If you've been watching the news since last night, when Liz Cheney read out Mark Meadow's text records for all to hear, you might have the impression that everyone around Donald Trump was shocked and frantic over the violence taking place on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6th -- presumably because they saw it as an existential threat to our democracy.

Maybe people are reading it wrong.

The plan all along was to create a clash between "patriots" and antifa/BLM that would allow Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and stay in office.

Leftists threw a major monkey wrench into the plot by not showing up. (Thank you, leftists. Major props!)

And because Trump minions knew that anticipated clash was the crisis they built their message around, they panicked for one reason only: because of how it looked. How it looked that Trump supporters were rampaging through the Capitol like the thugs they claimed Democrats were!

The entire Trump presidency was built around TV moments. Trump even hired people on the basis of how they looked on TV! Everything they did was based on the visuals. (Who specializes in creating misleading visuals? Fox News, of course.)

The White House plotters and their media minions tried desperately to cling to the pre-determined narrative of antifa thugs -- even though there weren't any.

So don't credit them for concern about the Capitol. As far as I can see, they didn't care about anything other than their own necks.