The Chilling Lesson of Mark Meadows’ Text Messages

The more we learn about what Donald Trump and his aides heard and did on Jan. 6, the more clearly we understand his corrupt intent. Fox News host Sean Hannity told the chief of staff that Trump should “ask people to leave the Capitol.” Laura Ingraham wrote that “the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, in a phone call with Trump, told the president that the attackers were breaking into McCarthy’s office, and he implored Trump to “call them off.” But Trump held out. One aide, Jason Miller, drafted tweets in which the president would urge his people to “leave the Capitol” and “head home.” Trump never sent those tweets. Chris Christie, tried to get hold of Trump to issue a plea—which Christie, in exasperation, delivered on ABC at 4:00—that Trump should “tell his supporters to leave the Capitol grounds.” The text messages to Meadows show that Trump’s allies were also imploring him to go beyond tweets and speak to the mob by video. He finally asked his followers to “go home,” but he also refueled their rage, repeating his lie that the election “was stolen from us.” Two hours later, as the conflict was winding down, he defended the insurrection as a logical response to enemies who had “viciously stripped away” his “sacred landslide election victory.” When you put the evidence together—Trump’s instructions to the crowd at his Jan. 6 rally, his subsequent tweets, Miller’s rejected drafts, Christie’s plea, and the text messages from Hannity and Ingraham—all of it is consistent with this theory: For about two hours, despite being asked to tell his people to leave the Capitol and go home, Trump refused to do so, because he wanted to maintain leverage over Congress.