image above: President Donald Trump at the Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington, before his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
WN: Near the end of the article highlighted below, the writer asks and answers (emphasis added):
Why didn’t Trump act more forcefully? Why didn’t he speak out sooner? Again, for the same reason he’d done everything else: He wanted to retain power.
The jury is in–and it is ever so sad:
Trump is just one more of common garden variety would-be dictators; whose power-hungry fascist junk litters the corridors of history. Trump’s will indeed be relegated to the dustbin . . .
excerpts:
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol concluded what is expected to be the last of its public hearings on Thursday by unspooling the evidence it had gathered. There was no more mystery about its conclusions than there would be when watching a prosecutor’s closing argument at a criminal trial: The riot was a function of the actions and decisions of the former president.As Trump adviser Roger Stone put it in a comment captured by a team of documentary filmmakers: “The key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“The vast weight of evidence presented so far,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee vice chair, said in an opening comment, “has shown us that the central cause of January 6th was one man, Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of it.”“At some point, myself and a handful of other folks went over and sat down with the president and communicated that the odds of us prevailing and legal challenges were very small,” [Communications aide Jason Miller] testified. He was right.
What followed was a review of that evidence, a stitching together of hours of prior testimony and the injection of newly uncovered details as the committee has continued its work. It was, as the prior analogy would suggest, a prosecution of a case — and an effective one.Why would he want to keep fighting it? Simply, to preserve his power. He wanted to remain president and understood that preserving a sense among his supporters that he should be president, that he had won, was important to doing so.
Trump’s responsibility for the violence that unfolded that day can be viewed as an escalation over three periods of time: the months before the election on Nov. 3, 2020, the period from Election Day to Jan. 6, and the events of Jan. 6 itself.Remember, Trump knew they were armed. According to the committee, he’d also been warned that there was a threat of violence. But Trump knew they were “not here to hurt me” and planned, as he announced, to march with them.
He wanted to retain power.