History is replete with examples of losing candidates disputing their loss in good faith—because there were plausible fact-based arguments as to why they, rather than their opponents, were the true winners according to the applicable rules governing those elections. Bush v. Gore is an obvious recent example that comes immediately to mind. That election was essentially a jump ball in Florida, giving both sides reasonable grounds for claiming victory in the fight over how to count the dimpled and hanging chads (along with other disputable ballots in a variety of forms).
What is remarkable and essentially unique about the 2020 presidential election, and which will be the focus of today’s hearing held by the House special January 6 committee, is the fact that the effort to overturn the outcome was undertaken entirely in bad faith. According to multiple news reports, the plan for today’s hearing is to show (as previewed in Thursday’s opening hearing) that President Trump’s inner circle knew, and repeatedly told him, that he had lost the election and that there was no reasonable basis for disputing its outcome—but he did so anyway in pure defiance of the facts, deliberately fabricating a false account of what happen in order to defraud donors to his campaign, his other supporters, and ultimately a vast portion of the public.
Politico’s preview of today’s hearing puts it this way:
“When Donald Trump stepped to a podium Nov. 4, 2020, and declared himself the winner of the presidential election, millions of his supporters apparently believed him — but Trump’s own advisers and campaign operatives knew better. …
“The select committee intends for Monday to be a document-driven and fact-heavy hearing, packed with evidence that showcased the proliferation of Trump’s lies about the election results.”
The New York Times similarly writes:
“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol plans to use the testimony of former President Donald J. Trump’s own campaign manager against him on Monday as it lays out evidence that Mr. Trump knowingly spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him in an attempt to overturn his defeat. …
“On Monday at 10 a.m. Eastern, [the committee’s leaders] plan to describe the origin and spread of Mr. Trump’s election lies, including the former president’s refusal to listen to advisers who told him that he had lost and that there was no evidence of widespread irregularities that could change the outcome.”
[UPDATE (9:19 am ET): CNN is reporting that Bill Stephen will not appear to testify today due to a “family emergency”.]
It appears that the committee’s goal is to establish the criminality of Trump’s fraud, including the specific aspect of duping donors into contributing funds to his campaign based on knowingly false pretenses. But I wonder whether the historically more significant aspect of today’s hearing is the possibility that it might help weaken the hold that Trump’s “Big Lie” has had on so many citizens. In this regard, I wonder also whether as much as the Watergate hearings are as a significant historical precedent for today’s event, perhaps the even more important historical analogy is the Army-McCarthy hearings. They finally loosened the grip that McCarthyism’s fraudulent Red Scare had over vast portions of the public at the time. Can the current hearings do the same for Trump’s electoral version of McCarthyism-like demagoguery?
On relevance of McCarthyism to Trump’s Big Lie, I found especially instructive this recent Retropolis piece, which discusses how scholars analyzing McCarthyism at the time—including Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter—described the pathology that now endangers the nation’s capacity for self-government.