Can Americans handle truth about Trump?

In another time, in another America, Donald Trump’s political career would be lying at the bottom of a dumpster beneath all the other cast-off garbage. Without stepping into the swamp of his disastrous, four-year presidency, any reasonable person aware of his unhinged, mendacious and almost certainly illegal plot to overturn the results of the 2020 elections should today be able to agree with the following words: Trump must never again hold a public office of any kind in the United States. Not even, as the old saying goes, as a dog-catcher.

But this is 2022, and the America of this peculiar juncture in time is a fractious, unsettled place. It is a nation plagued by paranoid fantasies and where a sizeable portion of the population has divorced itself from reality. That reality would include proof Trump led a conspiracy that not only attempted to derail the orderly transfer of power to another, democratically elected president, but culminated in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C.

The damning evidence to back this up has been there to see for the tens of millions of people who have tuned into the televised hearings being conducted this month by the House select committee investigating those Capitol riots. With their meticulously researched and curated facts, this committee is showing how Trump barged ahead with his plan to overturn the 2020 presidential results even though many of his closest advisers at the time repeatedly told him there was no evidence of widespread fraud and that his actions were illegal. Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of the attack” then watched to see how the violence would help him. At least that’s the assessment of Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman and one of the select committee’s nine members.

So far, the hearings bear out the views of this courageous woman who has stood against her own party. The public has heard from Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, as well as his own daughter, Ivanka Trump, about how he was detached from the real world, how he desperately fought to hold onto power and how they told him he was wrong. The public has learned that Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, told him that the VP had no power to block Joe Biden from being sworn in as president and that doing so would break the law. But Trump pressured him to make it happen anyway. The select committee has also heard testimony indicating that after the rioters who had invaded the Capitol began chanting, “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump expressed support for the lynching.

There’s a lot more that has been uncovered — and it’s as unsettling as turning over a rock and watching the creepy, crawly things beneath it scurrying around in the daylight. Even before these hearings end, there is likely enough evidence to indict Trump on criminal charges and, short of that, forever end his presidential prospects. But the big question is: will American voters agree?

The tragedy of it all is that diehard Trump loyalists could well persist in blaming what they consider to be the perfidious media, the power-hungry Democrats and a few presumably craven, turncoat Republicans for yet another attempt to dethrone their hero. Putting Trump on trial — if it comes to that — could make him a martyr to the far-right cause. Despite all this, these hearings remain vital to the U.S. and the world. They will provide essential chapters in the history of this era, testimony future generations should know and learn from. They are an honest and necessary effort to uphold a principle that has been so badly damaged in our social-media obsessed era. And that is the truth.

Some semblance of sanity may yet reassert itself in what is still the world’s greatest superpower. There are already polls that indicate public support for a new Trump presidential bid is falling and that many Republicans want to find another candidate to lead their party in the 2024 elections. Even so, other polls suggest there remains a substantial body of Republicans who categorically reject the findings of the Jan. 6 select committee.

The future of U.S. politics — in this decade at least — rests on a razor’s edge. The Jan. 6 hearings could yet restore a sense of balance and reason to the American political system. But if they fail to shake the illogical and dangerous adoration that some Republicans retain for Trump, nothing will.