For Donald Trump, getting back to normal still means overthrowing the government

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WASHINGTON — You observe enough crises, you start to see patterns emerge. For instance, the large number of people trying to skip ahead of reckoning with the causes and implications of the crisis and just get back to “normal.”

“Let’s just get back to normal” is by now a familiar approach to the pandemic. But it’s also the predominant approach of moderate Republican leaders to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of former president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn the election results.

You know who’s not on board with putting those events in the past and moving on? Donald Trump.

Trump was among the earliest cheerleaders of the get-back-to-normal approach to the pandemic. But more than a year after the insurrectionist riot, he’s still trying to overturn the 2020 election the way he attempted to back then.

Last week, Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mo Brooks, a longtime supporter who is seeking the Republican nomination in his state’s upcoming Senate election, because Brooks acknowledged that Joe Biden was the elected president. Brooks said he had been fending off requests from the former president to “rescind the 2020 election, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put Trump back in the White House” well into 2021.

Not every Republican candidate is fending off those requests. This past weekend, Trump appeared at a rally in Georgia with gubernatorial candidate David Perdue, who pledged his allegiance to Trump’s big lie: “Let me be clear,” Perdue said. “Our elections in 2020 were absolutely stolen.”

In a televised debate for the Republican Ohio senate nomination on Monday night, six of the seven candidates repeated Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was “stolen.”

Team Trump isn’t ready to let these events stay in the past.

You know who else isn’t ready to turn the page and declare everything normal? The congressional committee that’s charged with investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt and seeking a measure of accountability for it. Several revelations coming out that committee’s work within the past week show why.

The committee obtained text messages between Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Trump’s chief of staff before and after Jan. 6, 2021. In the messages, Thomas repeated extreme and bizarre conspiracy theories, indicated she was working to overturn the election results and urged Trump’s team to fight.

One could wonder, because she’s married to a Supreme Court justice, if this line of communication is what led the White House to publicly demand getting the election results before the Supreme Court. That suspicion certainly wouldn’t be lessened by observing that not only did Clarence Thomas not recuse himself for a conflict of interest in a motion that dealt with Jan. 6 and potentially could have surfaced his wife’s communications, but that he was the court’s lone dissenter in voting with Trump’s side in that case.

Then came the revelation Tuesday that the White House call logs turned over to the Jan. 6 committee have a seven-hour gap during the period the Capitol was under assault-a period when, from prior reporting, we know Trump was active in phone conversations. Is evidence being concealed? At the very least, retracing Trump’s actions at the time has been made far more difficult.

A separate development this week, a ruling from a federal judge on a motion from the Jan. 6 committee, should make retracing some of Trump’s steps in the lead-up to the riot easier to parse. Judge David O. Carter ruled Monday that emails from legal scholar John Eastman – a Trump adviser who provided the legal strategy to attempt to block the election certification in Congress on Jan. 6 – should be turned over to the committee.

In his ruling, Carter called Eastman and Trump’s co-ordinated actions “a coup in search of a legal theory,” and said he found it “more likely than not” that Trump broke the law in trying to overturn the election. “The illegality of the plan was obvious,” he wrote.

The Jan. 6 committee has conducted most of its business behind closed doors. But members indicated Monday evening that the business is ongoing – in addition to getting the Eastman material, they’ll likely seek testimony from Ginni Thomas.

What’s more, before their final report later this year, they intend to hold public hearings. “In the coming months, the committee will convene a series of public hearings. The American people will hear from our fellow citizens who demonstrated fidelity to our constitution and the rule of law, and who refused to bow to Trump’s pressure, ”said Rep. Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans serving on the committee.

At some point, pursuing legal accountability will rest in the hands of Attorney General Merrick Garland. But the Jan. 6 committee’s members, in a statement on Carter’s ruling, repeated why they think its important, 14 months later, to keep pursuing public information for democratic accountability. “America must not allow what happened on that day to be minimized and cannot accept as normal these threats to our democracy,” they wrote.

That Trump and his supporters continue to refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election shows the threat is not in the past.

“If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution, ”Carter wrote. “If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the court fears Jan. 6 will repeat itself. ”

The pandemic has shown – again and again – that trying to “get back to normal” in the midst of a crisis is basically just declaring the conditions that caused the crisis are normal. Carter says that the Jan. 6 crisis was caused by an attempted coup that could have forever ended the tradition of a democratic and peaceful transfer of power in the US

The question is whether Americans are comfortable considering that as normal.

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