Republicans Are Trying to Bully Their Way Out of Accountability for January 6

Donald Trump had a habit of issuing vague threats that, in their hazy, overheated menace, usually sounded like something a child’s idea of a tough guy might say. These comminations were often too strange, too difficult to parse to intimidate as the former president intended. And yet, they still inspired alarm for what they revealed—or affirmed—about the mental state of the man who was leading the nation. He may have thought he was sending a message to the people investigating him and his campaign; in reality, though, he was basically typing all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy over and over, in different configurations, onto his Twitter feed.

Facing their own investigation into their culpability for the January 6 riot their boss incited, the GOP has adopted this same, embarrassing bully tactic—and, as when Trump himself deployed the strategy, the scariest thing about it is what it underscores about the kookiness and cravenness of those doing the threatening. On Monday, the House panel investigating the pro-Trump attack on Capitol Hill called on phone companies to preserve communications records related to January 6, including, perhaps, those of Trump and some Republican lawmakers. That outraged members of the GOP like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told Tucker Carlson on Tuesday that telecommunications companies “will be shut down” if they comply with requests from Representative Bennie Thompson, the chair of the select committee probing the riot.

The threat was not limited to the ever-expanding fringes of the party, where Greene and other MAGA acolytes thrive. Hours earlier, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington, handed down his own ominous warning to the companies, tweeting that “a Republican majority will not forget” if they cooperate with the committee request. It’s hard to know what, exactly, that means, how the GOP would go about punishing private companies for obeying a congressional subpoena, or how doing so would not constitute a far greater government overreach than the one they claim Democrats are committing. The idea here isn’t really to make sense, though; in fact, logic and clarity would only detract from the aim of such threats, which is to “flood the zone with shit,” as Trump strategist Steve Bannon once explained, until efforts to hold people accountable and efforts to evade accountability seem indistinguishable from one another. “Russian Collusion Hoax 2.0,” Congressman Mo Brooks, one of the chief instigators of the January 6 attack, tweeted Monday. “Why not subpoena Socialists who support BLM & ANTIFA?”

Brooks, who has good reason to oppose the investigation, sought to cast the panel in that tweet as a group of socialists and “Pelosi Republicans” like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney—two staunch conservatives who have nevertheless been exiled from their party for having the temerity to object to Trump. It may be true that no pro-Trump Republicans are on the panel. But that is because three of those that McCarthy tried to install on it, before rescinding all five appointments, were election objectors who helped promote the big lie that led to the attack in question. One of the McCarthy picks, Jim Banks, went to even more absurd lengths than some of his colleagues in condemning the panel, suggesting that congressional investigators themselves should be punished for what he said in a letter to Thompson and the communications firms was an “authoritarian undertaking” with “no conceivable legislative purpose.”

“When we win back the majority next year,” Banks told Carlson on Fox News last week, “we have a duty as Republicans to hold every member of this committee accountable for this abuse of power, for stepping over the line.”

The idea that it is an “abuse of power” to conduct an investigation into a violent attack on the Capitol but not for the president or his allies to encourage that very attack is obviously absurd. Then again, absurdity has been a remarkably effective tool in advancing the project of Trumpism, even if it hasn’t always been wielded intentionally. Trump has always acted on his most obvious and immediate interests—to avoid investigation, to save face after a clear electoral failure, to cling to power. Those ends may not have been achieved, but the means are still being embraced by his party as they seek to elude responsibility for their own actions and to use his election lies for their own purposes—including the passage of draconian voter suppression laws, as Texas just did after a protracted fight with state Democrats. That’s an indictment of the GOP, yes, but also of a political culture in which such desperate acts of self-preservation could manage to prevail.