The January 6 release of the House Committee’s final report has sparked a flurry of publishing activity: seven editions of the 200,000-word document from six sources, including contributions from New Yorker editor David Remnick, House intelligence chairman Adam Schiff. plus six other reporters, another committee member, a former congressman and a former speechwriter for Donald Trump.
There are two reasons for this hyperactivity: the belief that the completion of the report is a significant historical event, and the belief that there is a great opportunity to do well here.
The Mueller report sold 475,000 copies in multiple editions, according to NPD BookScan, so the book business is hoping to do at least that well with the latest copy given away for free by the federal government.
Harper Perennial says it is printing 250,000 copies of its version, and Ari Melber, an MSNBC host, has a powerful introduction that reads like a multi-part indictment from a smart prosecutor. It helps that Melber’s marketing prowess is as great as his brain power. Pushing it on his nightly show, the book has already shot to the top of an Amazon bestseller list, long before it hits any stores.
The lawyer-turned-TV personality does his best job of detailing the eight plots Trump and his allies pursued to try to overturn the election, seven of which were clearly illegal or unconstitutional.
“They tried a coup,” said Melber. “That is the most important fact of what happened.”
Remnick and Jamie Raskin, like a Schiff committee member, teamed up to write the foreword and background for the version published by an imprint of Macmillan.
Remnick gets straight to the heart of the matter: “Trump does little to hide his most distinguishing characteristics: his racism, misogyny, dishonesty, narcissism, incompetence, cruelty, instability and corruption. Yet what has kept Trump going for so long, what has helped him avoid disaster and impeachment, is perhaps his most remarkable quality: he is shameless.
Because many of us have almost lost our “ability to live with anger,” Remnick admits, “The opportunity to engage with this congressional inquiry … is sometimes a challenge to the spirit … And yet, a citizen who can’t pay attention to himself.” To carry out such research or to absorb its surprising findings risks going even further into a disturbing ‘new normal’: a post-truth, post-democratic America.’
Raskin sees the attack on the Capitol as the latest in a “systematic threat” to US democracy, including “massive voter suppression, gerrymandering of state and federal legislative districts, the use of the filibuster to block voting rights protections, and the right.” -judicial activism to undermine the Voting Rights Act”.
His biggest goal is to abolish the electoral college without making any changes in the constitution. This can be done through the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,” an agreement among participating states that awards electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote, and which has already been ratified by 15 states and the District of Columbia with 195 electoral votes. , or 72% of the required 270 votes” to take effect.
Writing in Random House, Schiff blasts Republicans for trying to block the certification of Biden’s victory even after the invasion of the Capitol – 147 Republicans, including eight senators, filed objections in the early morning of January 7. But he’s also been careful to give credit to the Republican witnesses who did so much to burnish the committee’s credibility.
“These officials, all Republicans, not only resisted the tremendous pressure from a president of their own party, but were willing to stand before the country and testify under oath,” Schiff wrote.
Schiff says the report is an undeniable primer for Trump’s impeachment: “Bringing a former president who even now advocates suspending our constitution to justice is a dangerous endeavor. Not doing so is far more dangerous.”
For Skyhorse, former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, the only aide to vote to impeach Richard Nixon, echoes Schiff on this point.
“Having had to vote to impeach a president when I was in Congress, I’m sure [the January 6 commission] did not take it lightly to the Justice Department. Likewise, the DoJ should not treat it lightly, and I hope and believe that the American people will not allow that to happen.” .
The Hachette book has the most additional material, including a first-person account of the Capitol attack by New York Times reporter Luke Broadwater. After reaching a safe area, Broadwater found himself “much more angry” than “scared”. So did other more conservative journalists, disgusted by the senators who pushed the myth of election theft. As Broadwater recalled, “one shouted to a Republican as he passed by, ‘Are you proud of yourself, Senator?'”
All of these books are substantial efforts to place the commission’s specific findings in a broader political and historical context, including the one published by Skyhorse with Holtzman’s introduction. But Skyhorse also maintains its unusual reputation as a publisher famous for taking on books others have rejected (such as Woody Allen’s memoir), publishing two versions of the new report, one with a foreword by Holtzman and another by Darren Beattie, Trump’s speechwriter. starring a former writer. and Steven Miller.
Beattie was fired by the Trump White House after it was revealed that he had attended a meeting with Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigrant website VDare, a “white nationalist” who “regularly posts the work of white supremacists, anti-Semites and others”. radical right,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Beattie is horrified that the January 6 commission describes the attack on the Capitol as the result of white supremacy.
“Far from serving as an objective fact-finding body, the January 6 commission functioned as an incredibly performative and partisan kangaroo display to embarrass North Korean propagandists,” he writes roughly.
Beattie provides more comic relief with his take on the alleged election fraud that is one of the main themes of the report.
“It would take us too far afield to examine the allegations of election fraud in detail on the merits,” Beattie wrote.
He then goes on to give a long explanation of why no one should think Trump really believed he lost the election because his attorney general and several others told him to.
“For all the commission’s fixation on the term ‘The Big Lie,’ the commission presents little or precious evidence that Donald Trump did not truly believe that election fraud ultimately tipped the scales against him.
“… During the committee’s first televised hearing, a video clip of former Trump attorney general Bill Barr was played, referring to Trump’s theories of election fraud as ‘bullshit.’
“In addition to Barr, the committee cited numerous Trump associates who they say told the former president that his election fraud theories were wrong. That some of Trump’s top staff disagreed with Trump on the election issue is hardly evidence that Trump was persuaded by them, and therefore that Trump’s efforts to “stop the theft” were a deliberate lie and a malicious attempt to avoid a legitimate and peaceful transition of power.
“Barr’s claim that Trump was ‘totally out of touch with reality’ when it came to the 2020 election inadvertently undermines the committee’s suggestion that Trump was lying on the matter.”
Primetime auditions sometimes reached 18 million viewers, which Remnick notes was “comparable to NBC’s Sunday Night Football.” In the midterm elections, many exit polls showed the preservation of democracy as a key factor in the decision of many swing voters to vote against the Republicans. It seems clear that the investigation strengthened American democracy in more ways than one.
While an enthusiastic minority remains as down a rabbit hole as Trump’s former speechwriter, the results of the last election reinforce my belief that sane Americans still make up a small majority of voters.
So, like most of the contributors to these volumes, I believe there is much to appreciate in the work of the most successful congressional investigators since the Senate Watergate committee 50 years ago. Or, as Remnick says, “If you reach optimism – and despair is not an option – the existence and depth of the commission’s project represents a kind of hope.” It represents the declaration in favor of the truth and the democratic principle.”
