Thread by @PalmerReport

Pro tip: the 1/6 committee is NOT talking to you. You’re already on board.

The committee is speaking to voters in the middle, and it has to educate them one step at a time. It can’t be seen as gleefully or overzealously getting out ahead of the evidence, or else it’ll lose them.

Why hasn’t the committee revealed the names of the members of congress who sent those texts to Meadows?

Simple: the committee can’t be seen as making accusations against its fellow members of congress until it can point to more than just vaguely bad text messages as evidence.

Based on its actions thus far, the committee is clearly going to subpoena Trump and refer him for criminal charges. But it still says it’s merely “considering” or “open to” subpoenaing Trump, because voters in the middle want to see the committee as coming in with an open mind.

You may not see this as compelling. But it’s NOT FOR YOU. This committee isn’t a reality show aimed at making your blood pump. It’s a fact finding probe aimed at educating the millions of Americans who don’t yet have a firm sense about Trump and 1/6.

If the committee just immediately subpoenaed everyone at once, made accusations before it could prove them with easily understood evidence, and came off as overly partisan, the committee would fail on every level. It would accomplish zero of its goals.

In fact the GOP controlled Benghazi committee tried precisely this “guns blazing all at once” approach toward Hillary Clinton, and it failed to even put a dent in her.

That committee was BS while 1/6 is real, but it’s the same scenario: if you’re too “aggressive” you fail.

What did end up working against Hillary was the GOP’s slow-drip build to a fever pitch about her emails. Yes, that was a fake scandal. But it didn’t matter. Gradually building the drum beat is also how you get a real scandal like Trump and 1/6 to stick in the minds of the public.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the media (including most liberal Twitter pundits) are actively working against them on this. They’d rather chase ratings by insisting the Democrats are weak, Trump is coming back, and we’re all doomed.

So the 1/6 committee also has to convince the media and the pundits that there are in fact ratings to be had by properly covering Trump and 1/6.

Failing that, the committee has to make the media and pundits look foolish for doubting its work, so they’ll shut up (or be ignored).

So the democrats have to work far harder to make this real Trump scandal grow legs, than the republicans ever had to work to make any fake scandal grow legs.

But when the republicans make up fake scandals, they get to design ones that are ratings-friendly out of the gate.

When the democrats are selling the general public on an actual republican scandal, they have to uncover actual evidence, flip real witnesses, and so on. They can’t just produce fake stuff for show, like the republicans do.

Even if the democrats wanted to use fake evidence to hype fake republican scandals – which they should NEVER do – the media would destroy them for it anyway. Because there are more ratings to be had by calling out democrats for taking a scandal, than by hyping that fake scandal.

Conversely, because viewers in the middle more or less intuitively understand that the republicans are the scoundrels to begin with, the media can’t get ratings by calling out the republicans for faking a scandal. So instead the media (usually) just plays up that fake scandal.

Bottom line: the 1/6 committee knows what it’s doing, and as far as anyone can tell from the outside, it’s succeeding. The committee must continue getting things right. But there’s no reasonable basis for suggesting the committee is getting anything wrong.

The 1/6 committee knows its target audience is voters in the middle, and it knows the tone and approach that it must take in order to maintain credibility with that audience.

Those of you who already understand Trump and 1/6 are basically watching the hearings from side stage.

The media and the pundits all know that the 1/6 committee has to take this approach in order to succeed – or they darn well should know it, because it’s their job to know it.

When they claim the committee isn’t being “aggressive” enough and so on, they’re clueless or full of it.