Whether Trump testifies or not, the January 6 committee has issued a devastating indictment

The question of Donald Trump’s responsibility for an attempted coup against the US government has been definitively answered

Donald Trump rallies supporters outside the White House on 6 January 2021 (AFP via Getty Images)

Yesterday’s hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot – probably its last – ended with the committee unanimously voting to subpoena former president Donald Trump to testify before the committee.

One might wonder why the committee did not subpoena Mr Trump to account for his actions long ago. But even if the committee escapes being dissolved by a new Republican majority next January, a session with the former president himself is unlikely to happen.

All that notwithstanding, every moment of the panel’s final hearing before the midterm elections was carefully crafted to illustrate one point: Mr Trump’s actions, starting well before the 2020 election and running right up to 6 January 2021, directly incited the riot, and it was he who knowingly put the wheels in motion.

As Chairman Bennie Thompson said, the former president is “the one person at the center of the story of what happened on January 6.” Not only that, but everyone around Mr Trump’s administration knew his actions could lead to violence – including the Secret Service, whose internal emails showed that the organization knew that attendees at his “Stop the Steal” rally at the White House Ellipse were armed, and that these were the people whom Mr Trump goaded into marching onto the Capitol.

Similarly, the panel demonstrated that when the Supreme Court summarily threw out Mr Trump’s challenge to the election results, he told then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that “I don’t want people to know we lost” – and asked communications staffer Alyssa Farah, “Can you believe I effing lost to this guy?”

This, Representative Pete Aguilar said, illustrates that there is “no scenario” wherein Mr Trump’s actions could be seen as “benign”.

But perhaps the most damning evidence of the whole presentation that clearly pointed to Mr Trump’s culpability was footage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and now-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the phone with the Secretary of Defense, Vice President Mike Pence and then-governor of Virginia Ralph Northam, asking for National Guard troops and police officers to be sent to defend the US Capitol as they hunkered down in a secure room.

The video matters because ever since the Capitol riot, Republicans have sought to lay the blame for the riot on Ms Pelosi herself. After she rejected Kevin McCarthy’s request to seat Jim Jordan on the select committee, the notoriously belligerent Ohio congressman publicly mused why the Capitol wasn’t safe – ignoring the fact he himself has appeased Mr Trump’s worst impulses for years. “Only one person can answer that question,” he said. “The speaker of the United States House of Representatives.”

But the footage – along with a clip shown on CNN in which she said she wanted to clock Mr Trump herself if he came to Capitol – shows that Ms Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Mr Schumer took every step possible to insure not only that the Capitol would be secure, but that they could finish the business of certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

“Yeah, why don’t you get the president to tell them to leave the Capitol, Mr Attorney General in your law enforcement responsibility,” Mr Schumer said in a phone call with the acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.

All of the footage shown in the final act of the carefully coordinated ballet that the committee has staged demonstrated once again just how much blame the former president deserves – blame that former House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy himself admitted Mr Trump bore in the days after the riot.

The question of whether Mr Trump will testify may have been the lede and nut graf of most overnight write-ups, but taken together, the hearing’s revelations render the question of whether he’ll comply with a subpoena all but moot. The committee’s expected report will likely go into even greater detail of just how the riot happened and the extent to which Mr Trump allowed it and ignited it, but after this hearing, no-one can credibly say that anyone else shoulders the ultimate blame.