Trump called senators to encourage them to delay their certification of the 2020 presidential election. He took to Twitter to post a video link to his incendiary speech at the Ellipse earlier that day and to question Mike Pence’s courage — while ignoring repeated entreaties from his staff to stop the violence.
All of this was firmly in character. Nobody should be surprised that Trump, after losing his re-election bid, tried to burn things down rather than act as a responsible steward of the presidency and the public interest. But a weary familiarity with Trump’s penchant for violence and revenge shouldn’t prevent anyone from recognizing the savagery of what he tried to engineer on Jan. 6. It also shouldn’t distract the Justice Department from holding him accountable for the various crimes he committed when he tried to stage a coup.
Trump spent decades warming up for Jan. 6.
He was never a gifted or responsible operator of the collection of casinos he assembled in Atlantic City in his younger days. When the business unspooled beneath a pile of debt and eventually teetered into bankruptcy, he showed little sympathy for the investors, employees, vendors and local residents pummeled by the collapse.
In 1989, he took out ads in New York City newspapers that condemned Black and Latino teenagers accused of assaulting a White jogger in Central Park — in order to stoke racial divisions and keep himself in the media spotlight. He showed little interest in or sympathy for the teenagers; long after they were exonerated, he continued to insist on their guilt.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump staged a series of rallies peppered with calls for violence. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Trump said of one person disrupting one of his appearances. “In the old days,” protesters would have been “carried out on stretchers,” he lamented. Trump never hesitated to stir up the crowds. Violence spiked in the cities where Trump and his supporters gathered, but he didn’t back off. He reveled in the danger he unleashed.
In 2018, after a Trump supporter sent pipe bombs to CNN and a handful of the former president’s Democratic political opponents, Trump couldn’t bring himself to condemn the violence or sympathize with the targets. Instead, he bemoaned that the “bomb stuff” may have disrupted his political momentum.
Trump’s White House stay was littered with episodes in which he acted recklessly or irresponsibly but failed to show sympathy for those sideswiped in the process. Perhaps no event prior to the Jan. 6 insurrection captured Trump’s willingness to let others suffer in the service of his own ambitions quite as much as did the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Trump told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that early in the onslaught he knew of the dangers Covid-19 posed, but he chose not to say so publicly. After the pandemic began taking lives, he declined to visit or console families who lost loved ones. As he continued to downplay the severity of the outbreak and failed to fully marshal the resources of the federal government, more people died. But Trump often proved to be more concerned about the pandemic’s impact on his election prospects than he was about its impact on average Americans.
So the former president’s interest in fomenting a siege at the Capitol in the service of an attempted coup was in keeping with who he had always been. And since the riot, he hasn’t bothered to concede any of this.
“President Trump has never publicly acknowledged his responsibility for the attack,” noted Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat on the Jan. 6 committee, during Thursday’s hearing. “There is something else President Trump has never acknowledged: the names and the memories of the officers who died following the attack on the Capitol.”
What separates Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 from his previous derelictions is that there is a clear line connecting what he said to the ensuing violence — and to his failure to stem the violence, even though he was surrounded by advisers asking him to stop it. What’s unknown is whether he will be held accountable.
“Laws are just words on paper. They mean nothing without public servants dedicated to the rule of law,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, who near the end of Thursday’s hearing accused Trump of dereliction of duty. “We the people must demand more of our politicians and ourselves. Oaths matter. Character matters. Truth matters.”
The committee promised more hearings after Congress returns from its August recess. But the midterm elections also will arrive after the break, and if Congress changes hands, the committee’s ability to keep its probe moving along may get derailed.
This is why every Jan. 6 hearing has included pointed statements about the rule of law. The committee members know that if Trump is to be held accountable for an attempted coup and for standing by while the Capitol was attacked, the Justice Department will have to prosecute. Thursday’s hearing was just the latest reminder.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
• Even Republicans Are Now Tiring of Trump: Julianna Goldman
• Republican Boycott of Jan. 6 Panel Backfires: Jonathan Bernstein
• Donald Trump Knew Exactly What He Was Doing on Jan. 6: Editorial
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion
