The staging by the US Congress of the hearings on the tragedy of January 6, 2021, when rioters, white-hot by the still President Donald Trump, stormed the Capitol, is both spectacular and old-fashioned. Behind this solemn rite, we are witnessing the survival of an endangered species: the democratic space, where reason tries to seize this moment of madness that gripped America, for the acme of the Trump years.
The Commission repeats these moments and these images, shown a hundred times, but sheds harsh light on them to establish the responsibility of the billionaire and the helplessness (and blindness) of those around him. The commission investigated for more than a year, taking the time to convince witnesses to speak, to try to establish a careful chronology of the political and murderous spiral of January 6. The state of mind is very different from the two impeachment proceedings launched unsuccessfully against the former president, where elected officials were pressed for time and more concerned with political display than the result.
The first trial in 2019 – shone in a strange retrospective light since Russia invaded Ukraine – concerned Donald Trump’s alleged pressure on newly-minted President Volodymyr Zelensky to implicate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. , who had done business in the area. But the proximity of the Democratic primaries, then the November elections, and the resistance of the Republicans prevented the serenity of the debates.
This was even more blatant with the second procedure for incitement to rebellion, a week after January 6, 2021, the objective of which was to act before the official end of the term of the defeated president, to prevent him from running again. Justice, even parliamentary, does not go immediately.
What appears today in Congress is precisely the slow meticulous work of the commission which was able to question a large part of the protagonists out of public view. The great strength of the restitution of the first two days, June 9 and 13, is due to the variety of these personalities who supported Donald Trump and agreed to testify.
“Your dishonor will remain”
For four years, they swallowed many snakes without flinching, but stalled before the one that made American democracy falter: the questioning of the election results and the organization of what is described as “sedition”, with strong presumptions to think that it was the work of the one who had sworn, in 2017, to respect the Constitution.
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