The odds of Donald Trump actually showing up to testify under oath before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot are not great, according to host Andy Levy on this week’s episode of political podcast The New Abnormal.
“Less than zero,” says co-host Kali Holloway, a columnist at The Daily Beast and The Nation.
“I think that the panel’s probably aware that he’s not gonna show up, but I think this is the kind of thing that they have to do just to sort of, for lack of a better phrase, show they mean business.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The Jan. 6 panel voted unanimously to subpoena the former president at the end of its final meeting before the midterm elections, demanding answers over his role in the plot to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election. Whether Trump will obey the subpoena is another question.
“I guess you could argue it’s a symbolic move, but I don’t know, it feels like maybe more than that,” Levy said, though he admitted there was “not a prayer in hell” that Trump would attend.
“He is so worried about how he looks, and he’s so concerned about the potential that he actually is a loser, that he would destroy democracy rather than look like a loser,” Holloway said. “It just says so much about who Donald Trump is, what is important to him, and how little he actually cares for this country or politics. He operates from a place of spite consistently.”
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
Matt Fuller, senior politics editor at The Daily Beast, echoes concerns Trump won’t show up.
“He probably won’t do anything with [the subpoena], and I can’t imagine he’s going to sit down for the Jan. 6 committee,” he said.
“It could be a court fight, but more likely than not, it’ll just be a nothing burger.”
“The Jan. 6 committee… is never going to really get down to the bottom of everything. We’re really never going to know exactly what Donald Trump was doing, exactly what he knew, all the ways in which he was degrading the presidency at the time. But we’ve got a pretty good picture. And frankly, if you haven’t seen enough already, then you’re probably never gonna see enough.”
However, it is Fuller’s belief that the committee “pretty well laid out why Donald Trump’s testimony is kind of a necessary thing to have here.”
Also on the podcast, Justin Baragona, media reporter at The Daily Beast, discusses how much Fox News management and Tucker Carlson are invested in finding out who leaked the deleted Kanye West interview footage to Vice.
“They definitely want to know who it is and there will be repercussions, I would assume,” Baragona said.
“There’s only going to be a finite number of people that could have had access. There’s a freakout internally, but they’re just…[going to] hope it just kind of goes away.”
“We’re in a situation like a Roseanne Barr where they’ve gotten themselves a big-time celebrity that they can embrace, but then that big time celebrity blows up in a very public manner and nobody wants to touch that celebrity right now.”
According to Levy, who previously worked for Fox for more than 10 years, the network is “blown away that there’s a legit, incredibly huge star that appears to share their agenda” and that “they have to protect him at all costs.”
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
