“Republicans know that on the day of the assault on the Capitol they could die”

Conservative political strategist Reed Galen affirms that the sessions of the 6-E Commission, the group of congressmen that investigates the assault on the Capitol that occurred in January 2021, has a “devastating” effect on the figure of former President Donald Trump and the leaders Republicans who “bent to his will for four years.” He is the founder, along with other critical conservatives, of the famous Lincoln Project, a laboratory of ideas and political action born in 2019 to prevent the tycoon’s re-election and which now focuses on combating anti-democratic movements in the United States. Galen was part of the campaigns of George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the late Senator John McCain and has been adviser to the Treasury and National Security.

- What do you think of the Commission’s public hearings?

- The presentation he made against Trump was devastating. His team already told him that the vote count was useless when he denounced the alleged electoral fraud. And when it was clear that he was not going to accept it, a large part of his team went into the background and that opened the door for a group of ‘enablers’ who continued to fuel the conflict.

- The Republicans speak now, to distance themselves from those days, but none of them said anything then.

- If Mitch McConnell (former Senate leader) or any Republican leader had publicly proclaimed that Joe Biden was the president-elect, none of this would have happened. Congressional Republicans kowtowed to (Trump) during his four-year term and have kowtowed to him so far. They know. They know it was a bad day and that they almost ended up dead.

- The investigation draws a Trump apparently plunged into delirium.

- It’s a chain of events that allowed Trump to sink into his psychosis and pretend he had been let down, plus all those ‘enablers’ - John Eastman, Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Matt Schlapp - who kept feeding him fallacies that there was a way out. reverse the elections. It all culminated in January 6 and the violence that we saw.

close to disaster

- There were moments of resistance, such as that of Vice President Mike Pence, who legitimized Biden’s victory. Otherwise there is no telling what political circumstances we would be in now.

- Pence’s decision to refuse to be part of any irrational legal theory is one of the moments that reveal how close we came to disaster on several occasions. We have seen the photos this week of Pence hiding in a marginal room with his wife and his daughter seeing Trump who already thought he was dead. We have known that he was 12 meters away from the violent ones.

Reed Galen has been National Security Advisor to the United States. /

rc

- Did the former president act recklessly by launching his rants at some extremists who had planned in detail an operation to take over the building?

- On January 6, Trump was in a fortress surrounded by people committed to giving their lives for him, sitting watching the news on TV. He has never cared about the safety of others. Furthermore, he established that violence is an acceptable form of political action. This is what worries me the most: once violence enters the arteries of the political system, it is very difficult to remove it.

- How far does the danger go?

- We just saw how a group of 30 masked men were arrested in Idaho when they were going to interrupt a gay pride parade. Or the shooting in Buffalo, which was a political act (on the racist replacement theory). We need more police action to stop this extremism.

- Many of those radicals collaborate with the Commission.

- The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers were in coordination to conspire and several of their leaders have been indicted on charges of sedition in federal court. Some have turned against him and stopped supporting him, which makes sense if they want to avoid spending 30 years in jail. They’re not people you like, but when it comes time to respond to a congressional subpoena, everyone starts talking.

blood in the streets

- A key character in the plot is the lawyer John Eastman, promoter of the theory to achieve electoral annulment and frustrate Biden’s victory. It is said that in a White House meeting he knowingly presented ‘options’ to Trump and the Vice President that were illegal.

- Greg Jacob (lawyer for Pence) and Eric Hershman (lawyer for the president) warned Eastman that you can’t steal the votes of 80 million people. “There will be blood in the streets,” they warned him. And Eastman replied: “Democracy requires street deaths from time to time.” If the insurgents had triumphed on Capitol Hill on January 6, the country would have been torn apart. Eastman is probably going to prison for a long time. What can you expect from someone who willingly wants to go to work for Trump?

- Most of the Administration was trapped in its ‘bubble’.

- When campaign manager Bill Stepien said they were a “normal team,” they were only normal in the context of Trump’s world. They are not normal by any other objective standard, because the things they say, do, and put up with would not be done by any other decent, normal person. By the way, all of them hid in the shadows when the situation fell apart.

- While there is music, continue the dance.

- There were people ‘bewitched’ by Trump’s narcissistic personality. Others were intoxicated by the opportunity to spend a lot of time in the Oval Office close to power. And others were convinced that it was possible to subvert the Constitution and keep Trump in power.

- The ‘big lie’ of fraud is still credible for part of society.

- The repercussions continue to have an impact on the political space. More than a hundred Republican candidates in this year’s elections are presented with the only program that the 2020 elections were stolen. We’ll see what happens when Trump announces his candidacy for 2024.