Member-only story
IT’S AUGUST!
Expect the unexpected
August. People like Elvis and Marilyn die in August. Things like Manson happen in August. Nixon resigned in August. Weird stuff occurs in August.
Back in the winter, many people — or to be more precise, many Democrats — started asking, “Where are the fucking hearings already?” I was not among them. I looked at the January 6 Committee’s roster and felt confident that each member understood the urgency of the task at hand, and that thoroughness, not speed, was of the essence here.
I wanted the hearings to be as late as possible. I wanted them to be exactly what they’ve turned out to be: a Summer Sensation, just like the ones — Watergate! Iran-Contra! — we used to know. Rising to the occasion beyond our wildest dreams, the Committee has embarrassed its skeptics and achieved one of our — and certainly one of Liz Cheney’s — primary goals: keeping alive the possibility that Trump might die, as he was born to, in prison. We’ve earned that fantasy.
To paraphrase Nixon aide John Ehrlichman’s poetic image of leaving someone “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind,” the Committee has left Trump hanging obesely, obesely like an overstuffed piñata being whacked! by one humiliating and/or incriminating detail after another. The walls dripping with ketchup. That lunged-for steering wheel. Raw footage of an infantile old man pathetically…
