Gas prices are now averaging $4.41 a gallon across the country, down from last month’s peak of more than $5 a gallon.
Drivers have seen it at the pump, and Biden administration officials have repeatedly touted it in recent days: Gas prices are dropping, and they have been for weeks.
Although the decline in prices is a welcome reprieve for Americans whose budgets have been strained by higher costs for nearly everything, it’s reasonable to ask: Will this last?
Gas prices are averaging $4.41 a gallon across the country as of July 22, according to the American Automobile Association, down from last month’s peak of more than $5 a gallon. Although gas prices have been falling for more than 30 days straight, the national average is still substantially higher than a year ago, when prices averaged $3.16 a gallon, according to AAA data. Diesel prices are also averaging $5.46 a gallon as of July 22, down from $5.81 a month ago.
Rising gas prices have been a major driver of inflation. A government report released last week showed that an increase in energy prices fueled a big jump in inflation in June, when the Consumer Price Index rose 9.1 percent from a year earlier, a new four-decade high. Gas prices soared after demand for oil rebounded from pandemic lows and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up oil prices.
Several factors have pushed gas prices down, including a drop in oil prices as recession fears grow and a smaller-than-expected impact from Western sanctions on Russia. Supply has also improved relative to demand, which has slightly fallen in recent weeks and remains at levels lower than a year ago, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.
Biden administration officials have been quick to claim the decline in prices as a success and predicted that prices will continue ticking down, although they note that risks remain. Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the drop in retail gas prices was “not a daily blip.”
“We think it’s reasonable to expect more gas stations to lower their prices in response to lower input costs and thus, barring unforeseen market disruptions, to see average prices fall below $4 per gallon in more places in coming weeks,” Bernstein said at a White House press briefing on Monday. He also pointed to actions the administration has taken to address the rising costs, such as releasing millions of barrels from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Amos Hochstein, a State Department senior adviser for energy security, also said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that he was expecting average national gas prices to continue to decline closer to $4 a gallon.
But energy prices are highly volatile, making it difficult to make any predictions. Energy analysts and economists say it’s probably too soon to say whether prices will continue to fall in the coming months, and there are reasons to believe the downturn might not last.
“It’s helpful that prices are coming down, but I wouldn’t run a victory lap yet,” said Abhi Rajendran, the director of research at Energy Intelligence.
Here are four factors that could affect gas prices in the coming months.
- How people (especially investors) feel about the economy as a whole
A big reason that oil prices have dropped is because investors have grown more worried about a potential recession in the United States and a global economic downturn.
Anticipation of future demand is a key driver of oil prices, said Christopher Knittel, a professor of energy economics at MIT. Recession concerns have led to a slump in the crude oil market, resulting in a drop in retail gas prices.
One of the biggest factors to watch is the strength of the US economy. Fears of a recession have risen as the Federal Reserve continues to aggressively hike interest rates to get inflation under control. By making borrowing more expensive, the central bank is hoping to dampen consumer demand for goods and services, which should help prices fall.
But the Fed risks going too far with its policy moves, potentially triggering a recession as consumers pull back spending and economic growth takes a downturn.
“If markets think there’s going to be a recession next year, that starts to move oil prices today, even though demand will fall next year,” Knittel said.
Investors will be watching indicators like next week’s gross domestic product report, which will show whether the US economy contracted or expanded in the second quarter, said Omair Sharif, founder of the research firm Inflation Insights. (Two quarters of declining GDP growth is a common rule of thumb for determining when the US is in a recession, although there are complicating factors.) They’ll also be watching for changes in consumer spending, Sharif said. If spending shows signs of decreasing by more than expected amounts, that could worsen recession fears and lead to lower gas prices.
Investors will also be monitoring the Fed’s policy meeting next week, Sharif said, when central bank officials are expected to announce another interest rate increase of 0.75 percentage points. Investors will be paying close attention to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s comments about how aggressive the central bank’s interest rate hikes will be in the coming months. If bigger rate hikes are in store, that could worsen fears of a recession on Wall Street.
“You probably sell off on oil and other commodities,” Sharif said, “which could lower gasoline prices.”
- The effect of sanctions on Russian oil
So far, sanctions on Russian oil have had less of an impact on global supply than originally expected, since Russia has been able to export discounted oil to countries like China and India. Still, European sanctions could further strain the already tight global oil supply in the coming months.
In December, the European Union will fully ban Russian maritime deliveries of crude oil, and in February, the EU will ban shipments of refined oil products from Russia. By the end of the year, the embargo will apply to 90 percent of the bloc’s Russian oil imports. An insurance ban on ships carrying Russian oil will also be phased in, making it more difficult for Russia to export oil products around the world.
Oil prices could rise because of these tightening sanctions, said Kevin Book, a managing director at ClearView Energy Partners. “You could start to see a race to procure barrels if folks think that perhaps that’s going to be a real deterrent to the world supply,” Book said.
- The weather on the Gulf Coast
The National Weather Service predicted this year’s hurricane season would be more active than usual. So far, it’s produced three named tropical storms, fewer than last year’s. But it’s still early, and at any time, a hurricane along the Gulf Coast could knock out a refinery, the processing plants that turn oil into petroleum products like gasoline and diesel.
Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, predicted that gas prices would continue to fall through the weekend, but said that any signs of a storm forming along the Gulf Coast could threaten refineries and jeopardize that trend.
That could be “devastating for supply” and potentially push up fuel prices higher than last month’s $5-a-gallon peak, he said.
“I don’t think this is a big downtrend that’s going to persist,” Kloza said. “I think we may have another act.”
- Demand for gas in the US
People drive more in the summer, so Rajendran, the Energy Intelligence director, said it was more likely for prices to climb rather than drop between now and Labor Day. He said it’s also possible for falling gas prices to increase demand, which could push up prices again.
Although some regions of the country are already seeing gas prices fall below $4 a gallon, Rajendran predicted that the average national gas price would likely drift to higher than $4.50 before tapering off and reaching $4 a gallon or below by the end of the year as demand subsides.
Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said national gas prices could fall below $4 a gallon in mid-August if gas demand doesn’t surge, the country avoids a major hurricane, and the economy continues to show signs of cooling. But De Haan said costs could spike again if the country gets better-than-expected economic data in the coming weeks, spurring a rally. And consumers hoping to see gas prices averaging anywhere between $2.75 and $3.25 a gallon again could be waiting a while, he said.
“Americans have seen five weeks straight of falling gas prices, but that does not mean we are yet in the clear,” De Haan said. “I don’t think we’ll get back down to what most Americans consider normal for gasoline prices until there’s some sort of resolution between Russia and Ukraine.”
Germany has made itself an outlier in global meat consumption by embracing plant-based food and politics.
Oktoberfest — the annual two-week festival in Munich, Germany, that attracts some 6 million attendees a year — originally began in 1810 as the gaudy celebration of a royal marriage. Today, it’s primarily a good reason for visitors to drink about 2 million gallons of beer while eating nearly half a million roast chickens and over 400,000 sausages.
Once Oktoberfest is done, Germans will keep drinking beer; Germany, after all, ranks sixth in the world in per capita alcohol consumption. But the decadent displays of meat at Oktoberfest aren’t necessarily indicative of Germans’ year-round eating habits. In fact, Germany is one of the few places in the world where meat consumption is decreasing — and fast.
In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.
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The trend runs counter to virtually everywhere else on the planet, where meat consumption is quickly rising — from citizens of low-income countries adding more meat to their diet as incomes increase, to rich countries where meat consumption has more or less plateaued at a high level or continues to slowly increase. (Sweden, like Germany, is a notable exception.)
Understanding the causes behind Germany’s newfound love for vegetarian fare could be critical in figuring out how to slow climate change and improve overall health. Meat and dairy production account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and most countries’ per capita meat consumption far exceeds the 57 pounds per year recommended by the EAT-Lancet Commission, a panel of climate and nutrition experts.
Animal welfare and environmental activists in Germany say there’s no single explanation as to why their people are putting down (some of) their meat and opting for more plant-based food. One poll found that, from 2016 to 2020, the number of vegans in Germany doubled, hitting 2.6 million people or 3.2 percent of the population. A big jump, to be sure, but not enough to explain the sharp decline in the country’s meat consumption.
Rather, says Jens Tuider of ProVeg International, a Berlin-based organization that advocates for reducing meat consumption, “it’s the flexitarians that drive this development.”
Experts say the rise in flexitarians — those who reduce but don’t eliminate their meat consumption — could be due to a number of scandals in recent decades that have put the German meat sector under closer scrutiny. Exposés of forced labor in slaughter plants, reports of rotten meat sold across the country, bird and swine flu outbreaks, and animal cruelty investigations may have affected attitudes toward meat.
But those same problems are playing out elsewhere with far less effect on diet, including in the US, where Americans eat 225 pounds of red meat and poultry (fish excluded) per capita per year, almost twice the amount as Germans.
What seems to set Germany apart is its young people, who are deeply worried about climate change and see reforming the food system as one way to pump the brakes on their country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “Especially among the young people, you can see a cultural change, because they are much more aware of … what they eat, how they consume,” says Inka Dewitz of Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a foundation in Germany that is affiliated with the German Green Party.
The kids are eating their vegetables
In a 2021 survey of 15- to 29-year-olds that Heinrich Böll Stiftung conducted, 12.7 percent of respondents identified as vegetarian or vegan — about twice the rate of Germany as a whole, according to the organization. A recent survey by the German government found 14- to 29-year-olds report purchasing plant-based products at slightly higher rates than 30- to 44-year-olds and much more than those over 60.
This enthusiasm could be explained in part by the youth-led Fridays for Future movement, which was born out of teenage activist Greta Thunberg’s school strike in Sweden to demand action on climate change. The movement is popular in Germany, where over 16 percent of respondents in Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s youth poll said they take part in it to some degree.
“[The movement is] very aware about the environmental effects of meat production, and a lot of the Fridays for Future leaders are actually vegans,” says Mahi Klosterhalfen, president of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation, a Berlin-based animal welfare organization. On the website of Germany’s Fridays for Future movement, the organization’s policy demands for the agriculture sector include a halving of meat consumption by 2035, a further decline of 60 pounds of meat based on 2021 rates.
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Georg Wendt/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
By comparison, the US Fridays for Future movement website doesn’t say anything about meat. That’s in line with many US environmental organizations, most of which say we need to move away from a meat-heavy food system but mention it sparingly, given the fraught politics of meat regulation in the US, and a focus on bigger sources of emissions: transportation and energy production. However, environmental researchers have pointed out that even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we wouldn’t be able to meet global climate targets without cutting emissions from agriculture.
“For [young people], it’s more like a political statement to eat less meat or to eat no meat at all,” Dewitz said.
The “eat less meat” sentiment already appears to be taken seriously in some corners of Germany’s federal government. Cem Özdemir, the country’s minister of food and agriculture and a member of the Greens, recently listed shifting diets to be more plant-based as the first of four priorities in the agency’s forthcoming nutrition strategy plan. Two other German ministers have also called for a reduction in meat consumption.
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Carsten Rehder/DPA/AFP via Getty Images
That position stands in stark contrast to Tom Vilsack, who served as a lobbyist for the dairy industry after his stint as USDA secretary under President Barack Obama. President Joe Biden reappointed Vilsack to the job in 2021, and since then Vilsack has put forth some modest meat industry reforms but hasn’t signaled support for shifting diets away from meat.
German ministers, though, should have no issue finding support among the next generation of voters — a majority of them say the government should encourage people to eat a more climate-friendly diet.
Germany’s plant-based revolution
The shift isn’t just due to changing political attitudes. The quality and availability of plant-based fare have greatly improved due to innovation from restaurants, food tech startups, and big food companies.
Rügenwalder Mühle, a German meat company founded in 1834, began producing plant-based meat products at the end of 2014 and reported that, in 2021, its plant-based meat sales surpassed its animal meat sales. The former CEO, Christian Rauffus, predicted that his generation will be the last to eat meat every day because the next one doesn’t want to.
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Julian Stratenschulte/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
The entire sector has seen explosive growth in recent years: Grocery sales of plant-based products in Germany nearly doubled from 2018 to 2020, from $424 million to $835 million.
Hamburg resident Andreas Setzer, a consultant for animal welfare organizations, told me he was surprised to see so few vegan options while traveling around the US over the past year, having been spoiled in Germany for so many years.
“When I came to the US, I was expecting vegan options everywhere but I had to live off of [Burger King’s] Impossible Whopper,” he said about his experience trying to find meat-free food outside major US cities. He added that, in Germany, plant-based food is quite affordable and available just about everywhere.
But looking under the hood of Germany’s meat consumption patterns also illustrates a confounding reality of the country’s relationship to meat. While per capita consumption has fallen, the number of animals farmed per person has gone up. That’s because Germans are eating more chicken.
The dietary migration from red to white meat
Germans are eating about the same amount of beef as they were in 2011, but far less pork. But because pigs are large — pigs yield about 124 pounds of edible meat on average in Germany — the steep decline in pork only resulted in a reduction of about one-sixth of a pig per person. However, the 12.5 percent increase in poultry consumption, which looks modest on the chart below, has resulted in almost one extra chicken farmed for each of Germany’s 83 million residents because chickens are so small.
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That trend of poultry consumption growing faster than pork and beef consumption has been playing out across the globe over the last few decades as the simplified public health message that red meat is bad and white meat is good caught on. In the 1960s, there were 2.2 chickens raised for each person on Earth. Now, it’s 9.2 — a 318 percent per capita increase. (However, people in high-income countries eat far more chicken than those in low-income countries — for example, each American eats about 23 chickens a year on average.)
In recent decades, some environmentalists have been advocating for swapping red meat with white meat, because red meat — especially beef — emits far more greenhouse gasses than white meat. (Though plant-based protein usually pollutes less than them all.)
While the dietary migration from red to white meat may have slowed climate change, it severely worsened animal suffering. Not only are we farming far more chickens than in the past — 70 billion globally each year compared to 6.5 billion in 1961 — but they’re typically treated much worse than cattle and pigs and also contribute to air and water pollution in the same way the pork and beef sectors do.
“From the animal ethics perspective it is, of course, rather disastrous,” says Tuider of ProVeg International. “So I can’t really, at this stage, completely join into the party mode. … I’m quite sobered by the fact that we’ve seen this [decline in meat consumption] and increased the number of animals killed, actually.”
Germany’s decade-long decline in meat consumption shows that it is indeed possible to shift high-meat diets, a task that has long seemed impossible in the face of humanity’s 10,000-year love affair with domesticating animals for meat. But it also shows that the shift, when highly focused on greenhouse gas emissions, can also have the unintended consequence of increasing animal suffering.
In time, companies like Rügenwalder Mühle might figure out how to make plant-based chicken good enough to stop the dietary migration from red to white meat, and activists like Klosterhalfen might be able to persuade people to hold just as much empathy for chickens as they do for pigs and cows. In the meantime, at least Oktoberfest has several plant-based options for Germany’s vegans and flexitarians alike.
What is the point of the January 6 committee? Will Trump face any consequences based on what it finds?
The House January 6 committee’s primetime hearing Thursday represented the culmination of the series of eight hearings that stretched across the better part of the summer. This latest hearing filled in many of the gaps in what we know then-President Donald Trump’s role was in encouraging the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
And there will be more for the public to see. The committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), announced another round of hearings in September.
“Doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued, and the dam has begun to break,” vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) said Thursday.
In the meantime, there’s plenty to unpack from what we’ve learned so far. Here’s what you need to know.
- What is the point of the January 6 committee?
Although the events of January 6 were amply covered at the time and have since been the topic of books, documentaries, and a presidential impeachment trial, there have been countless questions about the attack on the US Capitol left unanswered. Was it planned or organized in any way? And, if so, by whom? What was Donald Trump doing while his supporters ransacked the Capitol? And how did it fit into Trump’s months-long effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep himself in office? These questions were left lingering even after Trump was impeached for inciting the attack, and have never fully been answered.
The January 6 committee was created by Congress to investigate the circumstances around the attack on the Capitol, to recommend “changes in law, policy, procedures, rules, or regulations” to prevent future acts of violence, and “to strengthen the security and resilience of the United States and American democratic institutions.” It was created with a near party-line vote in June 2021, with only the two Republicans who ended up on the committee, Cheneyand Kinzinger, voting for it.
The final work product of the committee is not the televised hearings, or punishing anyone for wrongdoing it uncovers, but instead a formal report to Congress. That’s expected to be issued in the fall; it is anticipated to explain how the attack on the Capitol happened and outline future steps to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
- So what has it been doing so far?
With its broad mandate, the committee has interviewed over 1,000 witnesses and focused intensively on the actions of Donald Trump in the weeks and months before the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on January 6.
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Julio Cortez/AP
The committee worked for months before it started making its case to the public, though much of what it found out behind closed doors was revealed in press reports. Those leaks of committee findings included reports about a draft executive order prepared for Trump to have the military seize voting machines, text messages sent by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows urging members of Congress to act to overturn the election, and correspondence between Trump adviser John Eastman and Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Since June, the committee has held eight public hearings geared at assembling a cohesive, comprehensive story of the organized, multi-pronged effort to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, with Trump at its center. So far, the hearings have focused on aspects of that plan, like:
- Attempts by Trump to pressure Republican state officials to try to reverse Joe Biden’s wins in several swing states.
- The effort to push Vice President Mike Pence into unilaterally and unconstitutionally throwing out electoral votes in his role presiding over the formal certification of the 2020 election.
- The effort to force Justice Department officials to take legal actions seeking a different election result in court.
- What happened when all of those failed, and Trump then focused on his rally on January 6 to try to bring his supporters to Washington, DC, in a last-ditch effort to hold on to power.
Unlike other congressional hearings that feature lengthy opening statements and ample speechifying, these have run more like scripted television programs. The committee has even used a former television news executive as a consultant, and that shows in the polished production: It weaves together clips of videotaped depositions and occasionally alternates those with live questioning of the witnesses before the committee.
- Could the committee’s work result in actual consequences for Trump or anyone else?
Yes, it could.
The committee doesn’t have the authority to punish anyone. Much has been made about whether it might issue criminal referrals to ask the Justice Department to indict Trump or others involved in efforts to overturn the election. These, however, don’t carry any real legal weight. One could tag Attorney General Merrick Garland on a tweet asking him to indict Trump and it would have much the same independent effect.
But the resources the committee has put toward investigating January 6 have produced evidence that could eventually be shared with the Justice Department to buttress its investigation.
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Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Perhaps the most meaningful legal impact of the committee’s investigation so far came in a 44-page ruling from David Carter, a federal judge in California. In the ruling, Carter held that documents the committee subpoenaed from John Eastman, an outside Trump lawyer, were not protected by attorney-client privilege. This was because, he wrote, Eastman and Trump were acting as criminal co-conspirators trying to mount “a coup in search of a legal theory.” In stark language, Carter wrote, “the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021” and “that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
This doesn’t mean Trump will get prosecuted. After all, the decision whether to charge Trump, Eastman, or anyone else with a crime doesn’t rest with a federal judge but with prosecutors. But it does come freighted with significance that a nonpartisan actor issued a formal legal ruling saying it is more likely than not that a sitting president committed a crime.
- What does this have to do with the Justice Department investigation?
You could view the committee’s investigation of January 6 and the DOJ’s investigations as two trains running on parallel tracks, investigating the same thing in different ways. The committee has moved from closed-door interviews to televised hearings while the Justice Department has been steadily prosecuting those who entered the Capitol grounds on January 6. As of early July, 855 people had been arrested across the country. About 330 have pleaded guilty to various charges, while 10 have gone to trial and been found guilty.
Recently, however, the DOJ has stepped up its efforts, raiding and seizing electronic devices of figures like Eastman as well as of those who were involved in schemes around the electoral vote-counting process. It is unclear exactly what connection this new push by the DOJ has to the committee’s work.
Eventually, the two tracks will converge once the committee issues its report and turns over its investigative material to the Department of Justice. The question then is simply what Garland will do with the evidence the committee has gathered as well as that gathered by his own prosecutors.
The final decision to prosecute Trump and his associates will fall into Garland’s lap. The attorney general will have to weigh not only the strength of evidence and the likelihood that a jury would convict, but also whether to set the precedent of indicting a former president, which would be a first in American history.
- Who are the participants I need to know about?
The two bold-faced names running the committee are its chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and its vice chair, Liz Cheney. These are the only two members of the committee who speak at every hearing. Cheney has often played an active role in hearings; her opening and closing statements provide a road map for what the committee intends to do and hints of new revelations to come.
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The other person who has come to national prominence through the hearings is Cassidy Hutchinson, a now-26-year-old former White House aide. The committee devoted a hearing in late June solely to Hutchinson, a previously obscure figure, which featured testimony about Trump’s desire to go to the Capitol on January 6 and about members of Congress who allegedly sought presidential pardons for their own efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
So far, Hutchinson has been the only White House aide to testify in person before the committee and willingly provide revelatory testimony. There have been plenty of other Trump White House aides who have appeared via their videotaped depositions and made memorable contributions, including White House lawyer Eric Herschmann and former Attorney General Bill Barr. Most recently, White House counsel Pat Cipollone finally testified before the committee. Others in Trump’s orbit have appeared in person for hearings, including former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Greg Jacob, the counsel for Vice President Mike Pence.
- And what’s going on with people like Steve Bannon who weren’t cooperating?
While many big names in Trumpworld have cooperated and the committee has played clips of depositions from top Trump allies including his daughter Ivanka Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his former campaign manager Bill Stepien, several well-known figures in Trump’s orbit have refused to do so.
The most well-known is Steve Bannon, the former top White House strategist who has since been an outside adviser to Trump. Bannon initially refused to cooperate with the committee at all. It then cited him for contempt of Congress, and the House voted to recommend that the Justice Department prosecute him for his refusal to cooperate. Bannon turned himself in last November, and, after months of legal wrangling, his trial is set to begin on Monday. The former Trump adviser captured attention in the past week with a last-minute offer to testify before the committee that was dismissed by the Justice Department as “not a genuine effort to meet his obligations but a last-ditch attempt to avoid accountability.”
The committee has referred three others for contempt of Congress after votes in the House. The Department of Justice declined to move forward with prosecutions of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump adviser Dan Scavino but has charged Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro with contempt.
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Others appeared before the committee but repeatedly invoked their constitutional right against self-incrimination, including former national security adviser Mike Flynn and former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark.
- Is this breaking through or having a political impact?
The committee is piling up plenty of evidence that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election and then actively conspired to overturn it. Of course, there have been plenty of instances of his misdeeds in the past — dozens of scandals, two impeachments, and an almost infinite number of problematic tweets — yet he’s weathered those and managed to stay the leader of the Republican Party. It’s hard to imagine that anything will ever shatter Trump’s grip over his MAGA base, and this probably won’t do it.
But there is some evidence that the hearings are eroding his general standing within the GOP; reaching some Republicans who were never part of the MAGA wing of the party and reminding them of their horror over the attack on the Capitol.
According to a late June poll from CBS/YouGov, a quarter of Trump voters say they are paying some or a lot of attention to the hearings, while over 40 percent of Trump voters think it is very important or somewhat important to find out what happened that day. Further, Trump’s unfavorability has steadily increased in polling over the past month, while the former president has started to slip under 50 percent in polls for the 2024 Republican nomination.
This is happening while Trump is sounding like a presidential candidate in all but name. Just last week, in an interview with New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi, he implied the only open question is whether he would announce his candidacy before or after the November midterms. While Trump still has a strong core of support within the GOP in a potential primary, he has already lost one presidential election to Biden, and lagged the incumbent in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll even though only a third of voters in the same poll approved of Biden’s performance in office. Anything that further dings Trump’s support — even outside the base — is a political liability.
- Is this like anything that has happened before?
While the January 6 committee has often been compared to Watergate, it has very little in common with the carefully crafted Senate committee that investigated the Watergate break-in, led by conservative Democrat Sam Ervin in 1973, an era when politics was more genteel and most Americans received their news through traditional media outlets.
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Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
The most unusual aspect of the committee is its non-adversarial nature. After a fight over Republican nominees to the committee led House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to refuse to participate, it left the committee without any Trump defenders.
Cheney and Kinzinger, the two Republicans on the committee, both voted to impeach Trump, and that has led to the members working together in a nonpartisan way. The resulting unity of purpose has enabled the hearings to become slick televised productions without any objections, obstruction, or grandstanding. While the decision to refuse to participate was initially made in an effort to delegitimize the committee and make it look like a partisan vehicle after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked two of McCarthy’s original nominees from joining the committee, Republicans have since been left regretting the decision. Even Trump has criticized it after the hearings began when he was left without any allies in the room.
The question is what outcomes will result from the committee. The Watergate scandal led to the passage of comprehensive campaign finance laws for the first time in American history (although much of the regime was promptly ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and has been steadily eroded by court decisions since then). While reform of the Electoral Count Act, the arcane 19th-century law that governs the certification of presidential elections, has had bipartisan support in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, it’s unlikely that there will be more significant legislative proposals. There may still be prosecutions of those involved in the effort to overturn the election, but the question is whether it will reach the scale of Watergate, which led to nearly 50 guilty verdicts.
There also is the specter of Trump or another MAGA candidate winning the White House in 2024 and potentially pardoning anyone prosecuted (including the hundreds already found guilty of breaching the Capitol). Trump has already expressed at rallies his willingness to do this. There is precedent for this — most of the top government officials wrapped up in the Iran-Contra scandal were pardoned by George H.W. Bush before he left office in 1993.
- What happens next?
The committee will continue its investigative process, and hold more hearings in September. It must also draft and write a final report, which is expected to be complete in the fall. At that point, it will make public whatever recommendations it has and perhaps hold another hearing to present them.
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Bill O’Leary/Washington Post via Getty Images
The hard deadline for action, though, is the midterms. Not only are Democrats expected to lose control of the House, but two of the committee’s members, Kinzinger and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), are not running for reelection, while two others face tough races. Cheney is the underdog in her August primary while Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) represents a swing district. The result is that the committee has to accomplish all of its goals by the end of the year.
With Democrats likely to lose the House and Republicans already pledging retribution over the committee’s work, it’s unlikely that anything proposed by the committee would stand a chance of passing the House in 2023.
As for Trump and his allies, the Department of Justice eventually has to decide whether to take the unprecedented step of indicting a former president. And if it doesn’t do so soon, the decision may be about indicting not just a former president but a current presidential candidate as well.
Update, July 22, 12:31 pm ET: This story was updated to include information from the most recent committee hearing.