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By Masha Gessen
The political trial at the time of Donald Trump was an artifact of his presidency: a significant war opposed to noise, opposed to nihilism-nothing-means-everything-and-everything-is-the-same – and nihilism won.
For 3 days, impeachment officials from the House of Representatives meticulously lined up facts, photographs and arguments. What had been a fragmented understanding of the occasions of January 6 has an orderly narrative. President Trump had instigated a violent insurgency. For months, he had consistently acted with the confidence that he deserved to be reinstated as president. His movements on January 6 reflected his earlier remarks, such as his fulfillment of a defense forces plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and his approach to communicating with his supporters through sequences of provocations, promises and compliments. . In his opening statement, House impeachment officer Jamie Raskin promised to be short and direct, providing a case “based on bloodless and hard facts. It’s about the facts. ” Among the events was a graphic video of the insurgency, beginning with an excerpt from Trump’s speech that he sent the crowd his way. Later that day, Raskin described the events of the painful revelry of his own circle of relatives inside the besieged Capitol, and then other events. “People died that day,” he said. “The officials ended up with head and brain injuries” People had their eyes gouged out. An officer had an attack downtown. One officer lost 3 hands that day. Two officials committed suicide. Senators, this cannot be our future. “
Then Bruce Castor, the co-leader of Trump’s defense team, opened up beside him. He spoke for over an hour, mentioning the Federalist documents; 3 of the founders; the bill of rights; having worked in the construction of the Capitol 40 years ago; having visited the Capitol earlier in the week; the importance of the Senate; the fall of Rome; the inherent fragility of democracy; Benjamin Franklin; Philadelphia Cream; independence from Great Britain; an anonymous member of Congress; the first amendment; the absence of criminal conspiracy fees opposed to Trump; the exceptional nature of the accusations; Bill Clinton; former Attorney General Eric Holder; Operation Fast and Furious; the defeated Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Dirksen’s speeches and old-fashioned turntable technology; the state of Nebraska, its judicial idea and its senator Ben Sasse; all the other senators and how wonderful they are; valves, whirlpools and the Bible; the Fourteenth Amendment; the concept of hearsay exemplified by a supposedly clairvoyant driving force speaking to his wife in a hypothetical car; a deliberate Senate rule that says, “Hey, you can’t do that” (not transparent what); the apparent “real reason” for the impeachment, that is, the concern of Trump’s political rivals to face him in an election; some examples of unmarried term presidents; the wisdom of the electorate; the concern that the electorate motivates in the members of Congress; and systematic obstruction; then despite everything he concluded: “President Trump is no longer in office. He has achieved the goal of the Constitution. He was deposed through the electorate. Reporters described the speech as tortuous, incoherent and inconsistent, and it was. It was also an insult to procedure and an attack on sanity.
The defense also had its own videos, adding an 11-minute montage of Democratic politicians and others, many of them black women, who oppose Trump. The video began with an excerpt from the Speaker of the House of Commons, Nancy Pelosi, saying, “I don’t even know why there are no uprisings across the country, and maybe there are”; switched to a series of people’s fight word snippets, adding singer Madonna; and it ended with a combination of Democratic politicians using the word “fight. ” One of the videos used a clip of then-Vice President Kamala Harris speaking on Ellen DeGeneres’ television screen in 2018. Another juxtaposed Trump’s law-and-order statements with footage from the Black Lives Matter protests. To call these examples “false matches” would be to eliminate them. A false equivalence is the act of wrongly equating two things by using a faulty explanation, why, or wrong information. Equating incitement to an insurgency through an incumbent president with heated political rhetoric, jokes, and most of all, without acknowledging a genuine insurgency, is an attack on the very concept of explaining why and the very concept of explaining why. . ‘information. These videos, like Castor’s bizarre keynote speech, countered the transparent and factual case presented through the House officials with noise. They flooded the area.
In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt identifies a pair of paradoxical qualities that characterize totalitarian leaders: credulity and cynicism.
Mass propaganda found that his audience was always willing to believe the worst, but it was absurd, and he did not object to being deceived because he thought they were all lies. Totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the right mindset. the assumption that, under such conditions, one day other people can be induced to believe the ultimate in the fantastic, and to believe that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their lie, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of abandoning the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest because they knew from the beginning that it was a lie and would thank the leaders for their astonishing tactical intelligence.
Another quality of totalitarian leaders and their followers is the conviction that the end justifies the means; makes it less difficult to settle for the lie as a tactical gesture, or even with it, and settle for the next lie, and the next and the next.
Trump’s defense team assumed his audience was gullible and cynical. That his public was willing to believe, contrary to existing legal opinion, that Trump, as former president, deserves not to be the subject of impeachment; that he did not intend to incite violence; that he had not found out that his followers had invaded the Capitol; or simply that none of that meant anything, that he did not incite and yet did, that he lost the election but won it, that members of Antifa were in the building, as Trump is said to have told the Republican leader of the House by phone. That Trump’s words were as insignificant as those of his lawyers, and that indicting the former president for “fair words” was the beginning of a slippery slope toward gratuitous prosecutions and the crackdown on loose speech. Array Arendt wrote that the qualities of credulity and cynicism were provided in other proportions depending on a person’s position in the hierarchy of the totalitarian movement. A senator would possibly be more cynical, for example, and a more credulous grassroots conspiracy theorist. He suspects that the ratio between credulity and cynicism will possibly vary over time, depending on temperament or cases, because everything is imaginable and nothing makes sense.
Castor’s obvious twists and turns in his opening set the stage for a gathering of everything and nothing in the defense team videos. This, in turn, allowed Trump’s lawyer, Michael van der Veen, to claim on Saturday that the insurgency was carried out through “left and right” groups. It also paved the way for Saturday’s discussion of the impeachment officials’ move to call witnesses. The story of the matter is compelling: Leaders had not planned to call witnesses in the first place, at least in part because they knew their potential witnesses, elected officials, could not be trusted to do so. tell the fact under oath. A possible key witness, McCarthy, had already superseded his story in his very important January 6 verbal exchange with Trump on several occasions. Things turned around Friday night when Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Washington State Republican, publicly stated that he remembered McCarthy’s initial story related to the appeal, which resulted in McCarthy, or at least the fundamental facts , can be specified. The Senate voted to call witnesses, but Trump supporters later threatened to block the proceedings by calling a slew of witnesses, delaying the trial and blocking the Senate’s paintings of the legislative calendar and appointments of President Joe Biden. trial and political affairs in the Senate. Senators have threatened to derail spending that may simply alleviate and even save the lives of their constituents during a pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis; that was the very definition of cynicism. Democrats have given up and agreed to waive witness testimony if Herrera’s brief is on the impeachment hearing record. I wonder what Arendt would have done with his Hail Mary for the ancient records. In 1967, he wrote in this magazine that once eluded, ancient facts can hardly be restored. What if they are hidden in a file?
Then it’s over. Trump acquitted. After voting to acquit Trump, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell gave a speech in which he claimed Trump had incited the insurrection:
There is no doubt, none, that President Trump is almost and morally guilty of provoking the occasions of the day. The other people who stormed this construction believed they were acting on the wishes and orders of their president, and having that trust was a predictable result of the growing development of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole that the defeated president continued to shout at the planet. The biggest megaphone on Earth.
And yet McConnell said, he believed that a former president may not be the subject of a impe trial process. That turns out to have erased most of the efforts of Trump’s defense team, although an audience of gully cynics wouldn’t hear it that way. They would say they knew from the beginning that Trump was to blame, but that he deserved to get away with it. You can keep this wisdom until the next lie happens.
It will be used in accordance with our policy.
The former president has shyed away from condemnation in the Senate, but his time will be remembered for his authoritarian policies and anarchic compulsions.
By David Remnick
A left-wing voice defends America’s history.
By Bill McKibben
On January 6, 2021, Luke Mogelson followed Trump supporters as they headed to the U. S. Capitol, with his phone’s camera as a laptop.
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