Government

Testimony Of Trump's Own Appointees, Family Members, Is 'Fake News' Only To Very Stupid People

There is no spin on just rolling the tape. Anyone who brushes off what is being said under oath by Trump’s own inner circle as fake news is an idiot.

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(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump sent a mob of his supporters to the U.S. Capitol and then sat there cheering them on in private while they ransacked the place. It wasn’t a mystery what was going on even in the moment. These people were telling us exactly why they were attacking the Capitol, on multiple social media platforms, as they were doing it: they were trying to invalidate the results of a democratic election through violence so that Trump could remain president.

Although a lot more detail would come out following the riot, by January 7, anyone who hadn’t spent the past four years learning to ignore what their eyes and ears were telling them in favor of whatever spewed out of Trump’s mouth knew the essential elements of the situation. As for everyone else, well, if watching the Capitol insurrection itself didn’t snap them back into reality, it is difficult to imagine what could.

Which is why I didn’t have high hopes for the investigatory committee in the U.S. House of Representatives and the public hearings about January 6 that we are now in the midst of. A great many things have happened since 2016 which I would think would have been more effective at dislodging a reflexive defense of Trump as a personality trait.

I’m starting to come around though. It doesn’t hurt that the hearings are being conducted skillfully.

Maybe the January 6 hearings don’t really have to change any minds — or even tantalizingly dangle the prospect of further criminal proceedings — to have an important impact. Perhaps these hearings will give everyone else social permission to shame Trump-loving holdouts into silence.

Trump has turned ambiguity into an art form. He vomits a bunch of vague insinuations from which we can all gather what he really means but which also leave him enough room to backpedal and claim bias and misinterpretation as needed.

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The January 6 committee hearings, however, are discrediting Trump using sworn testimony of those closest to him. The first hearing revealed videotaped deposition testimony of Ivanka Trump, his own daughter, who was with him in the White House on January 6. Ivanka testified that she accepted the fact that her father lost and that there had been no fraud which could have overturned the election of Joe Biden. Trump responded to his daughter’s sworn testimony a day after it was released (on his sad Twitter knockoff Truth Social) in his roundabout strategically ambiguous way, by more or less calling her an ignorant liar.

We were also treated to taped testimony from Trump’s pet attorney general, Bill Barr. Bar testified that he told Trump that the latter’s claim of massive election fraud was “complete nonsense.” Under oath, Barr said he told the president that his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen were “bullshit.” Following the release of this testimony, Trump lashed out at Barr (who, remember, he appointed) by calling him “weak and frightened” and by doubling down on those false claims of election fraud that have now been smacked down by dozens of courts across the country.

Trump apparently said to a number of his staff who were with him on January 6 that his supporters who were chanting “Hang Mike Pence” had the right idea, and that Pence deserved it for failing to support Trump’s bogus election lies. Trump now says this is “FAKE NEWS.”

Trump has gotten a ton of mileage out of the “fake news” phrase since he appropriated it to refer to anything unfavorable. But videotaped testimony offered under penalty of perjury from your own family members, supporters, and appointees is not even “news.” That’s primary source material.

There is no spin on just rolling the tape. Anyone who brushes off what is being said under oath by Trump’s own inner circle as fake news is an idiot.

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These hearings might not change any minds. The January 6 hearings will still be a win though if they can get people who continue to believe Trump’s bullshit to feel a little shame about openly admitting it. Even if these people don’t have the capacity to understand that Trump is lying, everyone else sure does.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

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