Let the photograph of officers with weapons drawn, defending the chamber of the House of Representatives against a window-smashing mob, be seared into the memory of every American, today and for generations to come. That is the legacy of Donald Trump.
All that ensued Wednesday — the reported death of one woman, the injuries, the tear gas, the property damage, the fear, the outrage of elected officials forced to cover their heads and flee to safety — was triggered then and there. It was Trump’s Riot, and characteristically, having stirred things up, Trump retired to the safety of his self-centered bubble to let others deal with the consequences.
Trump lit the fuse on Wednesday morning, pouty over his repudiation by Georgia voters. But he had been priming the explosion for months. He knew he was likely to lose in November, so he began feeding his supporters the fantasy that the election might be stolen. His media supporters — grifters and opportunists who use Trump to sell fake steroids and body armor and erectile dysfunction medicine — were happy to chime in.
Truth? Who needs it? “In this day and age, people want something that tends to affirm their views and opinions,” chirped the veteran propagandist Christopher Ruddy, proprietor of Newsmax. A small army of self-promoting lawyers were happy to file bogus lawsuits. Invited by a judge in Wisconsin to present evidence, Trump’s team called precisely zero witnesses. Asked by a court in Pennsylvania to support charges of election fraud, Trump’s team revised its brief to remove the unsupportable claims. In a disgraceful phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Trump himself promised “certified” evidence at his next rally. But the rally came and went, and Trump produced nothing.
Inevitably, some people believed it. They traveled to Washington, they cheered their president’s call to battle, and they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to attack Congress and the vice president of the United States.
There will be a lot of second-guessing of the Capitol Police and of public safety officials generally in the District of Columbia. How could they let this happen? Let’s be clear: Such questions are completely off-base. No official should be blamed for failing to anticipate that the president of the United States would incite a mob to overwhelm the Capitol. We cannot accommodate ourselves to the idea that this should be foreseeable; that we should plan against it; that law enforcement in Washington must go to battle stations in anticipation of an attack by one branch of government against another.
Now, maybe they’ll say he was just joking.
For Trump’s apologists, that’s always the last-ditch defense. He was just joking when he said, after neo-Nazis marched with torches through Charlottesville, that there were “good people on both sides.” He was “a performance artist” when he accused a former congressman of murdering a staff member. He was pulling our legs when he suggested that drinking disinfectant might cure covid-19.
Perhaps I’ve contributed in some way over the years, by occasionally putting his incendiary attention-seeking into the context of a life spent shilling — though my intention was to help people defend themselves against a profoundly reckless and insincere man.
The idea that the presidency could be an inside joke, an extended troll — “make liberals cry again,” hardy-har-har — has been founded on a presumption that the infrastructure of American liberty and law is so solid it can withstand anything. It doesn’t matter what elected leaders do or say. If the president tweets incendiary lies, well, that’s just Trump. If some grasping senators want to stage a fake protest of the election, if they want to make speeches and raise money with unfounded claims of fraud — no problem! That’s just politics. Their colleagues will bail them out by voting them down.
The Trump Riot is strong medicine for such disordered thinking. No cloak of invulnerability protects the American republic. Things can get worse here, just like everywhere else on Earth. The thin line between liberty and anarchy is that frontier of conscience that Pence finally discovered, that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) finally discovered, that Donald Trump has never glimpsed.
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