How a top Trump aide 'inadvertently' revealed the 'essential truth' about the GOP: columnist

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is among the Republicans who has been subpoenaed to testify before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's select committee on the January 6 insurrection, but former President Donald Trump has urged him to refuse. Meadows discussed the committee Tuesday night during an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, and liberal Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent slammed his comments as exemplifying the anti-democracy mindset that is so common in today's Republican Party.

Sargent, this week in his column, explains, "Meadows…. dismissed the January 6 committee's core mission…. Republicans have broadly renounced any obligation of any kind to hold actors on their side accountable for the effort to overturn U.S. democracy, first through corrupt and possibly illegal procedural means and then through mob violence."

During the interview, Sargent notes, Meadows and Ingraham "sneered at" the idea that extremists on the far right pose a "threat to democracy."

"Just look at that sneering at the very idea that Trumpists would undermine faith in our elections," Sargent observes. "How preposterous! Except just this weekend, Trump reiterated his stolen election lie, and the No. 2 House Republican refused to say the 2020 outcome was legitimate."

Sargent adds, "We just learned that a Trump lawyer authored a coup memo urging Vice President Mike Pence to ignore federal law to throw the election to Trump, and that Pence actually did entertain that scheme. Yet for Meadows, none of this is worth learning more about."

The fact that Meadows doesn't see the need for Pelosi's committee on January 6, Sargent stresses, shows how little Republicans care about the wellbeing of democracy in the United States.

"Meadows, apparently, doesn't want us to learn more about the full insurrectionist intentions of Trump and other co-conspirators — which likely include Republican lawmakers — or about the degree to which Meadows himself might have been one of those co-conspirators," Sargent writes. "Needless to say, a party this deeply committed to the absolute exoneration of Trump by definition does not see this effort to overthrow U.S. democracy as worthy of any national reckoning."

He concluded: "Meadows inadvertently captured an essential truth: The notion that a sustained effort to overthrow U.S. democracy requires a real reckoning and response has indeed become exclusively the Democratic Party position. But what does that say about the GOP?"