The storming of Congress, Wednesday, Jan. 6, by a mob of white-hot extremist supporters of Donald Trump egged on by the president is the culmination of a tumultuous presidency that, in the end, fractured the country.
Elected four years ago with the promise to “Make America Great Again,” President Donald Trump ends his tenure in shame. History will remember that American democracy was defied and, for a moment, suspended, on Wednesday, Jan. 6, by a mob of extremist supporters that the president himself incited to march on the Capitol to prevent his opponent, Joe Biden, from being officially declared the winner of the Nov. 3 election.
This dark day for the United States is the culmination of a tumultuous presidency that ultimately split the country in two: one part that respects constitutional order and the rule of law, and one that lives in a parallel universe. This universe, fed on conspiracy theories, is an alternate reality in which Trump did not lose the election by 7 million popular votes and the Electoral College vote of 302 to 232, but a universe that wants to believe the election was stolen by massive, orchestrated fraud.
In this universe of denial, it does not matter that more than 60 court rulings, including at the highest level the Supreme Court, rejected appeals to overturn the election. That’s something that matters little, since Trump himself, in a Jan. 2 phone call to a Georgia election official asking him to alter the result of the election in his state, maintains that he could not have been defeated by 11,779 votes, as indicated by the records, since he knows he “probably did win it by half a million.”
The American nation reaped on Wednesday what their president, a populist, demagogue and narcissist, has sowed for four years with the complicity of the Republican Party. Those in charge who agreed, at the start of his term, to support him in the White House for the sake of the country, the infamous “adults in the room” who were counted on to restrain him, threw in the towel one after the other or were sacked. Trump has never made a mystery of his seditious intentions. Before the election, he consistently refused to commit to respecting the results if they were not favorable to him. He also lent his support to extreme right groups like the Proud Boys, whom he asked to “stand by.”
A Profoundly Shaken Democracy
It was these groups of supporters that stormed and invaded the Capitol on Wednesday, easily overrunning an unusually light police deployment at the moment members of the two chambers of Congress were commencing the certification of the presidential election results. After being evacuated, elected officials were only able to return to work after several hours of unprecedented chaos and only once Trump finally asked his supporters to leave.
It will be up to President-elect Biden to rebuild this profoundly shaken democracy. He now has the means, thanks to the crucial victory of two Democrats who won Senate seats in Georgia on Wednesday, thus giving their party control of the Senate, on top of control of the White House and the House of Representatives. Biden has the stature for it, as demonstrated by his firm and lucid response to the Trumpist insurrection attempt.
The trauma of Wednesday could help Biden. Many unknowns, however, remain. What will become of the insurgent-in-chief, who has two more weeks in the White House and has been abandoned by his vice president? Will he have to be impeached, even if he has, finally, on Thursday, agreed to leave office? What will be the influence of some 100 Republican members of Congress who continued Thursday morning to reject the result of the election, claiming massive fraud? Will the outgoing leadership of the Republican Party, the self-proclaimed party of law and order, the party that belatedly rallied around the Constitution, learn the right lessons from this predictable disaster? The world, astounded by so much instability, anxiously awaits the answers.
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