It’s Dangerous for January 6th Hearings To Portray Our Republic as a Fabergé Egg

President Trump’s foes can be expected to use the club handed to them by the fools who desecrated the Capitol on January 6th. But hyping the attack as almost overthrowing our government has dangerous consequences that are not worth short-term political gain.Portraying America’s democracy as a delicate Fabergé egg — one that can be smashed by a cosplaying Viking — encourages all enemies, foreign and domestic.And the message isn’t just what Democrats and anti-MAGA Republicans hope, namely that the Orange Menace is dangerous and must be kept far from power.It’s that the state of our union is not, as President Reagan first stated in 1981, strong. For 40 years, presidents of both parties have used that line to remind everyone that however messy our democracy looks from the outside, we are 50 united states that stand ready to defend our liberty.But people see what they want to see on television, and in the January 6 hearings, our foes are shown America as they wish to see it: Hollow, divided, ripe for destruction.When in 2016 I interviewed Lieutenant Jim Downing, then 103 and the second-oldest survivor of Pearl Harbor, I asked for his advice to America on avoiding conflicts in the future.“Weakness invites aggression,” he said. “Keep America strong.” December 7, 1941, is indeed a date that will live in infamy, as is 9/11, but January 6?When Vice President Harris listed the three dates together, it rang hollow and even insulting, especially since the death toll was several orders of magnitude less.Those attacking on January 6 suffered four deaths. Police casualties were limited to Brian D. Sicknick, who the medical examiner later ruled had died of natural causes, although adding that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”Two other officers killed themselves afterwards, rounding out the Washington Post’s total of seven deaths. By comparison, 2,335 died in the Japanese attack and 2,996 in the Al-Qaeda attacks on the American side alone.January 6, fortunately, cannot compare to those numbers. The wise course, therefore, would have been to prosecute the guilty to the full extent of the law, not to blow it up into a Civil War that we escaped by a hair.Note, too, that Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush didn’t need to hire a Hollywood producer to punch up the script and sell the drama to the public.Yet that’s just what the January 6th hearings have done, cheapening the tragedy by enlisting James Goldston, former president of ABC, to draw viewers.Some of those eyeballs belong to terrorists, anarchists, fascists, and dictators who would love to see America overthrown. “Wow,” they must think. “They’re so weak, an unarmed mob almost overthrew them!”James Philips, author of Two Revolutions and the Constitution, found over 4 million Google search results for the phrase “Trump coup,” questioned that elevation of the unorganized “rabble.”“Let’s assume,” he said, “that President Trump was so narcissistic and so indifferent to the Constitution that he believed that his desire to win trumped the Constitution [and] would have been happy to use illegal means to retain the presidency.“Could he have succeeded? Well, no.” President Trump was “never likely to subvert enough people in all the organs of law, government, the military and the media that he would have needed to mount a successful coup.”January 6, looked at in this light, was the moment our democracy proved its strength. No mob — even several states arming themselves to secede in the 1860s — has proven powerful enough to destroy it.We have the Founding Fathers to thank for that. They designed a system so loaded with checks and balances that no would-be dictator could overcome all of its safeguards.Our democracy is a delicate egg? No, it’s a rock, built upon the Constitution. That is the message the January 6 hearings could have sent to all who would take a crack at it in the future.Because the state of our union is indeed strong. No Hollywood hyperbole or low-rent Vikings can change that fact, and it’s unwise to broadcast otherwise with the world watching.

It’s Dangerous for January 6th Hearings To Portray Our Republic as a Fabergé Egg

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