This went on for a summer, then fall with a presidential election that went really well, and then winter and a new year. This included Jan. 6.
A lot of people have been wrong over the last 10 years, myself included, and some people have been spectacularly wrong. One belief floating around in the lead up to the 2020 election was beating Trump would mean we would be free of him. But as Trump sounded more and more unhinged in the days leading up to Jan. 6, increasing numbers of journalists were concerned that Trump might try to pull something.
Then Jan. 6 happened. I had a deadline for a project that day, and I had to finish it. But as the day progressed, social media became full of reports coming from the Capitol and they were becoming more and more alarming. I never thought I’d have to work through a pandemic, and I really never thought I’d have to work through an insurrection. Disaster movies never go like this, I thought.
My wife and I retreated to our living room and watched it unfold on CNN and MSNBC. The day after, Lee Papa aka The Rude Pundit wrote this:
It could have been much, much worse. The motherfuckers built a gallows in front of the Capitol building. They talked about hanging members of Congress. And if you want to blindly dismiss that as hyperbolic bluster, go fuck yourself. These fucking animals had zip ties with them. There were fucking pipe bombs found, as well as a cooler filled with Molotov cocktails. They fucking vandalized the joint, wrecking shit and scrawling “Murder the media” on a door. The intention was to harm people. They killed a member of the Capitol police with a fire extinguisher. Do not have a single iota of doubt: If they could have gotten their hands on a Democratic member of Congress or Mitt Romney or another Republican they see as disloyal to their Orange King, they would have murdered them. Christ, imagine if they got to Ilhan Omar or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representatives who they have been told are enemy agents. And if you think that’s paranoid nonsense, then you put yourself in the shoes of the Senators and Representatives in that building, hearing the doors and windows break while a hooting mob of dullards who have been told that you hate them and their America come streaming down the hallway towards where you are. You’d have shit yourself in fear. They wanted to take over by force. They wanted a coup. This was an insurrection by people who believe a gigantic lie that is being cynically propagated by Republicans. You don’t bring a Confederate flag into the Capitol unless you’re making a pretty clear point about what you think of the United States government.
During this time, I said something to my wife, referring to our conversations about how some people we knew did not seem to understand how dangerous Trump and his followers were even after everything that happened. What I said was “Now maybe people will get it,” and my wife shook her head.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think even this will do it. I bet people will forget in a short while how awful this is.”
I would say she was right. There is this weird impulse for some that denying danger is a reasoned way to be, even if the danger is clear. Some of it was that. But some of it was a belief in the myth that “it can’t happen here.” But it did.
In the aftermath, a serious nation would ban Trump from running again. But not us. The very people who were telling us that Trump would go away and that an insurrection could never happen here were now lecturing us that the Glorious Glory of Our Glorious System meant we must move very slow. A lot of people dismissed the idea that Trump could have any shot at winning.
The end result of all that was Trump ran again, and now he won. Jan. 6, 2021, should have been a huge red flag, that Trumpism was a violent, dangerous movement that should have no part in our politics.
Instead, my wife was right.
The last word goes to David Bowie.
