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I don’t know why this was such a “wow” moment, but it was. I think it’s the combination of Parscale being a well-known Trump flunky yet demonstrating blunt moral clarity. You don’t see that very often.

It was the rhetoric. Even Trump’s former campaign manager couldn’t deny it.

As with 99 percent of the party, Parscale’s shock and horror wore off once he realized the Republican base didn’t feel the same way. He was back to kissing Trump’s ass again publicly a month later:

We’ll never see a neater illustration of the party’s corruption during the Trump era. Praising him publicly while privately blaming him for trying to incite a civil war is practically the job description for a conservative operative nowadays.

Parscale’s texts were part of a long presentation at today’s hearing aimed at showing that the violence on January 6 had been brewing for weeks. I warned of it myself the night before the insurrection when Trump tweeted that the crowd that was preparing to gather “won’t stand” to see him lose. “There was never a question that it would come to this once he started digging in on the idea that he was cheated, only a question of how explicit the threats of violence would become,” I said. “I don’t know that I’d bet on him tweeting ‘time to riot!’ at some point, but I wouldn’t bet against it.”

The committee went about trying to prove that the riot was not merely foreseeable but foreseen. It was, they claimed, inspired by another Trump tweet in December 2020 alerting his fans that January 6 would be the day to flex their muscle in the name of stopping the steal. “Be there, will be wild!” he wrote. They got the message.

Some of the more excitable types intended from the start to do more than just rally:

As the day approached, social media administrators saw it coming:

One key revelation today, in fact, was that a Trump tweet explicitly directing rallygoers to march to the Capitol had been drafted at some point before that morning’s rally for him to post:

He didn’t end up posting it, but the draft proves that he and his aides were looking to orchestrate some sort of second act outside the Capitol once the speeches were over. Organizers were even informed in the days prior to January 6 that Trump was planning to “order” rallygoers to the Capitol during his remarks that morning:

“The evidence confirms this was not a spontaneous call to action, but rather was a deliberate strategy decided upon in advance by the president,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy of the texts. Clearly, the committee is trying to build a criminal case against Trump for incitement. It’s of a piece with Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that he wanted the metal detectors turned off before the rally despite having allegedly been told that some of his fans were bringing weapons in. The more reason Trump had to know that violence might ensue, the easier it is for the DOJ to argue that he intended to incite lawless action when he told the crowd to go to the Capitol.

There’s one more player in the saga whom the committee hasn’t heard from yet, though. That’s Steve Bannon, who it turns out had two separate phone calls with Trump early on January 5 and then cheerfully told his podcast audience later that day that “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” What did Trump tell Bannon during those phone calls about how he expected things to play out once the rally was over?

We’re getting closer to an incitement charge, bit by bit.

Of all the seedy figures in the “stop the steal” saga, Bannon may be singular in how self-consciously he went about his business as a civic arsonist. Trump was in the grip of narcissistic mania, Sidney Powell and her gang were kooks or grifters, but Bannon looks to be a person who’s in touch with reality yet simply wants to watch the world burn, Joker-style. This afternoon Mother Jones posted this leaked audio of him calmly telling an audience three days before Election Day 2020 precisely what Trump was going to do if he lost — he’ll declare victory even if he loses, Bannon crows, sounding positively gleeful at the institutional chaos that lie would unleash.

At some point even professional writers run out of words to capture the sheer nihilistic evil that colored the “stop the steal” campaign in all its particulars. So I’ll leave it here and turn you over to the audio.

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