Let’s start with a prediction. The Americans will suddenly stop talking about the trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. The two celebrities will be eclipsed by another star: Donald Trump.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
It is that the public hearings of the commission on January 6 begin this Thursday. The United States will plunge back into the chaos of the assault on the Capitol, it is announced. What we feel forced to answer: so much the better!
This assault, on January 6, 2021, was the most striking manifestation of the excesses of Trumpism. The public hearings of the investigation carried out on this subject in the American Congress will look into the behavior of the former president. And on that of his most faithful allies.
So yes, so much the better if they dive back into it, our neighbors. They must relive it, this nightmare, to learn from it.
Because so far, they are treading water. It has now been more than a year since Joe Biden moved into the Oval Office, and the health of American democracy has not improved since.
It’s worrying. For them as for us, neighbors and passive spectators of this troubled period of American history sponsored by Donald Trump.
Too many Republican Party heavyweights continue desperately – and so far with impunity – to claim that the November 2020 election was rigged. And too many of their supporters have come to believe it.
All the better if Americans plunge back into this chaos, too, because too many questions remain unanswered.
– What really happened behind the scenes on the day of the uprising?
– What was the involvement of the former president and his allies?
– What was the true nature of their effort to overturn the election result?
It is also urgent to determine how to avoid such a fiasco in the future and how to protect American democracy against such threats.
Some believe, not without reason, that the January 2021 uprising was just a rehearsal.
PHOTO MARK MAKELA, REUTERS
Liz Cheney
Americans “need to understand how easily our democratic system can break down if we don’t defend it,” Liz Cheney said recently.
Regardless of what we think of the ideas defended by the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, we agree that today she is a fine example of courage.
She was among 10 Republican members of the House of Representatives – out of 211 – who dared to vote to impeach Donald Trump (for incitement to insurrection) in the second impeachment proceedings launched against him.
Today, they are only two Republicans – she and Adam Kinzinger, who has already announced that he will not run for a new mandate – to sit on the commission on January 6th.
The public sessions of this commission which we will be attending over the next two weeks represent the culmination of a colossal effort aimed at shedding light on a dismaying episode. The work has been going on for nearly a year and some 1,000 witnesses have already been questioned.
What we will learn there could be as disturbing as worrying.
But the killer question is this: will the members of this commission preach only to the converted? Those who have sworn only by the Trumpian catechism for half a dozen years will they be moved by their findings, however shocking they may be?
Will they only follow his work? We learned that the Fox News network, true to its reputation, is not going to broadcast them live.
In baseball, it looks like the Jan. 6 commission has already had two strikes against it.
But if American parliamentarians did not hold these public hearings, if they did not try to expose the machinations of the enemies of democracy, they would contribute to the trivialization of what happened.
To accept the worst excesses without flinching is to condemn oneself to seeing them repeat themselves.