Nightly Nuance - February 2, 2021

Hello, my friends. I recorded today's Nightly Nuance in the old school way. Our team didn't get a chance to edit it because it took me literally all day to gather my thoughts. So, thanks for your patience and grace. 

I wrote out my thoughts today, and I'm sharing what is close to a transcript below. 

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We are almost one month out from the Capitol Insurrection.

Last night, Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez spoke live on Instagram for 89 minutes about her experience of January 6th. She described hiding in a bathroom as a man angrily shouted “Where is she?” and pounded on the doors in her office. That man, it turned out, was a Capitol Police Officer, but he didn’t identify himself as such, and approached her with such hostility that neither she nor her legislative director were certain if he was there to help them or do them harm. He sent them off to another building without escort or instructions. They ran around in that building certain that they were in imminent harm, finally barricading themselves in Rep. Katie Porter’s office. Rep. Porter gave Rep. Ocasio-Cortez a pair of gym shoes from one of her staffer’s bags in case Rep. Ocasio-Cortez needed to run, jump out of a window, or try to blend into a crowd to escape the mob safely.

I watched all 90 minutes of Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s IG Live this morning, followed by clips from Rep. Porter’s appearance on MSNBC. Then, Sarah and I interviewed Olivia Beavers, a Congressional reporter from Politico. We intended that conversation to be about what to expect in a closely divided Congress, committee assignments, and the freshman class. Instead, it became an extremely personal account of being in the Capitol on January 6 and the trauma that has since followed it.

All of these accounts are necessary. They take a toll on us. For Sarah, the knowledge that violence can be mere steps away in a place you thought was safe takes her back to the shooting at Heath High School when she was a student there. For me, it’s hearing Olivia Beavers talk about how you don’t know how dangerous a situation is while you’re in it, and how seeing videos and pictures later brings on a new wave of shock. Though a completely different trauma in both nature and degree, her description took me back to my high school car accident. I remember my parents showing me a picture of my car a few days later. I hadn’t known at the time that the windshield had shattered. Something about having missed that detail created an emotional response for me that I still can’t quite describe.

This happens for all of us. Trauma never exists in isolation, and hearing someone else’s story — not consuming it, but really hearing it, inevitably brings up our stuff. It’s painful, and it’s miserable, and sometimes you aren’t sure what the point is when it hurts so much.

In a 77-page brief filed in the United States Senate, the House impeachment managers, Jamie Raskin, who recently buried his 25-year-old son, Tommy, and 8 others, try to help us understand what the point is. “This trial arises,” they write, “from President Donald J. Trump’s incitement of insurrection against the Republic he swore to protect.” The tell us in the introduction to the brief that “It is impossible to imagine the events of January 6 occurring without President Trump creating a powder key, striking a match, and then seeking personal advantage from the ensuing havoc.”

The Statement of Facts in the Brief lays out all of the events leading up to the Insurrection. How President Trump told us in July that he might not accept the election results. How he said again in August that the only way he could lose the election would be if it was rigged. They describe how this quickly became more than rhetoric, since the President claimed victory on November 4 and talked about how Democrats were trying to steal the election. How he and his surrogates told all sorts of lies and eventually started pressuring public officials to actually change results. He tweeted about Georgia’s Secretary of State 17 times between November 11 and the date that GA finally certified its election results. On Thanksgiving Day, he labeled Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who voted for him, an “enemy of the people.” Raffensperger and his family received threats of death and violence.

The brief describes Trump’s pressure on the Department of Justice, leading the resignation of Bill Barr. It describes his pressure on Acting AG Jeffrey Rosen and Trump’s reported scheme to fire Rosen and replace him with a loyalist. The President never stopped campaigning after Election Day. Indeed, he continued to fire up his base and raise money and insist to everyone who would listen that he won the election. And when you’re the president of the United States, a lot of people listen.

This all culminated, as we know too well, on January 6, when the president urged his supporters to show up in Washington DC to, as he said in his own words, “fight like hell,” “fight to the death,” against an “act of war.”

According to the House Brief, “Videos of the events show that dozens of the insurrectionists specifically hunted down Vice President Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi” and “menaced Members of Congress, their staffs, their families and Capitol personnel.”

The Brief describes the assault on the Capitol and how during it, the President called Senator Mike Lee, apparently trying to reach Senator Tommy Tuberville, “not to check on his safety, or assess the security threat, but to try to persuade him to delay and further obstruct the Electoral College vote count.” It describes how Republican members of Congress were pleading with the President to quell the “riotous mob.” “Even the President’s own Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, was prompted to speak to him after aides bluntly insisted on it: ‘They are going to kill people,’” the brief says on page 34.

Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham suggested that a long Senate trial of the President would be bad for the country. What I want to know to think about today is who decides what’s good for the country. And what do we mean by good and what do we mean by the country. As the brief puts it rather succinctly, the president violated his oath of office, attacked the democratic process, imperiled Congress, and undermined national security. How is America served by breezing by these established facts? How is it best for the country to pretend this didn’t happen, or that no justice is available, or that, as Leader McCarthy essentially said, everyone bears some responsibility so no one does?

Republicans who do not want to try to defend the president’s indefensible conduct (and several lawyers who are no longer working for the President) will argue instead that because Donald J. Trump is no longer the President, this trial is constitutionally inappropriate. Here is what the impeachment managers say in response:

That argument is wrong. It is also dangerous. The period in which we hold elections and accomplish the peaceful transfer of power is a source of great pride in our nation. But the transition between administrations is also a precarious, fragile time for any democracy - ours’ included. The Framers anticipated these risks and emphasized that presidential abuse aimed at our democratic process itself was the single most urgent basis for impeachment. It is unthinkable that those same Framers left us virtually defenseless against a president’s treachery in his final days, allowing him to misuse power, violate his Oath, and incite insurrection against Congress and our electoral institutions simply because he is a lame duck. There is no ‘January Exception’ to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution.

The brief goes on at length about the historical precedent for holding officials accountable for their official acts and about how President Trump is the personification of the demagogue the framers constantly worried about.

No one wants the Senate tied up in a trial when we need them to confirm new Cabinet members and officials, when we need money for schools and vaccines and unemployment insurance, when there are multiple and compounding inequities and environmental crisis and a coup in Myanmar and Russian hackers literally infiltrating government systems. No one wants this. That does not mean that skipping over it is good for America.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez spoke for 90 minutes on instagram live as the victim of a trauma, and she is one of hundreds and hundreds of people who experienced that trauma. Her trauma was specifically magnified because for years she’s been made the target of right-wing media and candidates. Millions of dollars have been spent telling a huge portion of this country to fear this young woman, who broke down in tears describing herself crouched in a bathroom, trying to peer between 2 sets of door hinges. It is not good for America to pretend that anything about this didn’t happen, to allow the same kind of language to resume as though we still believe everyone hears everything as a metaphor. We are all out of metaphors now.

The House Brief closes by saying that “this is not a case where elections alone are a sufficient safeguard against future abuse; it is the electoral process itself that President Trump attacked and that must be protected from him and anyone else who would seek to mimic his behavior.” And this is the problem, isn’t it? That so many seek to mimic his behavior and to disclaim any responsibility for the fallout. The fallout is predictable. It is foreseeable. It is inevitable.

It will take more than the trial and conviction of President Trump to do work that is “good for America.” His trial and conviction are insufficient. But they are necessary, and I shudder to think about the impact on this nation if the Senate tacitly approves the President’s conduct and the conduct of those who urged people to “stop the steal.” I read Jonathan V. Last’s column in the Bulwark today asking whether moderate Republicans can survive the sedition caucus. In it, he settled on 2 definitions - that moderate republicans are those who acknowledge that Joe Biden is the duly elected President and that he won in a free, fair election. Members who voted to overturn the Electoral College Vote and/or will not stipulate that he is rightfully elected are part of the sedition caucus. He estimated that the moderate wing, using these definitions, works out to be about 15% and the sedition caucus about 60%. He also assumes that the sedition caucus will triumph, because that is where most voters are.

Why is worth unearthing all of this pain? Why is it worth putting the country through a long Senate trial of a former President? Because of these numbers. Republican voters did not get to sedition alone and drag their representatives kicking and screaming behind them. They’ve been fed a steady diet of radical democrats not loving the country, of a scary squad who wants to destroy their way of life, and now a stolen election. These have not been metaphors, and it is no wonder that some percentage heard enough to believe it was time to take up arms. It is no wonder that some percentage used arms to act, as Rep. Mo Brooks instructed them to, as revolutionaries.

It is worth talking about it not because it feels good, not because it’s convenient, and not to satisfy any desire for revenge. It is worth a long Senate trial — as long as it takes — because it needs to be the end of the Trump era, not simply Chapter 2.