By Stephen Macaulay
Let’s not get too fancy here.
The adult tells the 4-year-old to eat the broccoli and the child sticks his fingers in his ears and goes “la-la-la-la-la-la. . .” to block out what will have to happen.
In the second public hearing of The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (the name of the committee cannot be stated too often lest people overlook the fact that it was an attack) the child in question was Donald Trump.
Aides told him that he lost. He didn’t want to listen. They repeated it. “La-la-la-la-la-la-la.”
(Trump may have wanted to believe an “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani, but I suspect that a teetotaler knows full well when someone is drunk and talking bullshit.)
But the kid at the dinner table and Trump were told, unambiguously, the truth of the matter and pretending not to hear it doesn’t change a thing.
Of course, the difference between the kid and Trump is that the broc doesn’t have the ramifications of an attack, an attack that led to the deaths of people in law enforcement. Many Republicans were in high dudgeon when the phrase “Defund the Police” was put out there.
How any of them can watch the Nick Quested footage as the mob attacked the police with fury and vengeance and not see their hypocrisy is startling. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe they, too, have their eyes shut and ears blocked so that they don’t have to witness the bloody reality of that situation.
Trump knew full well that he lost. If he didn’t, if he didn’t believe the people who he put into their positions of authority who told him he lost, then arguably the implementation of the 25th Amendment should have occurred because clearly the man’s faculties were not what we’d expect of someone beyond age 4.
So because he knew, because he kept telling people how the election was rigged, stolen or otherwise not in his favor, he worked to instigate what occurred on January 6.
The kid who doesn’t eat his broccoli might get sent to his room with his devices taken away.
What’s going to happen to Trump?
The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol can’t answer that question.
The Justice Department can. And should.