At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, police reinforcements were starting to clear a mob of Donald Trump supporters from the United States Capitol, which they had occupied for almost three hours. The representatives and senators, who were holding a joint session of Congress to certify the results of the Electoral College when the Trump supporters broke through security lines, are still in lockdown. Amid unprecedented scenes of mayhem, the joint session, which should have been a formality, has been suspended, and it’s not clear when the session will resume.
Earlier in the day, there were alarming clashes. At the doors of the House chamber, armed Trump supporters engaged in a standoff with Capitol Police. “Police have guns drawn. We are hiding behind chairs and tables on House gallery,” a reporter on the scene, Politico’s Olivia Beavers, tweeted, at 2:45 p.m. In the Senate, at least one man made it inside the chamber, where, according to Igor Bobic, a HuffPost reporter, he walked up to the dais and shouted, “Trump won that election!”
Outside the Capitol, police engaged in violent struggles with Trump supporters who were trying to get inside. Tear gas was deployed, and news footage showed police and Trump supporters punching one another and wrestling. There was a report of a woman being shot in the chest inside the Capitol building, and of multiple police officers being seriously injured in the melee.
With the Capitol Police clearly having lost control, a number of Republicans urged Trump to call off his supporters and demand that they leave the Capitol. “This is insane,” Representative Mike Gallagher, a conservative Republican and military veteran who represents the Eighth Congressional District of Wisconsin, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I have not seen anything like this since I deployed to Iraq, in 2007 and 2008. . . . The President needs to call it off. Call it off! Call it off!”
For a couple of hours, Trump refused to do so. At 2:38 p.m., he tweeted, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!” There was nothing in this tweet about leaving Capitol Hill. At 3:13 p.m., Trump tweeted once more, saying, “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence!” Again, this message didn’t contain any call for the protesters to withdraw. Indeed, it amounted to an expression of support for the break-in and occupation.
This is precisely what Trump wanted. It was Trump who repeatedly called on his supporters to travel to Washington, D.C., for the joint session, after his efforts to overturn the election through the courts had failed. It was Trump who repeatedly told those same supporters that the election had been stolen, and that the result needed to be reversed. And it was Trump who ignored reports that some of his supporters were planning to go far beyond the peaceful protest that he claimed to be calling for. Online forums popular with Trump supporters were “filled with violent rhetoric directed at a wide range of perceived enemies,” the Anti-Defamation League warned. “In response to a user who wondered what happens if Congress ignores ‘evidence’ that President Trump won the election, a user wrote, ‘Storm the capitol.’ ”
Before the mob broke into the Capitol, Trump addressed a large group of his supporters who had gathered on the Ellipse, the park just south of the White House. Referring to the election, he declared, “There has never been anything like this—it’s a pure theft—in American history.” Later on, after repeating a long litany of bogus claims about voter fraud, he said, “This is a criminal enterprise.” He ended his speech by saying, “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Ave. . . . We’re going to try and give our Republicans—the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help—we’re going to try and give them kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”
For the past four years, there has been a tendency in some quarters to downplay Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. Ever since the election, it has been incessant. With Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans pledging to accept the election results, Trump’s attempt to bully Congress into submission was—and is—destined to fail. But, when you are dealing with would-be authoritarians like Trump, it is a mistake to focus exclusively on the formal institutions of government; the danger comes from outside the system.
It’s been clear all along that Trump’s supporters took his claims of voter fraud seriously. And when he complained to them that McConnell and even Mike Pence, Trump’s ultra-loyal Vice-President, were preparing to sell him out, they were perfectly willing to believe it. They were even willing to storm the Capitol and terrorize members of Congress on Trump’s behalf. That is how democracies perish.
Shortly after 4 p.m., Joe Biden, the President-elect, addressed the nation. “This is not dissent—it’s disorder, it’s chaos. It borders on sedition, and it must end now,” Biden said, in Wilmington, Delaware. He called on Trump to go on television and demand an immediate end to the siege. “America is so much better than what we’ve seen today,” he said. Not Trump’s America, sadly.
Shortly after Biden spoke, Trump posted a minute-long video message from outside the White House, in which he repeated, yet again, his false claim that the election had been stolen. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it,” he said, addressing his supporters. “But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.” Trump’s message didn’t include a word of criticism about the violence, the damage to the Capitol, or the sabotaging of democracy. “We love you,” he told the rioters. “You are very special.”
Read More About the Presidential Transition
- Donald Trump has survived impeachment, twenty-six sexual-misconduct accusations, and thousands of lawsuits. His luck may well end now that Joe Biden is the next President.
- With litigation unlikely to change the outcome of the election, Republicans are looking to strategies that might remain even after rebuffs both at the polls and in court.
- With the Trump Presidency ending, we need to talk about how to prevent the moral injuries of the past four years from happening again.
- If 2020 has demonstrated anything, it is the need to rebalance the economy to benefit the working class. There are many ways a Biden Administration can start.
- Trump is being forced to give up his attempt to overturn the election. But his efforts to build an alternative reality around himself will continue.
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