If the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony before the J6 committee did nothing else, and it did plenty, it shined a bright spotlight on one of the GOP’s biggest problems with these hearings.
Their messaging. It’s sucked from the beginning, and it’s only getting worse. For the simple reason that they don’t have a coherent rebuttal messaging line! The original messaging option was to pass it off as a purely partisan witch hunt! When Cheney and Kinzinger signed on, and that wouldn’t work, plan B was to ignore the whole thing and run like a clutter of kittens from the cameras.
Because the committee is giving them no ammunition. Rather than calling witness after witness of Democratic friendly experts to slam Trump and the rioters, almost every single witness called by the committee have been card carrying, lifelong conservatives.
And these aren’t RINO’s either. Most voted for Trump, and some said under oath that they would vote for him again in 2024. Many of them worked with and for him, or in states he and his minions contacted trying to overturn the election. How do you tear down conservatives that Trump trusted and worked with for years? You can’t.
You can sum up the GOP’s biggest problem with one word. Credibility. They have none, and they know it. So the next best plan is option 2, Character assassination. Cassidy was only halfway through her testimony when Traitor Tot took to his cesspool social media site to complain that she was a Disgruntled former employee who literally begged him personally to take to Mar-A-Lago to work for him. And then Hutchinson retakes the stand and talks about her revulsion and disgust for Trump being willing to sit and watch Mike Pence strung up. Hmmm. Who do we believe.
Hutchinson’s testimony is a perfect example. Their main smear campaign against her is her admitted second hand retelling of Trump’s alleged nuclear meltdown in the limo when he found out he couldn’t go to the Capitol. Who cares? Hell, that isn’t even admissible testimony in a court, it’s hearsay. If I’m a criminal defense attorney, I’m shitting my pants over her testimony that not only did Trump know that some of the protesters at his speech were armed, he ordered the Secret Service to remove the metal detectors and let them in. That puts Trump’s whole Fight like hell! speech in a whole new, damning light.
Don’t believe me? Watch for yourself. The J6 committee is going to keep right on calling up traditional GOP stalwarts to grease the skids for Trump’s eventual perp walk, Trump and the GOP will continue to ignore the damning testimony, and instead, like an octopus, and try to escape through a haze of ink. Because that’s the hand they dealt themselves, and right now, they’re looking at a Kangaroo Straight.
They all should take frumpty’s advice & down a bottle of bleach & stop polluting our air.
They don’t have a coherent rebuttal messaging line. Not because they’re stupid, not because they lack resources — but because THERE ISN’T ANY coherent rebittal messaging line. The evidence against them is too coherent, too massive and too damning to be capable of coherent rebuttal. Al they’ve got is cheap tricks and bright shiny objects, and they don’t work any more.
They might need messaging on this one. I was listening to Public Radio yesterday or the day before and they were interviewing someone who has been studying/watching the people hawking the big lie around the country. They are all over the country doing rallies and such. A lot of people are being fed a bunch of b.s. and they are slurping it up like it’s soda pop. This is going on along with the added pressure of having people believing that stupidity run for public office at the state and local level. If there are state legislators full of people believing this stuff and people working or conducting elections at the local level, what the J6 committee does is pretty much meaningless since the ‘pubes will have people in place to do what they are ordered to do rather than the voters’ will.
Might NOT need messaging. Sorry, finger flub.
How much you want to bet that the people slurping this stuff up are the same people that have been slurping it up for the last six years at least … most of them much longer than that? They are not reachable and never have been. It’s the slightly sane ones, the ones that happily supported Trump until they no longer could deny that he was a f-ing maniac — people like Richard Donoghue and Patsy Baloney (Pat’s Abalone — sorry, I mean Pat Cipollone) that are now reachable. I think there must be a lot of Republicans like that.