When I asked a man with an assault rifle-a “combat-skills instructor” for a militia called the Pennsylvania Three Percent-how likely he considered the prospect of civil conflict, he told me, “It’s coming.” Since then, Trump and his allies had done everything they could to spread and intensify this bitter aggrievement. Hundreds of Trump supporters, including heavily armed militia members, vowed to revolt. On November 7th, mere hours after Biden’s win was projected, I attended a protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol, in Harrisburg. The past nine weeks had been steadily building toward this moment. Everyone seemed to understand what was about to happen.
There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current. “We’re storming the Capitol!” some yelled. You have to show strength.”īefore Trump had even finished his speech, approximately eight thousand people started moving up the Mall. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them-because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. The people around me exchanged looks of astonishment and delight. “After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the crowd. Pence, though, had advised Congress that the Constitution constrained him from taking such action. The lawmakers lacked the authority to overturn the election, but Trump and his allies had concocted a fantastical alternative: Pence, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could single-handedly nullify votes from states that Biden had won. Fourteen Republican senators, led by Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, had joined the effort. In December, a hundred and forty Republican representatives-two-thirds of the caucus-had said that they would formally object to the certification of several swing states. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.”Ībout a mile and a half away, at the east end of the Mall, Vice-President Pence and both houses of Congress had convened to certify the Electoral College votes that had made Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the next President and Vice-President of the United States. We’re going to have to fight much harder. “We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. He had a thin mustache and hugged a life-size mannequin with duct tape over its eyes, “ traitor” scrawled on its chest, and a noose around its neck. In front of me, a middle-aged man wearing a Trump flag as a cape told a young man standing beside him, “There’s gonna be a war.” His tone was resigned, as if he were at last embracing a truth that he had long resisted. The profanity signalled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms had survived the past four years.
It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half gleeful excitement at being licensed to act on it. Then he summarized the supposed crimes, simply, as “bullshit.” His voice, however, projected clearly through powerful speakers as he rehashed the debunked allegations of massive fraud which he’d been propagating for months. From where I stood, at the foot of the Washington Monument, you had to strain to see his image on a jumbotron that had been set up on Constitution Avenue. Thousands of them had assembled on the Mall, in Washington, D.C., on the morning of January 6th, to hear Trump address them from a stage outside the White House. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.īy the end of President Donald Trump’s crusade against American democracy-after a relentless deployment of propaganda, demagoguery, intimidation, and fearmongering aimed at persuading as many Americans as possible to repudiate their country’s foundational principles-a single word sufficed to nudge his most fanatical supporters into open insurrection.