What a timeline

The 1/6 Committee is in recess right now, but what they did over the last hour and 15 minutes was really something. They showed what was happening at the Capitol and put it up against Trump’s actions in the White House dining room. I don’t say “inaction,” because he was acting. He was watching the riot on Fox News, parts of which the Committee showed on video tape from Fox News. He was calling senators and urging them to vote to delay the counting of electoral ballots. He called Rudy Giuliani (!) twice, once for four minutes and then again for nine minutes. He was being told by aides like Mark Meadows and Pat Cipollone that he had to call off the mob and “condemn the violence,” something it turned out he would not do that day or at any time since then. He was visited by his own daughter and urged to do something to stop the violence.

And in the middle of it all, as the mob was yelling “hang Mike Pence,” as his aides were apparently telling him this and urging him to do something to protect the Vice President, Trump sent the now-infamous 2:24 tweet that “poured gasoline on the fire,” according to the hearing’s two witnesses. That tweet, alone, caused one of them, Matthew Pottinger, a deputy national security adviser who had worked for Trump since his inauguration, to decide to resign. “I made the decision that would be my last day in the White House because I didn’t want to be associated with that anymore,” Pottinger testified, using the pinched language of these little Republican functionaries who, even as their stomachs turned in revulsion against what happened on January 6, didn’t want to burn their bridges to the Republican Party at large. One witness after another was shown on video practically swallowing their tongues as they did everything they could not to condemn Trump even as they were describing the obvious crimes he was committing right in front of them on January 6.

Hearing’s up again.