On Balance | January 6 hearings put Trump and his autocratic ambitions at the heart of Capitol attack

Many were expecting the investigation into the 2021 attack to simply repeat the obvious – that Trump lied to try to stay in power – but it goes much further

By exposing Trump’s authoritarian designs, and frustration at checks on his power, the committee has driven home the need to hold him accountable

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An image of former US president Donald Trump is displayed during the third hearing on June 16 of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the US Capitol. The bipartisan committee, which has been gathering evidence for almost a year related to the attack, is presenting its findings in a series of televised hearings. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 1:30am, 21 Jun 2022Updated: 2:03am, 21 Jun 2022

Most Americans never believed Donald Trump’s lie about the 2020 general election. Most, meaning nearly all Democrats, most Independents, and Republicans who either still believed in the post-World-War-II order, saw that the former president put the interests of his own brand above all else, or both.

This larger group of sentient Americans unwilling to tear the country apart in a bloody insurrection saw long before the voting started in 2020 what Trump was trying to do.

Battered by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that spread death and misery, many grew tired of an administration that seemed incapable of anything other than a determination to undermine institutions on which the country was founded and the international order that all Trump’s predecessors over the past century had worked to build.

On June 9, a tweet by Donald Trump is shown during one of the hearings of the committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. Photo: Reuters

Trump portrayed Nato, first and foremost, as an ossified cabal of European bureaucrats that took advantage of America, dismissing its long-time role as a Western bulwark against the Kremlin, whose leader the former US president could not admire more.

Trump also stigmatised South Korea and Japan in the same vein, obscuring their role as the key to America’s influence in the Asia-Pacific, sparring with them through a megaphone over military base funding and market access instead of quietly working out differences. The WTO and the UN were traps for “internationalism”, a word that became a searing indictment under Trump.

These positions played well among many Americans – Democrat and Republican – who had been marginalised by the neoliberal economic policies that took hold after the fall of the Soviet Union.

But the scorched earth political tactics Trump used – including the rancour directed against his own public health officials trying to do their best in the face of a deadly contagion that few understood – alienated too many others.

Trump, or at least some of those he listened to, probably understood this. So an election result that didn’t keep him in the White House for another four years, he insisted repeatedly, was proof of a flawed system.

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}On Balance | January 6 hearings put Trump and his autocratic ambitions at the heart of Capitol attack

On Balance | January 6 hearings put Trump and his autocratic ambitions at the heart of Capitol attack