Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy sure managed to blow this one

| 9:09 am EST December 21, 2022
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When the January 6th Committee unanimously referred Donald Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution yesterday, it was the final major act of one of the most productive congressional investigations in history. The committee was chock full of solid people. But its effectiveness had just as much to do with who wasn’t on the committee.

It’s easy to forget that House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy was given the opportunity to add five of his own people to the January 6th Committee. In fact he did try to add five people. But after Speaker Nancy Pelosi vetoed Jim Jordan and Jim Banks due to their roles in the January 6th scandal, McCarthy withdrew all five of his picks, in what has turned out to be one of the dumbest tactical moves in the history of congressional politics.

Think about it. House Republicans had three of their own pro-Trump people on this committee, and took them off the committee. For that matter they could have had five pro-Trump people on the committee, if they’d replaced Banks and Jordan with any other two people who weren’t involved in the January 6th scandal.

Trump had people on this committee to do his bidding, push his lies, muddy the waters, and keep the serious people on the committee from being able to get their message across cleanly, and McCarthy removed those people. Of course it was probably Trump who told McCarthy to remove those people to begin with, even though Trump did later publicly blame McCarthy for the move. But those two deserve each other.

Trump and McCarthy were betting that if the January 6th Committee consisted entirely of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, the public would see the whole thing as overtly partisan, and would ignore its findings. That was an extraordinarily incorrect bet, and everyone but Trump and McCarthy knew it at the time.

It was seemingly yet another instance of Donald Trump confusing his own base with the general public. He never could understand the difference. After he got elected in 2016 by negative-three million votes, he should have known that he needed to broaden his appeal outside of his base. Instead he focused almost solely on his base for four years, and predictably lost in 2020 by seven million votes. Then his strategy for the January 6th Committee was centered around the belief that only his base mattered. That’s not how anything works in national politics. It’s why he’s become an irrelevant political candidate who’s left trying to sell trading cards to his base.