The New York Times makes an observation:
Trump’s Legacy: Voters Who Reject Democracy and Any Politics but Their Own
The mob attack on the Capitol, and interviews with Trump voters this week, show that the president’s subversion of democratic values will have enduring influence within the Republican Party.
...The adherence of Mr. Trump’s base to his groundless claims of a “sacred landslide” victory, and their rejection of a routine Constitutional process — a position abetted by 147 Congressional Republicans who objected to certifying Mr. Biden’s election — suggests that a core part of the Republican Party, both voters and some officials, is dead-set on rejecting the legitimacy of any politics or party but their own.
emphasis added
Ya think?
...For these voters, the lack of allegiance to small “d” democratic values seemed to stem, in part, from the shift among many Republicans to imbibing information from sources that offer propaganda rather than news and facts. The share of Republicans who trust the mass media has plunged in the Trump years to 10 percent, according to Gallup. A majority of Republicans believe Mr. Trump was robbed of the election.
Mr. Hoyt praised The Epoch Times, a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation, because “they just give you the facts of what’s happening.” For Ms. Grossi, One America News Network, the far-right channel that spreads conspiracy theories, is the only information source she trusts. She also follows QAnon, the baseless conspiracy movement that links top Democrats to child sex trafficking.
(Kevin Drum reminds us FOX is the real problem, and shows why.)
Charlie Pierce makes an observation:
...History hangs heavily on us all these days, as it should. We have seen the first successful insurrection against lawful government since the riots and uprisings that were allowed to destroy the promises of our first Reconstruction. And this comes after a period of long-delayed reckoning with the cost to our fellow citizens of indulging the tender feelings of traitors for as long as we did. The statues are coming down as they now are marks of shame and cowardice, not “healing” and “reconciliation.” In the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered the removal from the Speaker’s lobby of the portraits of four of her predecessors who had served the treasonous government between 1860 and 1865. Remember, these portraits went up after these four men had taken up arms against the United States. They were hung during that time of “reconciliation” and “healing” in which industrial America moved too fast to notice that it was selling out its Black citizens. In her letter sent to the Architect of the Capitol requesting that the portraits of the four traitors be removed, Pelosi wrote:
“As I have said before, the halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” Ms. Pelosi wrote in a letter to Ms. Johnson requesting the removal of the portraits. “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.”
And, on Wednesday, there was the battle flag carried like a pennant at a ballgame. If you want to know why the movement to remove memorials to the Confederate States of America and the people who served it is important work, you should wonder no more. It is because they do not represent the dusty past but the dark cancer at the heart of the living present, one that has to be excised lest it kill whatever future the republic has.
Read the whole thing from Pierce.
While all the dots about what happened at the Capitol have yet to be connected, the pattern that is emerging is ominous.
- President Trump, his supporters, and rightwing media have spent the past two months claiming the election was stolen with absolutely no evidence to prove it.
- At the rally held on January 6, 2021 he repeated the unfounded charges and incited the attack on Congress, promising he would be marching along with the crowd. (He returned to the White House instead to watch how events would unfold.)
- He had been in talks ahead of time with Republicans who were there in the Chamber leading the effort to object to the votes and delay the process.
- Some of them appear to have been coordinating with the events taking place outside.
- The mob that broke into the Capitol included people who were prepared to take members of Congress hostage, and execute them. They had planned ahead of time where they would go and who they would look for. They knew exactly where to go. These included known white supremacists and other extremists.
- While the violence was taking place, Trump said nothing for hours. When he finally did call for the mob to disperse, he told them he loved them and repeated his claims that the election had been stolen.
- Elements of the police that were supposed to provide protection appear to have been cooperating with the insurrectionists.
- Warnings about what was coming, obvious days in advance, appear to have been ignored or were never communicated to those who should have known to prepare.
- Reinforcements and equipment that should have been available to secure the Capitol were not, and it took hours before additional forces were permitted to arrive on scene. There was resistance within the government to sending more forces equipped to deal with the violence.
- There is no evidence to support the claim that Antifa had anything to do with the violence that took place, despite widespread claims now being circulated in the rightwing fever swamp, which is now scrubbing evidence that they were the ones planning for violence.
- Despite the fact that all the members of Congress, their staffs, and all the people who work in the Capitol were put at risk, despite the fact that people died, there were Republicans who were still insisting on unfounded fraud claims about the election hours later.
While we cannot be certain — yet — it appears the scenario cannot be ruled out that it was all intended to block the election certification so that it could not be completed. Violence against members of Congress, including the possible deaths of the Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence, and others, would have given Trump the pretext to declare martial law and declare the election invalid. (Declaring martial law has been urged on Trump by members of his inner circle as well as his base.)
That along with months of attacks on the integrity of the election and the large number of Americans who believe the election was stolen might have allowed the coup to succeed, especially given the elements prepared to seize on such an event to launch wide scale uprisings across the country. While the Capitol was under attack, several state capitals also saw protests with potential for violence.
It is no secret that there are groups who have been hoping to provoke a race war to carry out ethnic cleansing and a purge for some time now, or that Trump views them as “very fine people.”
The media has been attempting to portray Trump as having become reconciled to the peaceful transfer of power. He is not. Despite a video where Trump appeared to promise that and condemned the violence, he quickly abandoned that position and continues to insist the election was stolen. He is doing nothing to tamp down the conspiracy theories his base has absorbed and that the rightwing disinformation ecosystem continues to propagate.
He refuses to resign; Vice President Mike Pence and his cabinet refuse to take up the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Speaker Pelosi, a majority of Democrats, and finally a few Republicans, are attempting to impeach him once more. Even the Wall Street Journal is calling on Trump to resign.
Although the pressure is mounting, the temptation to run out the clock until January 20 and the inauguration is great. People are fleeing the Trump administration; he is increasingly isolated. He has finally been deprived of his social media tools.
But he and all the people lined up around him are not going away. Millions of Americans now believe the incoming Biden administration is illegitimate (and worse.) The Republican Party establishment has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It’s far from over. We really need to heed the words of Umair Haque.
Here are five things I tried to warn you about.
I warned you that there was going to be a coup.
I warned you that Trump was going to double down on his coup— all the way to the bitter end.
I warned you that as Trump’s soft coup failed, he would resort to a hard coup. Meaning that as a judicial, legal, political coup failed, he would try to get the military involved, and if that failed, he would try to simply rouse his army of American Idiots to violence.
I warned you that all that would happen almost inevitably. Why? Because Trump is an authoritarian, and he can’t back down. Backing down is showing weakness, and that is the one thing an authoritarian can’t do. Not just psychologically — but in order to keep their movement alive. They must go on doubling down, committing harder and more frequent and more outrageous transgressions, for their movement to go on being committed to them, to the goal of upending democracy, to believe that they can bring about the apocalyptic end they deisre.
And finally, I warned you that Trump would take his coup all the way to the bitter end even if he knew it couldn’t possibly be won. Why? Because there was a consolation prize well worth the winning. Weakening democracy, corroding its norms, shattering its values, disrupting its codes and rules. Dealing it a fatal enough blow, at least, to let it bleed out. And then maybe next time, maybe next time, the seizure of power would be successful. Even an attempted coup was going to be a consolation prize worth winning, because it would keep Trumpism alive.
I’m going to close with a few more words from Charlie Pierce:
Contrary to the sentiments of well-meaning men and women, this is who we are. It can happen here. The way you know that’s true is that it is who we’ve always been, and that it has happened here, over and over again. If we hadn’t been so quick to anesthetize our historical memory, if we had listened to Black historians like Barbara Fields, John Hope Franklin, and W.E.B. DuBois, we would not have been so capable of pretending to be shocked by what happened at the Capitol this week.