The alpha and omega of the case against Trump

The events of January 6 remain the skeleton key for understanding why Donald Trump should never again hold the presidency

U.S. Capitol. January 26, 2013. Photo: Vlad Podvorny/Creative Commons

Over and over again during the past few years, I’ve tried to describe how Donald Trump’s orchestration of the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol renders him permanently unfit to hold any level of power in this country (and not just me — this has been an unwavering aim of many reporters, writers, and politicians since then). For myself, this has branched into dissections of a growing authoritarianism throughout the Republican Party, the failure of Democrats to adequately confront the GOP’s violent threats, and criticism of the media for underplaying the dangers facing the United States.

I’ll admit that throughout this time, I’ve been plagued by a sense that if I and others could just write clearly and directly enough, it could change the public dialogue and bend the nation markedly away from the dangers of Trumpism. A recent letter from the editor at Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer has reminded me that this is not just a pipe dream — that despite the passage of time and the constant efforts by the GOP and the right to propagandize away Donald Trump’s insurrection, there are still effective ways to talk about that day and why he should never be president again.

Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn wrote his piece in response to reader criticisms of the paper’s coverage of Donald Trump — essentially allegations that the paper is unfairly reporting on Trump and downplaying allegedly worse behavior by President Biden. After making clear that his intent is not to anger or belittle such readers by writing his response, Quinn lays down the line:

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo zeroed in on, Quinn’s appeal to the evidence of our own senses is the burning core of his letter. In doing so, Quinn provides an essential reminder that the reality of Donald Trump’s offense against America is as plain as the hand that each of us holds up before our face. On January 6, we all literally saw an insurrection play out in real time, complete with Donald Trump as the warlord of the marauding white nationalist hordes who refused to withdraw until Trump reluctantly commanded them to do so. Americans don’t even need opinion columnists or politicians to tell them what happened. It was as obvious as a thing can be.

There are dozens of potent arguments for why Donald Trump is unfit for power. But I think Quinn reminds us, as much as anyone possibly can, that there is a stark and overriding simplicity to the choice facing the American people. We all saw Donald Trump try to violently overthrow our government (this is of course in addition to the various other illegal but nonviolent efforts he undertook to reverse the election results, malicious activities which stretched over a time frame of months). You can either accept this, or deny it. But those who deny it are doing so by denying reality, or because they agree with Trump’s attempted coup to install himself in power against the will of America’s voters.

Behind Quinn’s plain statement of the facts is the proposition that most Americans, perhaps even a decisive majority, can be trusted to believe the evidence of their own senses when faced with an undeniable rupture in the nature of our government and society. Propaganda can try to dissuade people, or cloud their perceptions, but it can only do so much against the vivid facts of January 6. Trump’s actions are so self-incriminating, so damning, that at some level, no more really needs to be said except to remind people to trust themselves. Fundamentally democratic and deeply moral, it is difficult to improve on Quinn’s appeal.

There are undoubtedly many reasons why Donald Trump has placed intimations of violence at the center of his current presidential campaign — so much so that I’ve been arguing he’s not running a re-election campaign so much as a second insurrection — but a central reason he is doing so is because of the undeniability of his January 6 attempt to overthrow the government. At a basic level, he knows that we know what happened that day — and like fellow thugs across time, his response has been to double down on his previous threats, to essentially tell us that he will happily engage in violence once again in order to try to get his way. Trump doesn’t even bother any more to pretend that he didn’t engage in violence that day; in this way, he further confirms Americans’ understanding of what happened on January 6, while demonstrating that he will unleash renewed violence if Americans once again reject him.