Donald Trump has opened the floodgates “to disorder and corruption” and must be held legally responsible for the attack on January 6, 2021, the chairman of the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the assault on the Capitol.
The former Republican president “tried to destroy our democratic institutions,” stated Bennie Thompson during a primetime hearing, which wraps up a series of public presentations of his commission’s work.
“He paved the way for disorder and corruption,” further asserted the elected Democrat who, sick with Covid, intervened by video link. For him, all those responsible for the attack, including at the White House, will have to “answer for their actions before the courts”. “It will take severe consequences, otherwise I fear that our democracy will not recover.”
Two members of the commission then presented the day of 6 January 2021 as experienced “minute by minute” by Donald Trump, whom they accused of having “failed in his duty” as commander-in-chief, by doing “nothing to prevent his supporters from wreaking havoc on the Capitol.
"Fight like hell"
Yet it was he who had summoned them to Washington, the day the parliamentarians were to certify the victory of his Democratic rival Joe Biden in the presidential election. Around noon, in a fiery speech in the heart of the capital, he asked them to “fight like hell” against supposed “massive electoral fraud.”
He then returned to the White House, while the crowd embarked on an assault on the 'temple' of American democracy, Capitol Hill. He took more than three hours to call on his supporters to leave the premises. “I know your pain,” he finally told them in a video uploaded to Twitter. “But we have to go home now.”
Donald Trump lost the election to current US President Joseph Biden, a close ally of Barack Obama, and resorted to bottom of the barrel tactics to cling onto power even after it was clear he had been defeated at the ballot box.
