As nation watches Jan. 6 hearings, eastern Idaho conservatives watch ’2,000 Mules’
Doyle Beck’s take on the Jan. 6 hearings was terse.
“It’s a friggin’ joke,” he said.
Beck, long a prominent member of the further-right faction of eastern Idaho’s Republican Party and a prolific funder of far-right candidates, is emblematic of the way a significant number of eastern Idaho conservatives are responding to hearings examining the violence of Jan. 6.
To be clear, not everyone in eastern Idaho is laughing off the hearings. Some are glued to their screens. John Radford, a longtime Idaho Falls City Council member and former Democratic House candidate, has been watching closely.
While Beck simply called Rep. Liz Cheney a “joke,” Radford said what’s struck him most is, “how courageous Liz Cheney has been. That’s hard to do — to stand on principle over party.”
But even centrist Democrats like Radford are few and far between in rural eastern Idaho, where President Joe Biden managed to break the 30 percent mark in only two of 14 counties.
“There are so many people not watching it because they don’t want to deal with it. … I don’t see a lot of chatter about it on Facebook and other places. It’s gotten some attention, but I wish it would have gotten more attention,” Radford said.
Tuning out
The question of fairness was one of Beck’s main preoccupations. He asked: How is it possible to take the committee seriously when there are no adversarial questions from Republicans?
“How would you like to go before a jury and the only thing they can hear — let’s say it’s a jury for your divorce — and the only thing the jury hears is the testimony of your wife?” he said.
Attorney Bryan Smith, who has twice launched unsuccessful primary challenges to Rep. Mike Simpson, said he sees nothing but political posturing in the bits of the hearings he’s watched.
He said they were a “never-ending witch hunt by liberals while ignoring the issues of the day” like high gas prices and inflation.
And, though the years-long rivalry between the two has been particularly bitter, on this point, Smith is simply repeating the message Simpson put out more than a year ago.
“The current commission is seemingly aimed not at investigating security failures of January 6th, but at politicizing the attack and using the commission as more of a partisan witch hunt,” Simpson said in January 2021.
The mob and the lawyers
As the committee has outlined, Jan. 6 was not just about a mob.
The “QAnon Shaman” may have made for good photos, but perhaps the biggest threat to the continued existence of democracy was a set of memos drafted by lawyer John Eastman, which set out a variety of supposed legal paths for Trump to retain the presidency despite losing the election. No matter how big the mob was, the federal government could have repelled them.
But what would have happened if Vice President Mike Pence decided to set aside votes as Eastman said he could? Nobody knows, but that might have been the moment democracy ended.
Most pro-Trump Republicans in eastern Idaho like Beck and Smith don’t defend the mob.
“There’s no justification for what happened that day,” Smith said.
But still seem to believe Joe Biden became president through illegitimate means
In contrast to the mob, Smith found the actions of the lawyers defensible. He dismissed the committee’s focus on such issues as “trying to paint (Trump) with a broad brush for exploring all the options available for what many believe was a rigged election.”
Beck expressed support for the idea that some states had sent alternate slates of electors, and so the election results were not clear and could not be certified on Jan. 6.
2,000 Mules
When I asked Beck and Smith what facts the committee was leaving out, they both had the same question for me: Have you seen “2,000 Mules?”
“2,000 Mules” is a documentary by right-wing provocateur and felon Dinesh D’Souza. It uses questionably sourced cell phone tracking data to allege that traffic patterns show that fake ballots were being cast in swing states.
To be clear, D’Souza’s claims are based on nothing but hand waving, and have been rejected by serious experts. But, wrapped in seemingly technical analysis, they are easy to believe if you’re inclined to believe them. And Beck and Smith have been fans of D’Souza’s for a long time. He was invited to headline the Bonneville GOP’s Lincoln Day dinner, the party’s most important annual fundraiser, in 2018.
This is the fundamental problem that the hearings face. A huge portion of the GOP still gives credence to the Big Lie. Lots of people here truly believe that Biden was not legitimately elected. And party moderate leaders like Simpson have been reluctant to take that lie head-on.
Some moderates open
Steve Taggart, an Idaho Falls bankruptcy attorney and longtime moderate GOP activist, said he does think the hearings are changing a few minds around the margins.
“I think what they’re doing is reinforcing that Trump knew what he was doing, and he just didn’t care,” Taggart said. “I think it is having some effect.”
As with many in moderate corners of the GOP, the most impressive moments for him have come from the depositions of former attorney general Bill Barr, who called Trump’s election fraud claims exactly what they are: “bull----.”
“This is pretty amazing stuff,” Taggart said. “Barr is pretty brutal.”
Taggart said equally compelling has been how clear it was that everyone around Trump was telling him to back down. “Trump was worse than people assumed,” he said.
And his perception is that the hearings are convincing reluctant Trump voters not to go down the same road they did in 2016.
“The real burden is on Republicans to shed Trump,” Taggart said.