The Capitol riot hearings reveal a divided America in cross-section

Almost everyone in the US seems to have an opinion on what happened on 6 January 2021, from DC insiders and elites to working-class people in small towns, writes Holly Baxter

Over and over again, people said that they believed they had been called to Washington DC by Trump (Getty)

By now, pretty much everyone has formulated an opinion about the 6 January insurrection. If you disagree with my point of view on it, you might call it the 6 January political conversation, or the 6 January rally. You’d deny that the aim of the rioters was to overturn democracy in the name of Donald Trump, and you’d talk about a couple of bad apples and a majority of very fine people. You might even say that the legitimate supporters of Trump were set up by agitators from antifa, or Democrats in cahoots with the CIA.

Few Americans are unsure where they stand on the issue, so why are the 6 January hearings – led by a committee of seven Democrats, plus two Republicans who have been basically excommunicated for their audacity – such a big deal? The first aired on primetime television last Thursday; the second on Monday, with more to come. The first was deliberately made easy to watch, running through the evening on all TV stations (except Fox News, though it did air on Fox Business). It seems clear that the government wants everyday Americans to watch what’s going on.

And, despite the fact that we all know what happened by now, the hearings have still made for surprisingly compulsive watching. The testimony from one Capitol Police officer who was badly injured by rioters was supplemented by video footage of her being thrown to the ground and knocked out cold. She returned to duty minutes after regaining consciousness, nursing a concussion she didn’t yet realise she had, and spent hours helping to hold the line while dressing the wounds of other injured people. She described how she thought to herself that she didn’t know exactly how to react, because she hadn’t been “trained in active combat”.