What a thing: the president himself, turned instigator-in-chief, siccing a mob on the nation’s capitol. Running real time on TV.
As coup d’etats go it was pretty pathetic and ragtag. more notable for the inadequacy of the police who allowed it than for what it was.
Reporters and the besieged lawmakers of both parties called it everything from a mob or riot to insurrection and coup.
It ‘s hard to imagine that the invaders really thought they had a chance of toppling the government. From what I saw, probably “storming by a mob”–a physical manifestation of the president’s deranged megalomania– is the most accurate characterization.
Still, it was shocking to watch in real time the desecration of this famous symbol of our democratic country. I discovered as I watched that I had in fact over my lifetime internalized that symbol so that when it was violated I too felt violated. It felt personal.
More dangerous seeming than the invasion itself was the puzzling and ominous failure to anticipate it on the part of law enforcement. There were reports of police standing by, even helping invaders in the building.
As reporters kept asking: why are they being allowed to stay here so long, seeming so comfortable. And then just shooed away, most of them, and not arrested?
Was it really just an inexcusable failure of imagination on the part of those responsible? or actual complicity?
What we saw yesterday did not happen only in DC. It happened on Cape Cod. Not just because we were, a lot of us I assume, watching it on TV but because thousands of Cape Codders voted for and enabled Trump.
If Trump undeniably egged on and enabled the rioters, your four years of unconditional love enabled Trump. Almost certainly Trump acts not only out of some person compulsion but believing, reasonably, that almost half the country wants him to.
You bear some responsibility.
In a column in July of last year I asked “can anything finally get to Trump’s loyal fan base? Is there nothing he can do that will shake their affection for the man?”
“What if he, as some have begun to worry, refused to abide by election results? What if, having lost, he refused to leave? Would that be Ok with you Trump supporters?
“ Now might be the time for members of his enabling base to let Trump, the man who more than once has said they he can get away with just about anything, know that he can’t.”
I wrote this thinking surely it would lure Cape Trump supporters out of the woodwork to confess that they too were finally rethinking their loyalty to Trump. That they might be ready to stand up and tell their leader: “No, too far, you’ve lost me. “
But in the several responses I got to that column (I know, hardly a meaningful sample), none would draw such a line. One respondent would say only that he was saddened by the “paranoia” of liberals like me who could even think such a thing of Trump.
Another respondent, when probed, admitted that rather than see Democrats in power he would indeed follow Trump in subverting the election.
Some Cape Trump supporters did their bit to aid and abet by protesting outside while their fellow supporters stormed the capitol. Perhaps some of them wished they were in DC where the real action was. What about the rest of you? Lawmakers yesterday kept saying that this mob was not representative of America. How about it? Did that mob storming the capitol and the democracy of which it is a symbol represent you?
Were you happy to see the Capitol breached.?
Do you whose main response to non-supporters in the aftermath of 2016 was to mock their whining as being simple sore-losing still need explained what has seemed to most fellow Americans dangerous about Trump from day one?
Even at this late date, it would be a comfort to see a full-page ad with thousands of names of those finally saying they don’t stand with that mob and apologizing for their role in enabling it.
And joining in the movement to see the man removed from office as a clear and present danger to us all.
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