House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed how much worse Trump's attempted coup could have been during Thursday's public hearings.
Experts weighed in following the hearing.
Princeton historian Julian Zelizer wrote, "The theme of today's 1/6 committee: the multi-part plan wasn't chaos, it wasn't 'delusion,' nor was it a leader who lost control of events. This was a premeditated, coordinated, and intentional effort to overturn an election that Trump and his team understood he had lost."
Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe noted, "two bipartisan 9-0 votes against Donald J. Trump today, one 9-0 vote by SCOTUS, the other 9-0 by the Select Committee to Investigate the Insurrection. A bad day for Trump, a good day for the Rule of Law."
He noted Trump telling Cassidy Hutchinson, "I don't want people to know we lost."
"This cinches his guilty state of mind. No doubt left," Tribe wrote. "Trying to defraud us all."
"After today’s public hearing, one more thing is clear: It won’t be enough for AG Merrick Garland to approve indictments of Trump related to Mar-a-Lago & obstruction," he explained. "He will have to approve indictments for trying to overthrow the election, seditious conspiracy, and insurrection."
Trump almost got away with it.
"Trump knew that violence on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, might give him a pretext to declare martial law and invoke other authoritarian powers in an effort to hang on to the Presidency," presidential historian Michael Beschloss said.
He explained, "If the January 6 attack on the Capitol and Congress had turned into a hostage crisis or, God forbid, assassinations of members of Congress, Trump would probably have declared that he needed to take increased Presidential power in order to ' restore order.' And if the physical Electoral Vote ballots were destroyed at the Capitol on January 6, as some of the attackers seemed eager to do, Trump might have announced that no President had been chosen and that he would occupy the vacuum."
Yale historian Joanne Freeman hoped Trump will testify.
"For now, we need to hear from the man at the center," Freeman wrote. "We are all as Americans owed an explanation."
"If we can’t agree there should be legal consequences for a president who tries to stay in office whether he wins an election or not—and is willing to lie, pressure officials, and incite violence to do so—then it’s hard to see how democracy isn’t doomed," warned Prof. Brian Klass. "This isn’t complicated."
Dartmouth political science Prof. Bendan Nyhan said, "it was an attempted self-coup (autogolpe). Did not emerge spontaneously. A direct effort by the President of the United States to overthrow our democracy."
Tribe, the Harvard Law professor, said, "this final hearing was the most effective in years. Taken together with the committee’s prior hearings, it left no doubt that Trump deliberately tried to steal the 2020 election and committed major federal crimes in the process."
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