Today’s hearing of the January 6 committee depicted a sharp contrast between “team normal” (as Bill Stepian, Trump’s campaign manager put it), who were able and willing to accept the truth if painful that their candidate had lost the election, and Trump (along with Giuliani), who was “detached from reality” (in Bill Barr’s words) if he believed that the election had been stolen from him.
I assume that leading Republicans, like Kevin McCarthy, will soon be asked by journalists (if they haven’t aready) in the aftermath of the hearings, whether they are part of “team normal” or instead sticking with Trump’s detachment from reality. I would think this line of questioning would be even more uncomfortable for GOP politicians than it has been previously, given the nature and extent of the testimony at today’s hearing. But given how firmly and how far many Republicans have gone in echoing or otherwise embracing Trump’s delusional claims about a stolen election, we shall have to see how successful the process of returning to reality will be. (A commentator on one network put it in terms of “deradicalization” analogous to other previous efforts to get supports of extremist groups to renounce their extremism.)
For post-hearing reports: