- The Jan. 6 panel focused on Trump’s “dereliction of duty” during its public hearing Thursday.
- But a political expert said the group has been most successful in highlighting Trump’s manipulative methods.
- “Trump is a master gaslighter,” said Matthew Schmidt.
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Donald Trump’s actions and inactions around January 6, 2021 took center stage at a congressional hearing Thursday. But the former president’s manipulation methods stole the panel’s six-week show, a political expert told Insider this week.
The House special committee investigating the attack on the Capitol has hosted eight public hearings since June 10, culminating in a prime-time hearing Thursday night — the last before the panel goes on vacation in August.
Over the past month and a half, lawmakers have presented a wealth of evidence suggesting former President Donald Trump’s “dereliction of duty” on that day and presented bombshell testimony highlighting the former president’s erratic behavior as a mob of rioters descended on the U.S. Capitol on January June 6, 2021
But the main point the panel has been able to make so far has little to do with Trump’s actions — and everything to do with Trump’s mindset, according to Matthew Schmidt, associate professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven.
“My big takeaway is that Donald Trump is able to do what he’s doing because he’s an incendiary,” Schmidt told Insider. “Trump is a master of gas lighters.”
Gaslighting—a form of psychological manipulation—involves casting doubt on someone’s perception of reality by distorting facts and truths. The perpetrator often uses lies, denial, and fabricated memories to exert power and control over the victim. The term has grown in colloquial usage in recent years.
Thursday’s panel hearing focused on the many steps Trump failed to take amid the chaos of Jan. 6 — he refused to recall supporters for hours, ignored strategic advice from his many advisers and refused to say that the 2020 election are over.
But there’s a subtle but important difference between acting immorally and not acting at all, Schmidt said, and Trump’s inaction during and after the Capitol riot was his own form of gaslighting.
“[The January 6 panel] showed that he did not act the right way, but most people need evidence that the man acted in the wrong way,” Schmidt said. “Action by inaction is always less powerful, and Trump is a master of action by inaction. “
Schmidt also pointed to Trump’s tweets during and after the siege as further evidence of his careful calculations. More than an hour after the first group of rioters ran over police outside the Capitol, Trump tweeted about the attack.
“Please support our Capitol Police and law enforcement. They are truly on the side of our country,” he wrote. “Be still!”
A former White House aide testified Thursday that Trump initially did not want to include any mention of “peace” in his response to the crowd. But even his final inclusion of “keep the peace” calls into question the real message Trump is trying to send, the political pundit suggested.
“‘Be Peaceful’ is gaslight,” Schmidt said. “It can mean ‘stop attacking,’ because attacking is the opposite of peace; or it could mean “invade the Capitol, but stay peaceful while you do it.”
The politics professor also argued that Trump’s tweets leading up to the riot, in which he invited supporters to come to D.C. to protest the election results, as well as his speech at the “Stop Theft” rally that preceded the attack , are examples of dogwhistle—another form of gaslight.
The term takes on a new meaning in the realm of politics, representing a coded message that can only be understood by a certain group of people.
“I think a lot of cases were unequivocal calls to violence, but they were unequivocal dog whistles,” Schmidt said of Trump’s communications with his supporters before the riots. “You can always claim you didn’t know the dogs would hear it, or that you meant ‘dinner time’ and not ‘eat the vice president’.”
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