Over eight televised hearings revealing the most comprehensive information yet on President Donald Trump’s role in provoking carnage at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the House panel looking into the attack made clear its main target audience: Republicans.
The main witnesses are Republicans. Democratic committee members went out of their way to praise Republicans who opposed Trump, most notably his Vice President Mike Pence. And the committee’s vice chairman, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), openly appealed to Republican voters. On Thursday night, she pleaded with them to abandon the man they had long revered — a man who “fished for their patriotism,” she said, by lying to them about stolen elections.
“Can a president who is willing to make the choices that Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be entrusted with any position of power in our great nation?” she asked in her closing remarks.
But it’s not yet clear whether Republicans are listening.
Polls show the GOP the outlook on January 6 has hardly budged. And at the Republican Governors Association summer meeting — held in Aspen, Colo., this week — hearings hardly came
Even Larry Hogan, the anti-Trump Republican governor of Maryland who is considering a run for the White House in 2024, offered a measured assessment of the committee’s influence. Among the subset of Republicans following the proceedings, Hogan said in an interview on the sidelines of the meeting, “there is an impact because they’re hearing from people in the White House and members of the administration and supporters who are giving eye-opening facts.”
But most Republicans, he noted, “are not looking or paying attention, and it won’t affect them.”
The members of the commission do not hide that they consider Trump a threat to American democracy and that their goal is no less than eliminating the possibility that he will hold power again.
Through testimony and other evidence, the commission showed that Trump summoned his supporters in D.C. on Jan. 6 with claims of voter fraud that he was repeatedly told were false; he knew the protesters were armed and directed them toward the Capitol anyway; resisted pleas to quell the violence and instead continued to try to delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory; and refused, a day after the siege, to confirm that the election was over.
Trump’s election has escalated tensions and tipped the US toward Jan. 6, panel finds
Amid these revelations, Trump is moving ahead with preparations for another presidential campaign, expecting an announcement in the fall.
Yet as he does so, there are indications of possible changes underway, with support for his future candidacy waning and Trump himself stewing over the lack of support he has received on television and online from fellow Republicans as the committee lays out its argument.
Trump called the hearings — which are expected to resume in September and examine the Pentagon’s response, Capitol security and fundraising by Trump and his allies, among other topics — a “fraud.” He hardly watched the hearings live — he plays golf almost every day — but he followed the coverage, watched some of the taped proceedings and polled friends about the revelations, according to advisers who, like others cited for this story, were spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly.
He became most animated by the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and urged allies to challenge her account. He was particularly angry when he saw some of his close aides on camera criticize his actions or dispute his claim that the election was stolen, four advisers said. A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump also called on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and others to push back more aggressively against the committee and complained that there were no Republicans on television to defend him. He has asked aides and advisers to attack the committee online, with his posts on Truth Social, the online platform he and his allies created, not getting as much traction as they used to on Twitter.
Many of his advisers are watching to see if any of the revelations are “referrals,” in the words of one, or whether the Justice Department will move to prosecute him. Hogan said he believes much of the ultimate impact of the hearings will depend on “what happens with potential actions by the Department of Justice.”
An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released this week found little change from December 2021 in the share of people who view the events of January 6, 2021 as a rebellion and a threat to democracy. About half define it that way, while a quarter, including 2 in 5 Republicans, describe it as an unfortunate event but not a cause for concern in the past.
The same share of Republicans said it was political protest protected by the First Amendment. Independents appear to have evolved in their thinking, with 52 percent of them now saying it’s a riot — a nine-point increase from December.
The clearest sign of the committee’s impact, some pollsters said, is not Trump’s favorability among the GOP, which remains in sterling, but rather attitudes about his possible future candidacy.
“You can see the effect of the hearings in the percentage of Republicans who want him to run again,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster. “Many Republicans are defending him and defending their support for him, but increasingly they feel he carries too much baggage to be the nominee in 2024.”
A New York Times-Siena College poll released last week was the latest to show a declining share of those who want him to run for president again. Only 49 percent said they would support him for another nomination.
That data is consistent with findings from focus groups conducted since the hearings began last month by Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and founder of the Republican Accountability Project against Trump. In several sessions with Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020, she said not a single participant wanted him to run again in 2024, compared to overwhelming majorities who supported a third campaign in dozens of focus groups before June.
“They think the hearings are stupid and they like Donald Trump,” Longwell said. “But they’re making political calculations about who might win.”
Officials, strategists and donors from across the GOP spectrum — from Trump critics to devotees — said any fallout from the former president would be based not on a substantive reevaluation of him, but on a tactical one.
“Republicans want to forget about January 6,” said a top aide to a gubernatorial candidate who defeated a Trump-backed candidate in a recent GOP primary.
This feeling may make some voters weary of Trump, in part because of his focus on discussing the results of an election he lost. Republican primary voters “by a 2-to-1 margin in Midwestern states want candidates and elected officials to focus on the future, not the past,” said Joe Lakin, a Republican media consultant in Missouri.
Republicans who chose to stick with the former president could also see their position hurt by that preference. To the extent that the Jan. 6 hearings came up at the Aspen GOP meeting, people at the meetings said, it was in the form of warnings about the general election viability of Trump-backed candidates and “election deniers,” as a top aide to one governor has labeled such challengers.
Frank Luntz, a veteran GOP pollster who attended the Aspen meeting, said he detected “disillusionment” among Republican voters “that Trump is putting them through it.”
But The fallout from the hearings will affect “only Trump,” Luntz said. That’s in marked contrast to Cheney’s prediction last month to her fellow Republicans who continue to support the former president: “Your dishonor will remain.”
Many Republicans may never hear that message because they have already dismissed the hearings as a partisan exercise, donors and strategists said. Republicans blocked the creation of an independent commission last year, and McCarthy withdrew his five commission proposals after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected two of them. That left a committee made up mostly of Democrats, along with two anti-Trump Republicans.
“The people who are getting into it are people who have taken a stand one way or another,” said Stephen B. King, Trump’s ambassador to the Czech Republic and a Republican donor and former party official.
Trump has rarely faced political spending when he has his back against the wall, said Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and top Trump fundraiser who also chaired the 2019 inauguration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“I kind of agree with what President Trump said when he first ran for president when he said he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose support,” Ballard said. “I don’t see anything in the coverage that would significantly change his support in the party.”
Advisers to other top Republicans say the hearings heighten concerns about Trump’s weakness. In their view, it’s not just that the hearings themselves will disqualify Trump as a potential candidate, but rather that they will remind people of the things they most dislike about him.
Two Florida lobbyists who have raised funds for DeSantis, a potential contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said the hearings could reinforce “Trump fatigue,” as one put it. “I think a lot of people want normalcy. Policies without the craziness.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Pence aide and White House communications director who…
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