More and more, Jan. 6 looks like a Trump production

Any sense of separation that remained between President Donald Trump and the mob revolt of Jan. 6, 2021 is rapidly disappearing. With a thousand small stitches, the special House committee probing his effort to overturn his lost election is knitting the story together.

At Tuesday’s hearing, the panel for the first time clearly attached the lethal events at the Capitol to the president’s online activity. That’s a key thread.

In a chaotic White House meeting in December 2020, Trump ignored legitimate legal advisers and made clear he wanted only to hear from those offering baseless election-fraud “theories.” Then, hours later, he issued his infamous tweet calling on his loyalists to attend his Washington rally on Jan. 6, vowing it “will be wild.”

What wasn't so well known was how literally the call to arms was taken. Groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers announced they'd coalesce. Travel plans followed. Dramatically and anonymously, a key Twitter employee told the House committee that the threats of chaos were glaring, but the company did nothing to counter it. One sample out of many of the response to Trump's appeal: “I’m locked and loaded and ready for Civil War Part 2.”

Sworn testimony also described Trump’s excitement during an Oval Office meeting when he heard a rally outside the White House on Jan. 5. Helping whip up the audience’s menacing anger were allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, both of whom he’d pardoned from earlier convictions.

The president, it was revealed, wanted to make a surprise announcement that he’d march the next day from his Ellipse rally to the Capitol. And he made late changes to the Jan. 6 speech, in part to target Vice President Mike Pence. The hearings have proved that the event was never going to be just another overwrought Trump rally.

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney said appropriately that it won’t do to just blame Trump’s more unhinged advisers for driving the defeated incumbent’s election-fraud hoax. She said Trump was “a 76-year-old man, not an impressionable child.”

The most moving evidence that one powerful man created the chaos came from Stephen Ayres, by all accounts an ordinary citizen arrested after the riot. Ayres said he regretted that he once believed the president’s false words and heeded his calls. Ayres said he didn’t leave the Capitol until Trump tweeted his appeal to protesters to do so late that afternoon. Both he and former Oath Keepers media spokesman Jason Van Tatenhove, testifying beside him, expressed alarm that more of the same may be in store in 2024.

Which raises questions that nobody is officially answering yet: Will the Republican Party, still under Trump's sway, enable that? Can a repeat be prevented by strong Justice Department action?

That's still for later, and stay tuned. First the committee, which has been effectively educating the public so far, must keep stitching those pieces together for the good of the republic.