In a time of agonising over other things, the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol — and democracy itself — returns in sharp focus as a special House committee opens hearings this week on the insurrection and Donald Trump’s part in it. Will Americans care?
The committee’s aggressive investigation is producing a spool of plot lines that together will tell the tale of a violent uprising fuelled by the venom and lies of a defeated president.
But Americans are processing the nightmare of the slaughter of children in Texas, the racist murders in Buffalo, New York, and the other numbingly repeated scenes of carnage in the US.
They're contending with what feels like highway robbery at the petrol pump, nagged by a virus the world can't shake and split into two hostile camps over politics and culture — the twin pillars of the nation's very foundation.
And they've already been through the wringer on all things Trump.
Beginning in prime time on Thursday, the committee is setting out to establish the historical record of an event damaging not only to a community or individual families but to the collective idea of democracy itself.
After more than 100 subpoenas, 1,000 interviews and 100,000 documents, the committee promises to tell a story for the ages.
Dozens of the insurrectionists have been brought to justice. But the committee's goal is larger: Who in a position of power should also be held to account?
There are so many layers of inquiry. Did former vice president Mike Pence refuse to leave the besieged Capitol because he suspected the Secret Service at the behest of Mr Trump was trying to take him away to stop him from certifying Joe Biden's victory? Did Mr Trump flush incriminating papers down the White House toilet?
One aim: to establish whether Mr Trump's acts are criminal, as one judge has mused they may be, and whether that might mean prosecution of an ex-president.
More broadly, the effort addresses who might be punished in the large circle of Trump enablers. Some of them are politicians who sided with his effort to overturn an honest election only to huddle in fear with everyone else in a Capitol hideout when the rioters swarmed the Capitol in service of that goal.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat on the committee, set high expectations as the panel tries to renew interest in machinations of nearly 18 months ago.
The hazards in that mirror are closer than they appear, as committee members see it.
“The hearings will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House,” Mr Raskin said in April. “Because it is a story of the most heinous and dastardly political offence ever organised by a president and his followers and his entourage in the history of the United States.”
That offence? “An inside coup” coupled with a violent attack by “neo-fascists”, he said.
Mr Trump is not expected at any of the hearings, but his words and actions will hang heavy over the proceedings as politicians look to place him at the centre of the chaos. It seems highly plausible he will find a way to rail against them that does not involve being under oath.
The panel, free from the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, is likely to try to show that the riot was not a spontaneous gathering but part of a broader conspiracy.
Yet much is already known because the attack played out on television, and Mr Trump exhorted supporters to “fight like hell” in shouts for the world to hear.
How many January 6 Capitol rioters have been charged and sentenced?
“In quieter times, the hearings would have a stronger hold on public attention,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania. “But, as is, they will be competing for attention with topics with greater immediate relevance in our lives.”
Hungry babies lacking formula. Soaring prices. Rising Covid hospital cases among the vaccinated. The threat that Russia's Ukraine invasion will escalate to something nuclear. Monkeypox.
“If the hearings are to do anything other than reinforce our existing political biases,” Ms Jamieson said, “they will have to reveal previously covered-up goings-on that threatened something that Democrats, independents and most Republicans can agree should be sacrosanct.”
Seven Democrats and two Republicans make up the panel. Among them is Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the deeply conservative but fiercely independent Wyoming legislator who is practically alone in the Republican Party in assailing Mr Trump while also seeking re-election to Congress.
Liz and Dick Cheney join Democrats to mark January 6 attack anniversary
Once an embodiment of the Republican establishment, she is now a renegade in a new order dominated by Mr Trump, who wants her unseated in her primary in August.
Dartmouth College historian Matthew Delmont said January 6 cast such an ominous shadow that he expects Americans, for all of their preoccupations, to be drawn to the inquiry.
“They want to understand how our democracy reached this precipice,” he said.
Mr Trump won the 2016 election with a minority of voters, lost the House to the Democrats in 2018 and lost in 2020 by a decisive margin — not a glowing electoral record.
Still he holds sway over his party, thanks to supporters whose loyalty seems immovable. They won't be easily dislodged by whatever a congressional committee reveals.
