Tonight's Episode: "Only Coup Plotters in the West Wing." (*Not series finale.)

[kpete]

Getting Donald Trump to repudiate the Jan. 6 violence he so gleefully watched on his West Wing television was like getting an infant to eat his strained vegetables. He fussed and batted away the spoon the next day. Metaphorically. There wasn’t a White House plate handy to throw against the wall as staffers insisted he suck it up and make the statement, responsible adult-style.

The Washington Post reports:

He struggled to do it. Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to individuals familiar with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

The public could get its first glimpse of outtakes from that recording Thursday night, when the committee plans to offer a bold conclusion in its eighth hearing: Not only did Trump do nothing despite repeated entreaties by senior aides to help end the violence, but he sat back and enjoyed watching it. He reluctantly condemned it — in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 — only after the efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed and after aides told him that members of his own Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

“This is what he wanted to happen,” Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who is scheduled to lead the questioning Thursday along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), said in an interview this week. “You might have earlier on said, ‘Was he incompetent? Was he someone who freezes in a moment when they can’t react to something? Or was it exactly what he wanted to have happened?’ And after all of this, I’m convinced that this is exactly what he wanted to have happen.”

...............

Only after it became clear the insurrection he inspired would fail did Trump issue a call to his “very special” mob to go home, Luria notes.

By then 187 minutes had passed. One rioter had been shot and killed by Capitol security, two others of natural causes, and a third of accidental acute amphetamine intoxication after collapsing amidst the violent assault. Hundreds of police officers were injured, some severely. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick suffered two strokes during the fighting and died the next day.

https://digbysblog.net/2022/07/21/you-know-he-loved-it/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/even-day-after-jan-6-trump-balked-condemning-violence/

[Baitball Blogger]

1. That show grew on me.

Hint: Look for the secret passage to the Oval Office and the person who likes to compose things.