“On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Vice President Mike Pence offered a classic of the genre. As Trump declared the election stolen, in terms as clear as a fist to the face, Pence tried to take him seriously, not literally; to signal solidarity with Trump’s fury while backing away from the actual claims. “I stand with President @RealDonaldTrump,” he tweeted. “We must count every LEGAL vote.”
But Trump did not want every legal vote counted. He wanted legally counted votes to be erased; he wanted new votes discovered in his favor. He wanted to win, not lose; whatever the cost, whatever the means. And every day since, he has turned up the pressure, leading to the bizarre theory that took hold of Trumpists in recent weeks that the vice president was empowered to accept or reject the results of the election on Jan. 6; that Pence could, single-handedly, right this wrong. And so, after years of loyal service, of daily debasements and constant humiliations, Trump came for Pence, too, declaring him just one more enemy of the people.”
…
“On Wednesday, at the Capitol, those who took Trump seriously and those who took Trump literally collided in spectacular fashion. Inside the building, a rump of Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, were leading a feckless challenge to the Electoral College results. They had no pathway to overturning the results and they knew it. They had no evidence that the results should be overturned and they knew it. And they did not act or speak like they truly believed the election had been stolen. They were there to take Trump’s concerns seriously, not literally, in the hopes that his supporters might become their supporters in 2024.
But at the same time, Trump was telling his supporters that the election had actually been stolen, and that it was up to them to resist. And they took him literally. They did not experience this as performative grievance; they experienced it as a profound assault. They stormed the Capitol, attacked police officers, shattered doors and barriers, looted congressional offices. One woman was shot in the mayhem and died.
If their actions looked like lunacy to you, imagine it from their perspective, from within the epistemic structure in which they live. The president of the United States told them the election had been stolen by the Democratic Party, that they were being denied power and representation they had rightfully won. “I know your pain,” he said, in his video from the White house lawn later on Wednesday. “I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it.” More than a dozen Republican senators, more than 100 Republican House members, and countless conservative media figures had backed Trump’s claims.
If the self-styled revolutionaries were lawless, that was because their leaders told them that the law had already been broken, and in the most profound, irreversible way. If their response was extreme, so too was the crime. If landslide victories can fall to Democratic chicanery, then politics collapses into meaninglessness. How could the thieves be allowed to escape into the night, with full control of the federal government as their prize? A majority of Republicans now believe the election was stolen, and a plurality endorse insurrection as a response. A snap YouGov poll found that 45 percent of Republicans approved of the storming of the Capitol; 43 percent opposed it.”
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“The Republican Party that has aided and abetted Trump is all the more contemptible because it fills the press with quotes making certain that we know that it knows better. In a line that will come to define this sordid era (and sordid party), a senior Republican told The Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.” What happened on Wednesday in Washington is the downside. Millions of Americans will take you literally. They will not know you are “humoring” the most powerful man in the world. They will feel betrayed and desperate. Some of them will be armed.”
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“The problem isn’t those who took Trump at his word from the start. It’s the many, many elected Republicans who took him neither seriously nor literally, but cynically. They have brought this upon themselves — and us.”
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“Speakers, including the president himself and his adult sons, called on Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to “stop the steal” — the certification of Biden’s Electoral College win.
“We will never give up! We will never concede!” Trump said during his Wednesday speech, before demanding Pence (unlawfully) reject the Electoral College results. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify — and we become president.”
The president calling for an authoritarian putsch in front of throngs of fervid supporters, including QAnon conspiracy theorists and members of the Proud Boys militia, seems bad enough. But as the day went on, it got even worse. In the afternoon, attendees stormed the Capitol, clashing with the police protecting it and eventually breaking into the building.
Before the event, websites and social media platforms popular with MAGA types lit up with posters’ threats to start killing people after the rally if Congress refuses to make Trump president. On Monday, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was arrested while carrying a high-capacity magazine for his guns. The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, reporting on the ground on Wednesday, said that every single attendee he spoke with raised the prospect of violence if they don’t get what they want.
“They better start worrying about the 80 million people who voted for Trump and are armed,” rally participant Carmelo Prochilo told Sommer. “This will be a second American revolution.”
This is not, in short, an ordinary political rally. It’s not even an ordinary Trump rally.
The breach of the Capitol is an expression of what Trumpism has become, and maybe what it always was: an anti-democratic cancer on the American body politic that threatens to plunge an already-rickety democracy into even deeper chaos.”
…
“Wednesday’s March for Trump was the third such pro-Trump rally organized in DC to protest the election result. It was originally planned in late December by a group called Women for America First, chaired by former Tea Party activist Amy Kremer.
But in the month since Kremer’s outfit filed its permit, Trump’s campaign to undermine the 2020 election escalated. His near-total focus in the past month has been delegitimizing the results, working overtime to convince Republicans that Democrats somehow stole the election from him — a campaign that polls suggest has been largely successful.
As options for staving off a Biden inauguration dwindled, Trump has focused on January 6 as the decisive day. He successfully convinced a majority of House Republicans, and some 2024 presidential hopefuls in the Senate, like Josh Hawley (MO) and Ted Cruz (TX), to support a challenge to the legitimacy of the election. He has privately and publicly pressured Pence to unilaterally invalidate the results, something Pence is not legally capable of doing.
The effort is flagrantly undemocratic, a kind of legal coup, but it doesn’t bother Trump’s hardcore supporters one bit. Because they have swallowed Trump’s line that this election is stolen, they are convinced that overturning an election is actually saving the Constitution — hence the slogan “stop the steal.” This long-scheduled rally has thus evolved into an event aimed at convincing Pence and Republicans in Congress to go along with Trump’s anti-democratic and illegal demands.”
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“The “stop the steal” slogan that dominates the protests itself implies that such a thing is possible, that their efforts may actually reverse the election. These are people who watch the fervently pro-Trump news networks One America News (OAN) and Newsmax; many are believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory that Trump is secretly working to defeat a cabal of pedophiles who run the Democratic Party and the world.
These hardcore MAGA supporters exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship with Trump and his sycophantic media — the beating heart of the movement we call Trumpism.
“We’ve seen OAN and Newsmax basically regurgitate baseless conspiracy theories from QAnon world,” Travis View, the host of a leading podcast on QAnon, told the New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo. Such theories “get into Trump’s brain, and then he regurgitates them back, and of course because he’s regurgitating the conspiracy theories he heard on the internet, all the internet conspiracy theorists believe that their conspiracy theory is validated, because Trump repeated it.”
This rally, then, has long since transcended its origins. It has become a vehicle for a pure personality cult, expressing the belief that Donald Trump cannot fail — he can only be failed. In such a worldview, whatever lengths Trump goes to in order to seize power is justified, because Trump tells his supporters that Democrats have so thoroughly corrupted the system that nothing can be trusted, and they believe what Trump tells them.
Such unquestioning loyalty, when wielded by a man with demonstrable authoritarian instincts, is toxic to democracy. And on Wednesday, we saw just how bad this can get.”
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“At one of the prior DC MAGA rallies in December, four people were stabbed outside a bar popular with the Proud Boys — a pro-Trump street brawling group that the president specifically told to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate. The Proud Boys are a very strange group; in an explainer for Vox, Jane Coaston describes them as an “amalgamation of a men’s rights organization, a fight club, and what some may see as a hate group.”
The most characteristic Proud Boys activity is street brawling, particularly with antifa counterprotesters. To climb the ranks in the organization, a member is required to get in at least one physical fight with its ideological opponents.
The heavy Proud Boys presence in DC right now underscores the threat that lurks behind the protests: If you don’t give us what we want, we’ll try to take it by force.
Almost from the get-go, the events were marked by violence: On Tuesday night, pro-Trump demonstrators engaged in violent clashes with DC police.”
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“Again, some kind of violence was predictable before the event. The posts on pro-Trump social media prior to the rally were chilling: One Reddit user told others on the r/The_Donald subreddit to “travel in packs and do not let them disarm someone without stacking bodies.”
Trump himself has hardly calmed the situation. His heated rhetoric, particularly on Twitter, can easily be read as a call to arms by rallygoers”
…
“But nobody anticipated just how bad things would get during the day on Wednesday. Shortly after the president himself spoke at a rally, demanding action, its attendees staged an attack on America’s legislature — literally disrupting the proceedings of Congress that would confirm Biden’s presidency.
That gives reason to think the Trump movement is not merely anti-democratic, but increasingly willing to use extrajudicial force to accomplish its authoritarian political ends.
“If America wants to prevent another event like Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol in Washington, DC, officials should make all efforts possible to arrest and prosecute every single person involved in the violent protests — events that some branded as an attempted coup by President Donald Trump and his supporters.
This is not simply a matter of vengeance. It’s a real-world example of a common concept in criminological theory focusing on the best way to use punishment to deter future crimes.
In criminology, there are three levers for fighting crime, as the late Mark Kleiman previously explained: swiftness (how quickly someone is punished), certainty (the likelihood someone is punished), and severity (how harsh a person’s punishment is) — established way back in the 1700s by an Italian criminologist called Cesare Beccaria.
Much of the attention in US debates about criminal justice policy goes to severity of punishment — essentially, debates over how harsh or long a prison sentence should be. This has been the lever that public policy has largely relied on over the past few decades, contributing to the buildup of mass incarceration.
But severity is, based on the available evidence, actually the weakest of these levers. So simply making punishments very harsh doesn’t seem effective for deterring crime. What criminologists have found is that the certainty of punishment is far more important.”
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“If Wednesday’s rioters get away with violently shutting down the workings of the federal government, it will send a message to them — as well as to other people interested in carrying out political violence — that this behavior is, if not okay, at least something they can get away with. That would invite copycats.
The good news is, much of the day’s events were recorded and photographed, with some demonstrators gleefully streaming their actions and posing for photos as they trespassed and looted the Capitol and congressional offices. If they’re serious about punishing these wrongdoers, police could use this evidence, as well as typical investigative tactics, to track down the hundreds of people involved (beyond the 13 already reportedly arrested by the police).
But that’s the rub: Officials have to be serious about punishing these wrongdoers. Otherwise, they’ll send a signal that what transpired on Wednesday was actually fine, making it more likely to happen again.”
“Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), Steve Daines (R-MT), and James Lankford (R-OK) are among the Republicans no longer objecting to the results of the presidential election following a day of violence and destruction by President Donald Trump’s supporters at the Capitol — but not everyone has changed their minds.
In a vote Wednesday evening, six Republican senators and 121 House Republicans still backed objections to certifying the electoral outcome in Arizona, a surprising result in the wake of the violence that occurred earlier in the day.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and Roger Marshall (R-KS), maintained their objections — even though they’re unfounded, won’t be going anywhere, and further amplify lies about a rigged election. (The objection did not obtain a majority of votes in either chamber, and failed.)
“This is the appropriate place for these concerns to be raised,” Hawley said in a floor speech, highlighting questions he still had about Pennsylvania election laws.
Their decisions to uphold these objections suggests that some are still shockingly comfortable undermining the democratic process even after pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol to contest the validity of the election results.
It’s an attack that Republican lawmakers’ actions helped stoke, given their willingness to support Trump’s repeated, unproven claims about a fraudulent election.”
“The majority of House Republicans still chose to reject electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania, hours after a pro-Trump mob fueled by conspiracy theories stormed the Capitol Wednesday, leaving one woman dead and a nation rattled.
These votes had no material effect on the transition of power. After the Capitol had been cleared, Congress met in a joint session to fulfill its legal obligation to count the Electoral College’s votes, but given that Democrats hold a majority in the House and most Senate Republicans were unwilling to object, there was no path forward, and the votes failed. A majority of both chambers have to reject a state’s votes for an objection to stick.
However, after a day of violent insurrection, it has become too clear just how dangerous it can be to feed into anti-democratic delusions.”
““For two months now, a political party and its accompanying media ecosystem has too often been unwilling to tell their followers the truth — that this was not a particularly close election and that President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20,” Obama wrote. “Their fantasy narrative has spiraled further and further from reality, and it builds upon years of sown resentments. Now, we’re seeing the consequences, whipped up into a violent crescendo.””
“Thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington, DC, for what Trump dubbed a “Save America Rally,” a two-day protest meant to demonstrate support for the disproven conspiracy theory that widespread fraud marred the 2020 presidential election — and that Trump, rather than Biden, is the rightful winner of that contest.
Trump himself addressed a crowd of several thousand rally attendees near the White House on Wednesday, and encouraged them to take their protest to the Capitol following his remarks.
However, several hundred supporters did not wait that long, and began to march to the Capitol area before the conclusion of the president’s speech.
The Washington Post’s Rebecca Tan reported that the Trump supporters were met with barricades, which they destroyed. They proceeded to fight with police, according to HuffPost’s Philip Lewis, who shared video of police working to reestablish control as Trump supporters shouted at them, with several appearing to tell various officers they were “fucking traitor[s].”
Prior to the congressional evacuation, several nearby federal buildings, including the Library of Congress, were reportedly evacuated.
Eventually, the police couldn’t contain the protesters, who broke into the Capitol itself — and things got scarier.”