Can a commission to probe the US Capitol attack stop the virus of Trumpism?

Name: End of Trump presidency leaves Chinese-American community deeply divided
Uploaded: 2021-05-24T17:30:12.000Z
Duration: 5 min 17 s
Description: End of Trump presidency leaves Chinese-American community deeply divided

A bipartisan, independent January 6 commission could potentially halt the mutation of the Republican Party and stop a civil war

Then, America could begin treating its brothers and sisters who are in the thrall of Trumpism with the compassion they need

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Supporters of then-US president Donald Trump, including Jacob Chansley (right), are confronted by a US Capitol Police officer outside the Senate Chamber inside the Capitol in Washington on January 6. Photo: AP

Robert Delaney

Published: 1:30am, 25 May 2021Updated: 2:07am, 25 May 2021

“These are people with brain damage, they’re f***ing retarded,” Albert Watkins, who represents the “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley – the face of the January 6 pro-Trump assault on the US Capitol – told Talking Points Memo in an interview published last week. “But they’re our brothers, our sisters, our neighbours, our coworkers – they’re part of our country.”

The comments – which are too salty to repeat in their entirety in a family newspaper – are shocking on many levels, but their candour resonates most profoundly on a fundamental level. They attest to the unsettling reality that America’s body politic is now vulnerable to a life-threatening variant of political extremism.

Republicans in the House of Representatives threw Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney out of her leadership role for criticising former president Donald Trump’s insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the GOP leaders of both congressional chambers are opposed to a commission to investigate the January 6 attack.

05:17

End of Trump presidency leaves Chinese-American community deeply divided

These developments reveal how the variant has transformed one of America’s two major political parties, one which must be recognised at least as an important check on the Democratic Party, into pro-Trump zombies.

This might seem like a purely domestic political matter, but Beijing is surely watching closely as this plays out because it knows that a country is weaker when required to fight a war on two fronts.

Washington is doing just that. The first is the new cold war of democracy versus authoritarianism – a complicated, international effort that requires assiduous diplomacy.

The second is Trumpism versus the American political system, a battle that many of us thought would have been over once control of the White House and Congress reverted back to the Democrats.

Electoral politics had historically sent America’s more extreme ideological movements, such as the country’s Communist Party in the first half of the 20th century and the far-right John Birch Society of the 1960s, into the wilderness.