\n\n“Speakers, including the president himself and his adult sons, called on Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to \u201cstop the steal\u201d \u2014 the certification of Biden\u2019s Electoral College win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe will never give up! We will never concede!\u201d Trump said during his Wednesday speech, before demanding Pence (unlawfully) reject the Electoral College results. \u201cAll Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify \u2014 and we become president.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a>, seems bad enough. But as the day went on, it got even worse. In the afternoon, attendees stormed the Capitol,<\/a> clashing with the police protecting it and eventually breaking into the building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before the event, websites and social media platforms popular with MAGA types lit up with posters\u2019 threats to start killing people after the rally<\/a> if Congress refuses to make Trump president. On Monday, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio<\/a> was arrested while carrying a high-capacity magazine for his guns. The Daily Beast\u2019s Will Sommer, reporting on the ground on Wednesday, said that every single attendee he spoke with raised the prospect of violence if they don\u2019t get what they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey better start worrying about the 80 million people who voted for Trump and are armed,\u201d rally participant Carmelo Prochilo told Sommer<\/a>. \u201cThis will be a second American revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not, in short, an ordinary political rally. It\u2019s not even an ordinary Trump rally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Wednesday\u2019s March for Trump was the third such pro-Trump rally organized in DC<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in the month since Kremer\u2019s outfit filed its permit, Trump\u2019s 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 \u2014 a campaign that polls suggest<\/a> has been largely successful<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The effort is flagrantly undemocratic, a kind of legal coup, but it doesn\u2019t bother Trump\u2019s hardcore supporters one bit. Because they have swallowed Trump\u2019s line that this election is stolen, they are convinced that overturning an election is actually saving the Constitution \u2014 hence the slogan \u201cstop the steal.\u201d This long-scheduled rally has thus evolved into an event aimed at convincing Pence and Republicans in Congress to go along with Trump\u2019s anti-democratic and illegal demands.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The \u201cstop the steal\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These hardcore MAGA supporters exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship with Trump and his sycophantic media \u2014 the beating heart of the movement we call Trumpism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve seen OAN and Newsmax basically regurgitate baseless conspiracy theories from QAnon world,\u201d Travis View, the host of a leading podcast on QAnon, told the New York Times\u2019s Farhad Manjoo<\/a>. Such theories \u201cget into Trump\u2019s brain, and then he regurgitates them back, and of course because he\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “At one of the prior DC MAGA rallies in December, four people were stabbed outside a bar popular with the Proud Boys \u2014 a pro-Trump street brawling group that the president specifically told to \u201cstand back and stand by\u201d during the first presidential debate. The Proud Boys are a very strange group; in an explainer for Vox<\/a>, Jane Coaston describes them as an \u201camalgamation of a men\u2019s rights organization, a fight club, and what some may see as a hate group.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The heavy Proud Boys presence in DC right now underscores the threat that lurks behind the protests: If you don\u2019t give us what we want, we\u2019ll try to take it by force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almost from the get-go, the events were marked by violence: On Tuesday night, pro-Trump demonstrators engaged in violent clashes<\/a> with DC police.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n