Jan. 6 hearing won't move MAGA crowd, but this hero's testimony will reach people

The Jan. 6 committee’s evidence-laden opening hearing Thursday night showed exactly why Republicans and their symbiotic pals in the right-wing media are bending upside down and backward to keep people from tuning in.

Out of the gate, live and in primetime, House select committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., punctured former President Donald Trump's "rigged election" balloon until it was limp, tattered by documentary evidence and clips of under-oath testimony that included Trump's own daughter acknowledging she accepted there was no basis for her father's fraud claims.

When you've lost Ivanka … well, things aren't shaping up well for Trump's dynastic aspirations.

The con of the century

Of course, Trump knew he lost. He knew all the "stolen election" prattle was made up. Snippets of testimony shown during the hearing included then-Attorney General William Barr saying he saw "absolutely zero basis" for rigged election claims and campaign spokesman Jason Miller saying one of his team's data specialists told Trump flatly that he was going to lose.

It was, and remains, the con of the century, all in service to one man's egg-fragile ego.

The question looming over the committee's work, and particularly over the hearings, which will continue Monday morning, has been: Will it matter? Will anyone care?

I wondered that myself, right up until the point in Thursday's hearing when Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards was introduced and then asked to describe what she saw on the day of the attack.

'I was slipping in people's blood'

"I could not believe my eyes," Edwards said. "There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people's blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos."

The coverage of what happened that day and what gave rise to it has focused largely on big names: Trump, people in his Cabinet, Fox News hosts, extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

But Edwards and her testimony, along with video of her being knocked unconscious and then later pepper sprayed, were central to the hearing. That was smart on the committee's part because she, unlike the larger-than-life politicians or the conspiracy-addled extremists, is relatable.

The truth might hurt: I guess that's why Fox News won't show the Jan. 6 hearings

She's a cop, a woman who for years served the force at the Capitol, the "proud" granddaughter of a Marine who fought in the Korean War.

She was a victim of the crowd Trump riled up with lies and nonsense. She was a victim of the grift that our former president, an unrivaled opportunist, attempted to pull off without concern for our democracy, the lives of people like Edwards or even the life of his own vice president. (Cheney said in her opening statements that Trump’s response to the Jan. 6 crowd chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" was that Pence "deserves it.")

MAGA fans won't care, but others will

In her opening statement, Edwards, her voice cracking at times, said this:

"I was called a lot of things on Jan. 6, 2021, and in the days thereafter. I was called Nancy Pelosi’s dog, called incompetent, called a hero and a villain. I was called a traitor to my country, my oath and my Constitution. In actuality, I was none of those things. I was an American standing face to face with other Americans, asking myself many, many times how we had gotten here."

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Those words will mean nothing to the die-hard MAGA crowd. They can’t be moved.

They’ll mean nothing to Fox News viewers who pledge allegiance to a "news organization" that was the only major network not to carry the hearing live on its primary platform.

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Those words don’t need to sway people like me who pay close attention to the ins and outs of politics and despise what Trump did to this country. We already know where we stand.

A hero should make people care

But the things Edwards said, and the sincerity and bravery with which she said them, will mean something to the largest swath of Americans – people who don't always have the time or desire to pay attention.

If your views weren't already hardened, you couldn't watch and listen to Edwards' testimony and not be moved. She's the regular person in this horrific narrative. She's the person who did her job and paid a mighty cost in doing so.

She's emblematic of the largely nameless people who suffered simply because Trump is too big a baby to admit he lost.

Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards is a hero, and she stood in sharp contrast Thursday night to the cowards who tried mightily to drive our democracy into a ditch.

She might well have helped the committee accomplish its first goal: Getting regular Americans to care.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Twitter @RexHuppke and Facebook: facebook.com/RexIsAJerk

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Officer Caroline Edwards hearing testimony: A hero of Capitol riot