Violent insurrectionists loyal to former U.S. president Donald Trump stand outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press
Rare photographs of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Newly released surveillance films from the halls of Congress. Lurid testimony. Hot rhetoric. Partisan tensions. Debates over whether democratic rule is endangered in one of the world’s oldest democracies. All in the month that marks the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in.
Democratic Party officials and U.S. network executives believe the combination of those factors – plus, of course, the looming shadow of Donald Trump, which hangs over this episode and just about everything else in the civic life of the United States – makes for must-see TV. The American public may feel otherwise.
For the first time, congressional leaders will hold important televised hearings during prime time Thursday. That in itself is a statement – about the significance they attach to the riot in the very legislative campus where they work, and where the hearings will be held, and about the way Democrats and a handful of Republican rebels hope the hearings will lay bare the role Mr. Trump played in the siege of the Capitol and the threat the former president, contemplating a third presidential campaign in 2024, poses to democracy.
U.S. Capitol riot hearings: How to watch and what you need to know
“The target is the people who are not locked into the conviction that Jan. 6 was simply a demonstration that got out of hand,” John Dean, the Watergate-era White House counsel whose televised testimony provided perhaps the most devastating moment of the June, 1973, hearings, said in an interview. “The hearings will lay out evidence showing it was much more serious than that.”
There is political danger all around.
The danger to Mr. Trump is that new evidence – a “smoking gun,” in the phrase used in the 1973-74 Watergate scandal that underlined the power of televised congressional hearings – will emerge to tie him directly to the riot. The danger to the Democrats is that they are the 21st-century political equivalents of a devastating critique laid against French military strategists in the First World War, that they are “fighting the last war,” which is to say that in their effort to keep Mr. Trump from regaining power they are employing the time-worn and perhaps dated tactic that forced Richard Nixon from power.
That last-war tactic – televised hearings, much like the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings that demonstrated the danger of senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting tactics – had enormous impact in its time. All three networks, the lone gatekeepers for television viewers a half-century ago, carried the Watergate hearings live. Over all, those hearings occupied 319 hours of coverage. More than seven out of 10 Americans watched them live, according to a Gallup poll. Variety magazine, at the time the publication of record of the entertainment world, called the Watergate hearings “the hottest daytime soap opera.”
Even so, they started slowly, and network executives worried they had a broadcasting dud on their hands. “There was very little interest at the start of the Watergate hearings, and after the initial few days the networks threatened to pull coverage,” Mr. Dean said. “It didn’t pick up steam until I got there and 85 million households tuned in. It took away my low profile.”
Compare Mr. Dean’s experience to the 2021 impeachment and trial of Mr. Trump. In that drama – only the fourth impeachment in U.S. history and the only time a president has been impeached twice – just one in 20 Americans tuned into the broadcasts by ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
Republicans complained that the two Trump impeachments were politically motivated, that the public saw through them and that, as a result, millions tuned out. “Hard for me to stay awake and listen to all this,” said GOP Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina. Shortly thereafter Mr. Trump named him White House chief of staff.
These new hearings – conducted only three days after the indictment for seditious conspiracy of five leading members of the far-right Proud Boys group involved in the storming of the Capitol – are being aired against the New York Rangers-Tampa Bay Lightning NHL playoff game and a slate of Major League Baseball games, including the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Angels. (The Toronto Blue Jays have an off day.) And voters are preoccupied with inflation, gasoline prices and COVID-19 variants.
Conscious that Netflix and other streaming services will offer gripping dramas Thursday night, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the panel have enlisted the services of James Goldston, a former ABC News president, to give the six hearings a more polished look than the usual, halting pace of Capitol Hill proceedings. In the age of Twitter – Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York has already tweeted that the hearings will “fully expose the cult’s extreme effort to overthrow the U.S. government” – viewers will have no patience for droning opening statements and long pauses as aides whisper cues in the ears of unprepared lawmakers.
“The Democrats are clearly hoping that this will dissuade Republicans from jumping onto the Trump bandwagon,” said Bruce Cain, a Stanford University political scientist. “It may not make a difference in the midterm primaries because they are almost over.”
But one vital primary remains, on Aug. 16. It is in Wyoming, where Mr. Trump has endorsed a challenger to renegade Representative Liz Cheney. She is the lead Republican at these hearings.
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