Trump Refuses to Explain His January 6 “Fiddling While Rome Burns” Afternoon - Horowitz

Trump Refuses to Explain His January 6 “Fiddling While Rome Burns” Afternoon - Horowitz

Donald Trump apparently believes he owes the American public no explanation for his “fiddling while Rome burns” afternoon on January 6.  This is despite the fact that unlike the Roman Emperor Nero, to whom the phrase originally applied, the disgraceful events of that fateful afternoon were not just caused by Trump’s neglect; it was a raging fire that he was primarily responsible for starting.

 

When repeatedly asked by Kristen Welker to explain what he was doing that afternoon in an interview that aired on her Meet the Press debut on Sunday, the former president repeatedly refused to answer even the most basic factual questions about his actions or lack thereof. He essentially asserted he didn’t owe the American public any accounting for his dereliction of duty, continuing to accept no responsibility and attempting to shift all the blame elsewhere.

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The January 6 committee accurately summarized Mr. Trump’s failure to take action to stop the attack on our Capitol that afternoon in one of its findings: “Knowing that violence was underway at the Capitol, and despite his duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, Donald Trump refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television. This failure to act perpetuated the violence at the Capitol and obstructed Congress’s proceeding to count electoral votes.” 

 

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) saw the afternoon similarly. “Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet attacking his vice president," Senator McConnell told his colleagues in a floor speech excoriating Mr. Trump after explaining he was voting against convicting him in his impeachment trial because he was no longer president. “Predictably and foreseeable, under the circumstances, members of the mob seemed to interpret this as further inspiration to lawlessness and violence. Later, even when the president did halfheartedly begin calling for peace, he did not call right away for the riot to end. He did not tell the mob to depart until even later. And even then, with police officers bleeding and broken glass covering Capitol floors, he kept repeating election lies and praising the criminals.”

 

Just as troubling. Donald Trump also continued his fact-free insistence that he was the real winner of the 2020 Presidential election in the interview with Welker. When asked point blank by the new Meet the Press host, “Are you acknowledging that you lost the election,” the former president responded, “I’m not acknowledging. No. I say I won the election.”  And he continued to with a straight face offer up the same falsehoods that have been thoroughly debunked, such as that ballot boxes were stuffed.

In the Meet the Press interview as a whole, Mr. Trump continued his “firehose of falsehoods” approach to public communication-one that appears to serve him well with his core supporters but turns-off a substantial majority of the electorate who view the former president as reflexively dishonest. “Former President Donald Trump made a spate of false and misleading comments about immigration, foreign policy, abortion and more,” reported NBC News’ fact-check of the interview.
In advance of the interview there was the usual gnashing of teeth and unfair criticism of the interviewer for even doing the interview among some liberals and progressives.   The plain fact is that as a former president and the current frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Trump is a newsworthy interview subject and no interviewer no matter how skilled will be able to confront all his falsehoods in real time.  It is not a legal cross-examination; it is an interview.
In this case, Ms. Welker did a fairly effective job of drawing the former president out on some key topics, her push back on questions like January 6 and his refusal to admit he lost the 2020 presidential election, yielded some new and somewhat revealing answers. and since the interview was taped, NBC News was able to periodically interrupt it for fact checks. It also seems that some of the criticism of mainstream journalists interviewing Donald Trump is that the critics are under the mistaken impression that these interviews help his political standing.  This is simply not the case. Since his victory in 2016, the more Mr. Trump dominates the headlines and media, the worse he and the candidates he has backed in general elections have done.

 

If your goal is to ensure that Donald Trump does not return to the White House, you should want him to be interviewed on television everyday between now and the general election. If he turns out to be the Republican nominee, there is nothing better for Joe Biden’s reelection chances, than Mr. Trump telling interviewers on every platform that he did everything right on the afternoon of January 6 and that he was the real winner of the 2020 election.