On Balance | A year after the US Capitol attack, American democracy is in no better shape

Cracks are now forming in the defence that Donald Trump had managed to keep intact since he incited an insurrectionist mob to attack their government a year ago.

The fear that the former US leader instilled in his party kept the Republican ramparts around him standing firm, fortified by Fox News successfully pushing the down-is-up narrative about a left wing “false flag” conspiracy being behind the January 6 insurrection – even as hours of footage and more than 150 guilty pleas make clear that the mob was the beating heart of Trump’s base.

The handful of vocal Republican Trump critics in Congress – including Wyoming’s Representative Lynn Cheney, who is on the January 6 investigation committee – had not added up to anything more than a breakaway faction that has come under attack from their colleagues.

Cheney herself was removed from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference and replaced by Elise Stefanik, who tried to block Electoral College counts in Pennsylvania on the night of the insurrection attempt and echoed Trump’s stolen election lies on the House floor that night.

But recent revelations about texts sent by Republican members of Congress, Fox News personalities and even Donald Trump Jnr to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, as the assault on the Capitol took place, seem to have put the former president in a more vulnerable position.