Also important for the Capitol riot probe: what Trump * didnt * do that day.

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The House select committee investigating the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, doesnt really need to prove President Donald Trump was to blame for the riot. Separating Trump out of the events of that day means focusing extremely narrowly on the initial acts of violence and ignoring 1) why the rioters were at the Capitol and 2) why they were so angry. It is declaring innocent the guy who supplied all the matches, poured out all the gasoline and kept chanting, Cool kids start fires.

Many Americans don’t accept that, of course. Many Republicans think Trump doesnt bear primary blame for the riot, thanks to some combination of focusing only on the acts of violence, believing it to have been spurred by people who didnt support Trump or seeing the complaints of the rioters as justifiable (and not recognizing that view as a function of Trumps false claims about the election).

Were far enough from the events of the riot by now that views of what occurred are largely cemented and that the most popular media outlet among Republicans is actively helping its viewers to ignore the committees work suggests the cement will remain intact. The committees vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Could make as robust a case for Trumps culpability as might be imagined, but most Americans will either already or never accept the argument.

Which is why some of the committees most important work might be showing not what Trump did but what he didnt do.

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Lets say, just for the sake of argument, that tens of thousands of people showed up in Washington without Trump cajoling them to. Lets say they were there because they thought the election had been stolen, even without Trump having said a word to that effect. And lets say that, once there, a subset of the group marched on the Capitol and broke inside, intent on disrupting the finalization of Trumps election loss as Congress counted the electoral votes.

What might you expect the president of the United States to do? The Capitol, just over a mile down the street from the White House, is being overrun by angry rioters and members of Congress and the vice president are inside. They are at risk. What would you expect the response from the chief executive to be?

Perhaps something like this?

He was very animated and he issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders. He was very animated, very direct, very firm to [Army] Secretary [Christopher] Miller: Get the military down here, get [National] Guard down here, put down this situation, etc.

Thats Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, telling the Jan. 6 committee about a phone call he had with a senior administration official on the day of the riot. But that forceful insistence on addressing the riot didnt come from the president. It came from Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump, Cheney said during Thursdays hearing, did not call his secretary of defense, did not talk to his attorney general, did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security, gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day and made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and display and deploy law enforcement assets.

Pence demanded action. Trump demanded nothing.

Why? Why wouldn’t the president want immediate action to stem the violence? Messages from allies were flooding his chief of staffs phone, demanding he do something. But he didnt. Why not?

We know the probable answer, of course. Trump didnt take any action because he preferred the riot to the vote-counting. In a conversation with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) As the riot was underway, McCarthy demanded that Trump take action to halt the attack.

I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are, Trump told him, according to legislators who spoke with McCarthy.

For hours, theres no record of what Trump was doing on that day. There is no record of calls from the White House, though Trump apparently used aides cellphones during the period of the riot. Some of that time was spent crafting mixed messages about the days events, like a belated video asking that rioters leave the Capitol as he offered them praise. In his book Frankly, We Did Win This Election, journalist Michael Bender reports that Trump simply ignored many demands that he do more.

Trump could have done three things on that day. He could have kept pushing the rioters forward, offering more tweets like his one soon after the Capitol was breached disparaging Pence. At the other end of the spectrum, he could have done what Pence did, demanding immediate action to protect the safety of legislators and the security of the Capitol. Or he could have done what he did: little to nothing, avoiding criticism for actively stoking the riot as it was underway while reaping the benefit he enjoyed seeing his furious supporters fight to keep him in office.

The benefit went further than that, of course. He and his allies used the delay to press legislators to reject the electoral votes submitted by the states. The riot soothed his insatiable desire to have his ego stroked, but it also delayed the inevitable and kept open the last window of hope for Trump to stay president.

Even setting aside any blame that Trump deserved for the riot, he had a motive for allowing it to continue and the evidence suggests he took no action to prevent it from doing so. To continue the initial analogy: he stood by holding a fire extinguisher as the fire continued to burn at times roasting marshmallows to make smores.

Without Trump, there was no riot at the Capitol. Without Trumps intervention, the riot was almost certainly worse than it otherwise would have been. And thats a choice that cannot be defended by waving away his responsibility for the riot in the first place.

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