Five down, a little more left.
The first phase of the January 6 public hearings ended Thursday with dramatic testimony focused on the efforts of former President Trump and his allies to put pressure on the Justice Department.
House Speaker Benny Thompson (D-Miss.) Said the hearings would now be suspended before resuming next month.
The punctuation mark is the ideal time to assess the impact of the five hearings so far.
They have not fundamentally changed the electoral landscape – but no one expected them to.
Yet they were convincing enough to exceed expectations, hold the attention of much of the public, and create new problems for Trump.
The former president, predictably but eloquently, criticized the process.
In general, the hearings portrayed Trump and his most ardent advisers as insisting on a de facto coup, while ignoring the massive evidence that the 2020 election was tainted by any large-scale fraud.
The commission’s story was not interrupted by voices defending Trump. The only Republican members are co-chairs Liz Cheney (Wyatt) and Adam Kinsinger (Illinois), both of whom are staunch critics of the former president.
The decision of the leader of the minority in the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy (California) to withdraw the participation of the Republican Party from the commission in its establishment last year is the subject of heightened speculation.
McCarthy resigned after President Nancy Pelosi (D-California) refused to accept two particularly loyal allies of Trump, Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.), As members of the group.
But now people from Trump himself to skeptical Republicans see this decision as a serious strategic mistake.
“It was really stupid. That was a huge mistake, “said Liz Meyer, a political consultant who has advised many Republican candidates and previously served as director of online communications at the Republican National Committee.
“In general, I’m not a big fan of people who would like to [as pro-Trump Republicans] but he would turn out to look much worse than if they were there.
Trump himself said in a recent interview with Punchbowl News that “it would be very smart” to put Republicans who support him in the panel, “just to have a voice.”
Instead, the seven Democrats and two Republicans against Trump in the panel showed a remarkable march of moments.
Big TV viewers saw a video of the eldest daughter of former President Ivanka Trump, who said she accepted the opinion of then-Attorney General Bill Barr that there had been no significant election fraud. Bar himself has been shown several times to call such allegations “nonsense.”
Republican officials at the state level, such as Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger, testified about the many personal threats they received after resisting pressure to change election results in their states.
Private figures such as Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards and former election official Shay Moss have given exciting stories of their experiences.
At the first public hearing, watched by about 20 million people in prime time, Edwards recalled the “flap” he saw on January 6. At Tuesday’s hearing, Moss spoke of her suffering when she and her mother were falsely accused of running in the election fraud in Georgia.
The hearings that are being written about have had a significant impact, even though so much of it has happened in public, “said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
“They showed how deliberately behind the efforts to cancel the election, how many people realized that this was just a campaign based on false information, and how all this was a more organized effort than people thought, not only on January 6 but in the whole thing. “
But Zelizer, like many others, is skeptical that the hearings will have a direct impact on the position of the two major parties, even after the midterm elections, which remain just over four months away.
The reasons are clear.
At this stage, opinions about Trump and January 6 are almost concreted. Democratic voters now hold him directly guilty, and his staunchest loyalists will never do so.
In addition, the combination of a fragmented media environment and the fact that Trump resigned 17 months deprives these hearings of the kind of seismic impact that the Watergate hearings had half a century ago.
However, there may be some impact around the edges.
A poll by ABC News-Ipsos, published on Sunday, showed a modest increase in the number of Americans who believe Trump should be blamed for his behavior. The figure now stands at 58 percent, according to the poll, up from 52 percent in an ABC News-Washington Post survey in early May.
The political world in Washington is also teeming with talk about whether the hearings have hurt Trump as a potential Republican candidate for 2024.
The hearings served as another reminder of how much excitement and trauma the 45th president always brings with him.
A poll in New Hampshire on Wednesday, which showed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (right) ahead of Trump among the likely Republican primary voters in the state, further fueled that speculation.
“There’s a significant percentage of Republican voters – I’d say 50 percent, and maybe more – who, if you ask them if they approve of Donald Trump, they’ll say yes,” said Republican strategist Dan Judy.
“If it’s the only game in town, they’ll support it in 2024. But if there’s anyone else who imports a little bit of Trump’s style without that kind of baggage, they’re very open to supporting that kind of person. ”
Trump himself posted a poll later Wednesday on his favorite social network, Truth Social, which showed him far ahead of DeSantis with Republicans across the country.
As is often the case with the former president, the alleged display of force seemed to betray a certain vulnerability.
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The former president has suffered some damage so far.
The question now is whether the panel will deepen these wounds in its last hearings.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stenage.
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