It Took Less Than a Day
Within hours of Tuesday night’s blue wave, JD Vance stepped in front of the cameras and told the country that Republicans lost Congress for one reason, the Iran War. Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican leadership, Don Jr. included, fell in behind him so fast it looked like every one of them got the same text message of talking points before breakfast.
Because they did.
I want to tell you exactly what is happening here, because I have watched this same party take a violent attack on our Capitol, a day the whole country saw with its own eyes, and slowly sand it down into a feel-good story about patriots and free speech until millions of people stopped believing what they saw. They are doing it again regarding why they lost the midterm elections.
They will gaslight the facts and they will minimize the harm, and this time the Iran War is the tool they picked up to do it.
They Already Ran This Play Once
January 6th was an attack on the Capitol that Donald Trump and others incited in the weeks leading up to that day. On the morning of the assault, Trump and his allies took the stage at a rally they called “Save America,” held at the Ellipse, a large public park directly south of the White House in Washington, D.C., and they threw more gasoline on a fire that was already burning. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, called for “trial by combat.” John Eastman, a constitutional law professor and Trump legal adviser, urged Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the electoral votes. Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama told the crowd to fight politically and carry their message to Capitol Hill.
Donald Trump Jr. stood up for his father and challenged Republicans who were unwilling to contest the election, and Eric Trump did the same, going after Republicans who refused to back the election challenge. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign fundraiser and Don Jr.’s partner at the time, fired up the thousands of supporters packed into that park with an enthusiastic speech, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton pushed claims attacking the election results from a separate rally that day. We all saw what happened next. We saw the violence, the anger, the hate, and the destruction, outside the building and deep inside it.1
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