake in the House Select Committee’s investigation of the Jan. 6 pro-Trump insurrection and the ongoing threat to U.S. democracy.
JASON STANLEY: I think that it’s extremely clear that there was a coup attempt. It was almost successful. And the Republican party is now a fully anti-democratic party that is seeking one-party rule. They are lauding countries like Hungary that have achieved that. And they’re looking carefully at what failed in the coup attempt and they’re systematically passing laws that will ensure that those failures won’t happen again. So we can expect in 2024, it will be successful. And if it’s Donald Trump or another one of these would-be autocrats who wishes to take his place, that they will rule with impunity and the United States will degrade, as it’s already degrading its democratic status.
The probe, for anyone who’s been watching, it was quite clear that this was a coup attempt. What we’ve seen what the probe has unveiled is that at the very center of power, Trump was trying to convince Justice Department officials, state officials to push the (inaudible) narrative that there was significant voter fraud or suspicion.
And the entire time, one of the many things that should worry us is first of all, the level to which people denied what was happening before their eyes. And now that it’s all being laid out in public, people don’t care because, you know, I mean, I don’t know why. I don’t know why so many people deny that it was happening when it was happening. And I don’t know why people don’t care as much as they should that this happened in the United States. But all of this sends a loud and clear message to would-be autocrats, including Trump himself, that no one really cares.
I think one thing that’s happening is a level of cynicism about politics that has been spread — in some cases, to some extent justified, of course — but democracy is always a creaky business that is always going to involve corruption, especially when campaign finance laws have been so degraded as they are in the United States. So you can always represent the system as broken and so (inaudible) characters. They say, look, it’s all just a crooked, rigged system anyway. So it’s a very grim sign that it’s hard to rally people behind the last vestiges of American democracy.
SCOTT HARRIS: I think looking back at the George W. Bush administration, the torture that took place, the war of aggression that was launched against Iraq under the pretense of lies that came out of the White House and what we saw unfold under the Trump administration, we have obvious impunity for the law. And I think there’s a lot of cynicism out there about the rule of law in this country. The law is supposed to apply to all of us, no matter how rich or powerful, but it seems our rule of law here has degraded quite a bit.
JASON STANLEY: If people think that a game is rigged, then they will think that the person who’s openly cheating is authentic. The problem is, you know, we had multiple previous governments not bringing to account the financiers who destroyed our economy, the defense industry and foreign policy hawks that are complicit in or are agents in mass murder, war crimes and torture. And then everyone thinks, okay, the whole system is broken. So why care about a coup? And that’s what we face. You know, we can point fingers at the Bush administration. Then we can and should point fingers at the Bush administration. We can and should point fingers at President Obama’s administration for not doing as much as they could for sucking up to the tech titans and tech oligarchs, and to tilt us in the direction of oligarchy. But none of that should make us so cynical as to turn our eyes from an almost successful coup attempt, and right now, one of our major parties turning explicitly against democracy.
So I think the question is, how do we combat this anti-democratic party? How do we encourage Republicans, people who I disagree with politically, but are committed to democracy? How do we encourage them and encourage people like what’s happening in the opposition to Viktor Orban right now in Hungary, where you have people across a wide ideological range who are sick of the kleptocracy and the corruption? And even though they have massive political disagreements, they all agree Victor Orban should be defeated and some semblance of democracy could be returned to Hungary. I think we need something like that. We need some kind of agreement across ideologies to preserve a vague semblance of democracy before it’s too late.
For more information, visit Jason Stanley’s website at Jason-Stanley.com.
