Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Don’t Ever Get Used to Trump’s Contempt for the Law

The ex-president’s hint that he’d pardon Capitol rioters and his claim that the 2020 election should have been overturned make the case again for prompt congressional hearings.

January 31, 2022 at 12:30 PM UTC

By Jonathan Bernstein

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

Trump? Or the Constitution?
Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images

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The strongest case for the work of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and for that committee to move quickly to public hearings, is that former President Donald Trump continues to make it clear that he set out to undermine democracy, that he sees nothing wrong with having done so, and that he would do it again if given a chance.

I’d prefer to ignore what Trump is saying, but that’s not really an option. He’s acting like a presidential candidate — he is, as the political scientist Josh Putnam puts it, running for 2024, although we won’t know for some time whether he’ll be running in 2024 — so he can’t just be ignored.