It is not a homogeneous group. There are the staunch bootlickers, the smart opportunists, and the terminal mediocres. They may be mercenary generals, educated in elite schools, who swore to respect the Constitution but preferred to tarnish the reputation of the Armed Forces. Or merchants profiting from unprecedented criminality, implemented by both the New York businessman and his grotesque carioca clone.
Americans are, after all, witnessing a coherent inventory of the republic’s most corrupt presidency.
On Tuesday (12), the seventh public hearing of the committee investigating January 6 had testimonies from repentant Trumpists. It is impossible to deny the importance of ratings, in a country where 70% of those who vote for the Republican Party remain certain that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
All of the witnesses questioned by the committee are Republicans, and several were loyal to the former president until the Capitol invasion, which makes it harder to sell the story that the House investigation is just a Democrat propaganda circus.
At the latest hearing, Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the Oath Keepers — one of the white nationalist militias that organized the attack on Capitol Hill after Trump rallied supporters in December in a tweet — said: “Let’s stop beating around the bush. January 6 was planned as an armed revolution.”
At his side, Stephen Ayres, who has already been found guilty of participating in the invasion and faces a year in jail, said he was following the summons of the defeated president. At the end of the hearing, Ayres addressed a group of police officers who were beaten and wounded on 6 de Janeiro and asked for forgiveness.
Nobody expects regret from the two monsters, the one from Florida and the one from Brasilia. But there is no way to promote reconciliation without exposing the hordes of facilitators of the violent coup. Two new books serve as a compass for the balance that still needs to be done in Brazil. Both are x-rays, in excellent prose, of those who made Trump’s election and presidency possible.
Tim Miller published “Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell”. He was a hired gun, looking for dirt on opponents of former Florida governor and Republican pre-candidate Jeb Bush in 2016. He is also a gay man, married with an adopted daughter, which justified the party’s homophobic platform.
Testimonies like Miller’s are especially valuable for mapping conservative hypocrisy. He created a classification for different degrees of support for Trumpism and interviewed the specimens who were protagonists of the Trump years, exposing repulsive arguments. His book demolishes the fallacy about the importance of staying in the palace to be the voice of reason blowing advice into the autocrat’s ear. Extremists, he concludes, have become the tail that now wags the dog of the republican establishment.
In the other book, “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission,” veteran political reporter Mark Leibovich does the astounding accounting of the transformation of conservative republicans into soldiers of a mafia cult.
The prison awaits some inhabitants of the trumposphere. They did not calculate the risk of servitude.
