Trump's Insurrection: A Riot or a Coup? (Ep 4)

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0:37Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US and our final episode in this special series on January the 6th, 2021 and the events of that fateful day. When we left you last week, January the 6th had happened and many Democrats and even Republicans are furious with Donald Trump and the impeachment talk has already begun. In today's episode, we are going to look at how people tried to hold Donald Trump responsible for January the 6th, how successful they were or were not, and we are going to discuss whether we think the blame lies firmly at the door of Donald Trump and whether he intended for January the 6th to happen.

1:19And this is also a masterclass, this episode, on the Donald Trump squirm. How he manages to get through this process of being impeached again. How many presidents have been impeached twice in this country, Kat? He is the only one. He's the only one. And he's not convicted. And he lives on. He's the second to have been reelected after taking a break. And we can get to that too. And how he manages to squirm. As you say, the squirmer in chief squirms out of this. This is a masterclass in squirm. The squirm in chief. And I'm going to enjoy sharing my thoughts on this with you. The erosion and support for President Trump comes as COVID-19 cases have been surging.

2:02Joe Biden is back and taking aim at the current commander in chief. Under this president, we become weaker, sicker, more divided and more violent. What if Biden wins? Our constitutional rights are to remove a tyrannical government. I'm going to give it to you all. Yeah, we're violent. We are getting ready for some big calls. NBC News projecting, as expected, Joe Biden will win. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. The 700 ,000 votes Trump was ahead by disappeared. We're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! You'll never take back our country with weakness.

2:45Go! Go! We have a brief in the capital. Where the fuck are they? They've got to do it. They were peaceful people. These were great people. We want Trump. We want Trump. We mentioned in the last episode how the world was watching. And our audiences, certainly when I was on the BBC covering this, were really watching around the world. And it was interesting that the Chinese state media and we got our reporters. I remember interviewing one of our reporters in Beijing and asking them, you know, what do they make of this? and he said, look, the Chinese state media is portraying the events of January the 6th as evidence of a country in decline.

3:24But behind the scenes, what we didn't know at the time was how nervous the Chinese were that American democracy might fall and that Donald Trump might use this moment to do something incredibly dangerous. So on the 8th of January at 7.03 a.m., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military general, Mark Milley, urgently calls his Chinese counterpart, General Li, through a top secret back channel. He is trying to reassure them that America is still stable and that nothing crazy is going to happen. The conversation takes place for an hour and a half. Of course, there are translators, so that doubles the talking time, but even so, 45 minutes.

4:12Mark Milley is trying to bring the Chinese back from the brink and reassure them that Joe Biden will take over, America will not attack China because this is what the Chinese are worried about. They are worried that an unstable democracy or a president who is desperate not to leave the White House could do something crazy like attack China. Did Milley break the law doing this? Well, Donald Trump says that Mark Milley broke the law. And that is why Mark Milley is today, even as we're speaking, one of the highest ranking people on the watch list, the hit list that the Trump MAGA people have for retribution, because they say that what he did was treasonous.

4:54But Mark Milley, who was furious with Donald Trump, and actually knew, of course, that America was not stable at this moment. He saw what had happened on January the 6th as a deliberate coup attempt, an attempt to undermine democracy. And he thinks he has to do this to protect the country, to protect America's international standing and to protect the kind of global peace. I don't know. What do you think? Do you think he broke the law? Do you think what he did was treasonous? I don't think he broke the law because he didn't do anything lawbreaking. He's communicating, which you know, we've been doing this since the end of the Second World War.

5:32We've always had back channels. We have back channel communication. We had hotlines put in with the Soviet Union after the Cuban Missile Crisis. We have training that takes place. Sometimes we send people, not to adversaries necessarily, but we do send people to be trained elsewhere and people come to Guantanamo, they come to Quantico, other places to be trained. And so not an abnormal thing to do, but what is abnormal is the situation. And so Trump is the master of this. Okay. He's the master deflector and he's the master of telling his supporters about his victimhood. Such a good point. It's such a good point.

6:16I am aggrieved here. Right. Mark Milley is supposed to be my general and he's calling hated China to tell them not to worry about an attack. Who the hell is he to do that? I'm the commander in chief. This is not about the MAGA crowd that tried to just have an insurrection and a police officer has died and my supporters who breached the Capitol and wanted to hang Mike Pence. This is about Mark Milley. He's the guy that's done something wrong. It is unbelievable. and it is right in the Donald Trump playbook and it's right in what I call the algorithm, the Trump algorithm. Deflect, deny, never be responsible for anything.

7:04The Roy Cohen approach to politics. Never apologize. Aha, see you're giving it up. You've watched The Apprentice, and you saw Jeremy Strong's performance as Roy Cohen intimidating the living daylights out of the young Donald Trump and seeking him to be ruthless and cold and sinister. One thing about that movie, by the way, is the coldness in the eye sockets of Jeremy Strong. Because there's one thing about Roy Cohn that everybody remembers is the dead eye, the dead eye stare, I am not you. I am more ruthless than you. I am more vicious than you. And so here, Mr. Trump, I'm going to appeal to one of those evil twins in your personality.

7:53Be vicious, deflect, deny. And so he goes after Mark Milley, goes after him. Mark Milley is so worried at this point, which we don't know at the time, we only know this subsequently from reporting, and you and I have both spoken to Mark Milley about this time as well, that he puts a tight leash around the military. He wants to preemptively stop Donald Trump from doing something unilaterally. And he summons his senior officers from the National Military Command Center, and he goes through the procedures for launching nuclear weapons. And he makes it clear to everyone that he, as chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, must be involved in that process.

8:32He instructs them that even if they get a call from President Trump, they cannot do anything without Milley. And a statement then goes out from the Joint Chiefs, all the Joint Chiefs saying, January the 6th was a direct assault on the US Congress, the Capitol building and our constitutional process. On January the 20th, 2021, President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will be our 46th Commander-in-Chief. I cannot imagine how much Donald Trump hated that statement. It is one of these crazy, crazy things about our life is that we know something horrific has happened. We know something wrong has happened, but it's almost like a form of abuse, right?

9:19Because it's almost like the president is breaking all the norms. He's abusing the system, but he stole the president, right? And so therefore you're sitting there being abused by somebody that you were taught in school to revere. Imagine the King of England doing this, or the prime minister, and all the school children in England are told, hey, these are our leaders, and these, you know, God save the King, we sing every morning when we go to school. But here's the person that we all look up to, George Washington's heir, Catty Cat, and he's a nut job, and he's doing things that are breaking the norms, and we're trying to figure out how to in four.

10:00Smashing the norms. I mean, Nancy Pelosi also calls Mark Milley and asks him what precautions are available to prevent an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or launching the nuclear codes. And I think it's at this point that Democrats are very worried. January the 6th has happened. The whole city is jittery. Kevin McCarthy, as you said, at this point is still livid. Even Lindsey Graham, the senator who has been so close, the Republican senator who's been so close to Donald Trump goes on the Senate floor and says, Trump and I, we've had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way.

10:37Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are lawfully elected and will become the president and the vice president of the United States on January the 20th. Lindsey Graham, where have you gone? Because for those days after January the 6th, he stood up and he said he was getting off the Trump train and that the events of January the 6th were beyond the pale. And look how quickly their willingness to challenge and hold Donald Trump responsible quickly fades. I know I'm jumping around and I have attention deficit disorder and you try to keep us organized and I'm forever grateful to you for that. But can I just, I got to digress for a second.

11:12I want you to picture the day in 2024 where Trump re-arrives at the Capitol. And it's his first visit to the Capitol since the 2021 insurrection. And he's greeted like a returning conqueror. How much has changed? I know. All these guys crapped all over him. All these guys sent out declarations. McCarthy tells his roommate, Frank Luntz, the guy's dead and buried politically. I don't have to worry about him anymore. I'm moving on to the Speaker of the House. This finished him. Does anything ever finish him? The one person who was not there to welcome him back with open arms to the Capitol and has not done so a single time, Vice President Mike Pence.

11:58Well, Pence says he can't vote for him. Pence says what he did was a disgrace. You know, Mitt Romney was also in that category. Mitt Romney has a distinction, God bless him, of being a Republican senator that voted twice for Donald Trump's impeachment. He was the only Republican senator to vote for the impeachment one. He does it again in impeachment two. And I know Republicans who have been lifelong Republicans, voted for Donald Trump in 2016, voted for Donald Trump in 2020, who have said to me that January the 6th was the line that was breached. That was the Rubicon. And once it was crossed, they could never vote for Donald Trump again.

12:36So you've got some of them and you've got, of course, in Congress, famously at the time, Liz Cheney, the Republican from Wyoming, daughter of the former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has started talking about impeachment very publicly. And on January the 13th, they bring it to a vote, this idea of impeachment against Donald Trump under the charge of incitement of insurrection. Nancy Pelosi says before the vote, he must go. He is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love. And across the Democratic Party, it's very clear there's solidarity, there is a mission to get Trump out. Trump was impeached by a vote of 232 to 197.

13:17First time, as you said, that any president has been impeached twice. Do you think that the fact that he'd already been impeached made this impeachment somehow less dramatic or less consequential, Anthony? I do. I do. I think he's numbed people. He's numbed people. He's the great normalizer of abnormal behavior. You have heads of state all over the world now that have the Donald Trump algorithm and matrix and say, okay, this is totally abnormal, but there's a lot of things that he does that's predictable. And he's normalizing abnormal behavior. And as a good, true narcissist. He's enjoying the fact that we have to kowtow to him.

14:05And so he's doing it again. He's there. He's putting on his flex. He's saying Millie's a treasonous person. He's saying Mike Pence did not do the right thing. He's telling his staff under no circumstances, can you help the Biden transition? He's about to ascend to the presidency illegitimately. He's stolen the election. I will not admit defeat. I will not show up at his inauguration. The Roy Cohn school of malicious manipulation. And that I think is a very important moment as well. I mean, there's nothing in the constitution that says that a president has to show up at the inauguration of his successor, but it's one of those norms and traditions, the customs of American democracy that Trump smashes through.

14:54On the 20th of January, the day that Joe Biden is inaugurated, Donald and Melania Trump come down from the White House residence. They say goodbye to the White House staff. They are applauded by some of the staff. They walk out onto the lawn, they get on Marine One, and they leave the White House. They go off to Andrews Air Force Base. Donald Trump gives this not particularly gracious speech at Andrews Air Force Base before getting on Air Force One to fly back to Mar-a-Lago. And I think for those of us watching that day, and for many people in Washington, yes, he gave an ungracious speech. Yes, he failed to turn up to the inauguration.

15:37But the overwhelming sentiment amongst Republicans that I spoke to, as well as Democrats, was relief. Relief that he got on the plane. I mean, it was almost like Air Force One took off, flew down to Florida, and we were all watching the footage of it as it took off thinking, well, thank God, because it was touch and go. It was touch and go right until the end of his presidency about whether he was actually going to leave. Washington had become this kind of fortress after January the 6th. There were enormous security precautions. There were troops everywhere. The Capitol was barricaded in a way it's never been in the 25 years I've lived in Washington.

16:17I had never seen that. You couldn't get near to the Capitol. And Joe Biden at 11.52 in the morning takes to the stage and is inaugurated. Can I interrupt you for just a personal story because I think you'll enjoy this. So I probably should admit this on our podcast, but I'm on the MAGA internal mailing list. Okay. So what does that mean? If there's like a special event, I still get the invite. Okay. So do you know where I was invited on the morning of January 20th, 2021? Andrews. That's right, Caddy Kay. Joint Base Andrews. Amazing. Please attend the event. Fill this out with your name for secret service.

16:59So was he trying to make an alternative to the inauguration or something? He was trying to go to his donor list. He was trying to go to his donor list to continue the fight. Okay. And he had in his head, I'm going to raise money off Stop the Steal. And so I'm going to go to my big kahuna donors and I'm going to have them show up with me so I can further indoctrinate them. Come on, you're going to see me in all my orange war painted splendor with Air Force One behind me. And Melania in a very fantastic black suit and big black sunglasses, I remember. Right. And my kids are going to be there teary-eyed and you're going to be with me.

17:44And of course, I put out on Twitter the invitation. And then I said, geez, I'm sorry, I can't attend. I'm having both my front teeth drilled this morning. The dentist has called, it needs to like marathon man, Laurence Olivier. With no anesthetic, I'd rather be there. With no anesthesia, they're going to drill my two front teeth at 9 a.m. January 20th. Sorry, I cannot make your ridiculous, insane, asinine speech. Go ahead, Katty. Sorry to interrupt. Do you want a little detail? This is the fashionista in me. You know I like my clothes. A little detail. Melania gets on the plane on Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on that morning, dressed in this kind of black suit with black glasses.

18:28She hasn't said anything. She gets on the plane and then she gets off the plane at West Palm Beach in Florida. And she has changed while she's on board and she gets off the plane in a kind of summery, bright colored dress. And it's like Melania is saying, thank God I've left Washington. I mean, you could just read it in her clothes. Look at the pictures, guys, because it's quite fun to see Washington. The subliminal messages that Melania Trump sends with her fashion are always worth noting. And she sent a big one on that inauguration day. Here we are. Biden is now going to take the stage, right?

18:58I mean, Trump's gone. He's taken off. Read a little bit of what he says, because I think it's really interesting what he says. He says, today, we celebrate the triumph, not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy. The will of the people has been heard, and the will of the people has been heeded. We have learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed. Has democracy prevailed, Katty? Well, I think democracy has prevailed. Yeah, me too. Anthony, at this point. I think it still has. Fast forward to, exactly, to 2025 and the irony that Joe Biden will stand, sit on the podium next to Donald Trump as Donald Trump is sworn back in again as president and will take over from Joe Biden.

19:49Joe Biden as the outgoing president will attend the inauguration. Kamala Harris as his vice president will attend the inauguration. and they will watch as democracy works, as democracy holds, and there will be a peaceful transition of power. And I don't know if you would say that there was a peaceful transition of power after this series in 2020. I don't think there was a particularly peaceful transition of power, but four years later, fast forward, democracy is held when the transition of power will take place as it normally should. So, Katty Kay, the irony of ironies, this ridiculously sturdy system with all its checks and balances and all of its decentralization is actually not what Donald Trump calls it.

20:33It's not rigged. It's not a stolen election. It's actually a fair and judicious process, so much so that he can be the second president since Grover Cleveland and return to the presidency. And there's great irony in all this. There's great irony in all this because this is a man that if he lost that election fair and square, what do you think would have happened if he lost the 2024 election, a redo of January of 2021? I think that's a very good question. I mean, how much is there an appetite in this country still for that kind of violence? I mean, it was interesting that he was not convicted by the Senate on the 13th of February, 2021.

21:10Trump was acquitted. Mitch McConnell voted to acquit. If they had convicted him in the Senate on that day, on the 13th of February, again, another rhetorical question. Would he have been running again in 2024? Would he, all of these moments, how much would they have changed history? I mean, here's the thing. Spinaless jellyfish. That's the title of this episode. Kevin McCarthy is, Trump is not going to be around anymore. I've got to maneuver and get the Trump MAGA voters and I got to get everybody in the fall. All I care about is being Speaker of the House. McConnell's furious at Trump, but McConnell can't convict Trump unless he has Republicans in the House voting to impeach Donald Trump.

21:59Kissinger does it, Liz Cheney does it, a few others. And I will point out, Katty Kay, that the ones that vote for the impeachment are all MAGA primaried and knocked out of the House of Representatives, Liz Cheney, Adam Gissinger, your careers are over because you have spine and principles. You're knocked out and you've been outmaneuvered to the right by MAGA candidates. But all McCarthy had to do is pick up the phone. Hello, Mitch? Yeah, how are you? I'm going to deliver 25 to 30 Republicans that hate Donald Trump's guts. All you have to do is deliver, You tell me two thirds of the Senate, we're all going to be there.

22:41We can knock this guy out and put them lights out forever. And we can get Republican oriented policies with somebody normal. Not that normal because all these politicians are nuts, but you know, a Ron DeSantis, a Nikki Haley, a Chris Christie, but not Donald Trump. We have a moment to extinguish the guy, but I can't do it, Mitch. You know why I can't do it? Because I need to be speaker of the house for 24.5 Scaramucci's because I can't last longer than that because I've got Matt Gaetz, Spain on my ass, and all these other people are going to torture me while I'm speaker. But my ambition, my personal ambition is more important than anything else.

23:24So I last 24.5 Scaramucci's and now I'm on the speaking tour earning kibbles and bits in terms of speaking fees. Jellyfish. Let's take a break there. Join us afterwards for the final twist in this story, the January the 6th committee and their investigation as to whether Donald Trump was personally responsible for what happened.

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24:59Welcome back. So we have got to the January the 6th committee that is created in the House of Representatives on July the 1st, 2021. Joe Biden is now president. It's a few months after the events of January the 6th, and it is formally known as the Select Committee to Investigate the January the 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. There had been efforts to form a kind of bipartisan independent commission, a bit like the 9-11 Commission after the attacks of 9-11, but these have been blocked in the Senate. So now the House has moved to create a select committee, and the committee is composed of seven Democrats and just two Republicans, Liz Cheney, who we mentioned earlier, the congresswoman from Wyoming, and Adam Kinzinger.

25:45And I think, you know, these, I don't know whether to think, Anthony, wow, it's so impressive that these two stood up and joined the committee and went by their principals, Adam Kinzinger, the congressman from Illinois, Republican congressman, or whether to think, wow, it's so depressing that there were only two members of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives who were brave enough to even join a committee that was just investigating the events of January the 6th. I want you to imagine in your mind, because you've lived in Washington for two and a half decades, And I want you to imagine in your mind the number of Republicans that have told you privately that they hate Donald Trump.

26:25Do you have that number conjured up in your mind? So many. Yeah. So many. So give me the number. 25? I would say at least. At least. You know, it could be even closer to 40, 50. Okay. So let's say 40 or 50. You get two people. And why, Katty? What does Trump call this select committee. He calls it the unselect committee. And he's raging about it on Truth Social. He says it's a witch hunt. And it's a witch hunt. And he's raising, Catty K, he is raising hundreds of millions of dollars. He's telling his friends in real estate that this thing known as politics is absolutely fabulous. You put out a link, you put out a text, you put out an email, and there's people all over the country that are sending him$5 and$10 and$20 and$60.

27:18It's fabulous. And he's grinding out these emails like sausages. He's just grinding them out. Stop the steal. The unselect committee is coming after me. I need your help. I need your help. Does he spend any of this money fighting the stolen election? Of course, the answer is obvious. No, he doesn't because he knows the election is not stolen. And so he's got hundreds of millions of dollars in his war chest caddy. time to redo Trump Force One. Let's take those engines off. Time to repaint the plane. Going to use this money for that, but I'm not going to use the money for the stop to steal. And now you have these brave souls on this committee.