TODAY MARKS the one-year
anniversary of a violent assault on the seat of U.S. democracy.
Like most one-year-olds who get scolded for bad behavior, Republicans
aren’t owning up to their role in the insurrection. With the exception of a
handful of brave souls who are willing to risk losing their seats for the
greater good, congressional Republicans are either pretending January 6 never
happened or spinning a fantastical victim narrative where the insurrection was
a mere “protest” and the Big Bad Democrats (and Liz
Cheney) are being unfair to their twice-impeached, one-term president. Right-wing
media is singing from the same hymnal, feeding
mass denial among the Republican base, two-thirds of whom still can’t
accept that Biden won legitimately.
Numerous Republicans involved in the attack on democracy have refused to appear before the House Select
Committee on the January 6 Attack (hereafter referred to as “the January 6
committee”), gone to court to try to dictate the terms of their testimony, pleaded
the 5th in front of the committee, withheld public documents, or sued to block
phone records which could provide key details
about the insurrection and Team Trump’s extensive efforts to overturn the will
of the people.
Despite epic stonewalling of the committee, a
clear picture of the Republican Party’s full ownership of January 6 has
come into view. With each
new revelation, the circle of collaborators widens
to include numerous congressional Republicans, Trump operatives, and high-level
members of the Trump administration.
In a world governed by facts, logic, and data, the insurrection—and the
story you’re about to read—wouldn’t exist. No one who was paying attention to polling
in the weeks before the 2020 election was surprised when Biden won.
It was apparent by the evening of Wednesday, November 4, less than
24 hours after polls closed on election day, that
Donald Trump was going to lose. With Wisconsin and Michigan called for Joe Biden
that day, and Arizona and the 2nd district of Nebraska before that,
Biden only had to win Nevada to amass 270 electoral college votes. His chances
of losing Nevada, an effectively blue state Democrats had won in the previous
three election cycles, was remote, and Pennsylvania appeared to be a
really good bet for Biden, based on Trump’s
narrowing margin and the number of votes which remained to be counted in heavily-Democratic
precincts.
The projections proved correct. On Saturday, November 7, 2020, Joe Biden
was officially declared the winner of Pennsylvania and president-elect of the
United States.
If anything, it was surprising that the election
was even close, given that Biden had an
8.4% national lead on election day. A number of
theories would emerge for why pollsters had failed so spectacularly for a
second straight presidential election, but it was evident that record
levels of culture war polarization stirred up by Donald Trump turned right-leaning whites out
in droves, making Iowa and Ohio (which were predicted to be close) Republican blowouts, and Biden’s Wisconsin
win far
smaller than pollsters thought it would be. At
the same time, racial divisiveness backfired among most young voters, suburban
voters, and voters of color, driving Georgia and Arizona—states a Democratic
presidential candidate hadn’t won since 1992 and 1996, respectively—to Joe
Biden. The Democratic sweep of 2020 Senate races in these states proved that
Biden’s wins were no fluke.
Though the results of the presidential election were
orderly and predictable based on voter turnout
demographics, Trump and his allies in state legislatures, Congress, the Republican
Attorneys General Association, right-wing media, and social
media were lethally effective in manipulating
that polarization in the eight-and-a-half weeks between Trump’s loss and the
insurrection.
In fact, Trump’s disinformation campaign began
months before the election with constant claims that mail
balloting was inherently corrupt and that the election would be “rigged” against him, an attempt to suppress a voting method
preferred by many Democrats and pre-emptively delegitimize a potential loss at
the polls. Trump repeated these baseless
talking points with such mind-numbing repetition that most Republican voters
took them seriously, prepping his followers to believe the many lies to come.
Outside of the right-wing echo chamber, it was common
knowledge that Republican-leaning, in-person votes would be counted first in a
lot of competitive states, creating a “red
mirage” (the false impression that Trump was
going to win), when the reality was that there would be a “blue
shift” as more Democratic votes—mail votes in
particular—were counted.
Preying on Republican voters’ programmed
ignorance, Trump held a press conference early on the morning after election day where he claimed
that his shrinking leads in competitive states were fraudulent, and said,
“Frankly, we did win this election.” This would be the opening of a full-court
press to steal the presidency through disinformation,
dozens of frivolous
lawsuits, abrupt personnel changes, abuse of
executive powers, and pressure campaigns on state and local officials.
Later that day, November 4, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows received a text (likely
from Trump energy secretary Rick Perry) suggesting an
“aggressive strategy” to hold the White House.
The plan was to convince at least three Republican-controlled state
legislatures to shatter long-standing legal precedent by tossing out the will
of the voters and declaring their state’s electors for Trump.
Two days later, on November 6, a member
of Congress texted Meadows with a similar proposal.
Meadows’ response?
“I love it!”
Also on the 6th, Representative Paul
Gosar of Arizona (who would later be tied
to the January 6 “Save America” rally) sent out widely-shared
tweets implying that his states’ tally was fraudulent
due to vote-flipping on Dominion voting machines, a talking point that
Republicans would milk to death—even though Trump’s lawyers knew
the claim was false.
On November 9, Trump’s exceptionally
loyal attorney general, William Barr, sent a
directive to federal prosecutors which allowed them to ramp up voter fraud
charges before state elections were certified, a change in Justice
Department policy which prompted the
resignation of Richard Pilger, who headed the
department’s election crimes division.
On the same day, Trump fired Defense Secretary
Mark Esper for not being “sufficiently
loyal” (i.e. for refusing to deploy troops to American cities during the summer
protests, among other apostasies). Trump replaced Esper with the underqualified Christopher Miller, who brought three
Trump loyalists with him, including Kash
Patel, a lawyer with no military experience.
This was an oddly consequential move for an outgoing administration to make. Suspicions were
further aroused when two administration officials told the New York Times that Trump was considering
firing FBI chief Christopher Wray and CIA head Gina Haspel too; Haspel reportedly
told General Mark Milley (chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff), “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.”
According
to I Alone Can Fix It by Washington
Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Phillip Rucker, on or around November
10, Milley received a call referring to the likelihood that Trump and his
allies would try to overturn the election. Milley responded that, “They may
try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed” because “You can’t do this
without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the
guys with the guns.”
Speaking at a military installation in Virginia the
following day (Veteran’s Day), Milley told the assembled crowd, “We do not take an oath to a
king or queen, or tyrant or dictator, we do not take an oath to an individual….We
take an oath to the Constitution, and every soldier that is represented in this
museum—every sailor, airman, marine, coastguard—each of us protects and defends
that document, regardless of personal price.”
One public official who paid a personal price
for following the Constitution was Republican Chris Krebs, the Trump-appointed
head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency. On November 18, Trump fired Krebs by tweet because he’d had the gall to fact-check
false claims of election fraud online and had gotten off-message by publicly
sharing his observation that 2020 was “the most secure election in American
history.”
Later that day, after pressure from Trump, the
two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers (covering
Detroit, which is 78%
Black) tried to rescind their certifications of the county’s vote totals. They
were denied in these efforts, which would have only delayed the obvious, given
Biden’s 154,000-vote
margin of victory in Michigan.
Unwilling to let objective reality get in the
way of raw power, on November 19 Trump’s attorneys Rudy Giuliani and
Sydney Powell had a surreal hair
dye-dripping press conference in which they served
up several false
and misleading claims to try to pressure the
Justice Department to open “a full-scale criminal investigation” of the
election. (Four months later, when Powell was sued by Dominion, who manufactured
the voting machines which Powell said had produced fraudulent vote tallies,
Powell’s lawyers defended their client by claiming that “no reasonable person” would have
believed Powell’s attacks on Dominion.)
On November 20, Trump continued his
campaign to flip states he’d lost when he invited Republican representatives from Michigan’s state
legislature to the White House. Trump was unable to cow
them into submission because there was no legal way for Republicans to overcome
Biden’s 154,000-vote victory in the state. After the meeting, the Michigan
representatives made a joint statement to the press in which they said, “We have not yet been made aware of any
information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as
legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process
regarding Michigan's electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”
With Michigan a long shot, Trump turned his
attention to Pennsylvania. On November 25, Trump conferenced
in from the White House to a hearing/publicity
stunt in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani issued—and
Trump backed—debunked claims about voter fraud in that state.
Trump later invited key Pennsylvania legislators to the White House. Joining
Trump was Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who
would
circulate a PowerPoint presentation chockfull of
outlandish conspiracy theories to Mark Meadows and Republican members of
Congress. Waldron would later say that he spoke with Mark Meadows “maybe
eight to ten times” between election day and the
insurrection.
False claims continued on November 29,
when Trump spewed election
lies and whined about the FBI and the Justice
Department in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. (Bartiromo would
later be sued for promulgating disinformation about the presidential election).
Trump’s favored narrative took a major hit on December
1, when Attorney General William Barr told an AP reporter, “we have
not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the
election.” According to reporter Jonathan Karl, Barr felt that Trump’s fraud
allegations were “all bullshit,” but he’d agreed to the investigations to “appease his
boss.”
Barr’s boss was busy on December
5, as he tried
to muscle conservative Republican governor Brian Kemp into throwing out Georgia’s electors
and pressured the Republican head of the Pennsylvania House of
Representatives, Bryan Cutler, to do the same in his state.
Convincing Republicans in at least three swing states Joe Biden had won to
send alternate slates of electors, or toss out electors for Biden, was Trump’s
only chance. If neither presidential candidate amassed 270 electoral college votes,
the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans
had a majority of the state delegations. If put into action, this plan would have
allowed Trump to stay in office by effectively nullifying the presidential
election and the votes of 159,000,000
Americans.
Twenty of Biden’s electoral college votes were in Pennsylvania. Trump’s maneuvering
to overcome an 80,000-vote loss in that state was set back on December 8,
when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit claiming a measure passed by Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature to
expand mail voting had been unconstitutional.
By the end of December 9, the District of
Columbia and all 50 states had certified their vote totals, and Biden’s win.
Though Attorney General William Barr had already
issued his finding that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election,
Trump poked him again on December 10 with a retweet asking for a special prosecutor to investigate allegations
of fraud.
Chaos was averted on December 11. Trump planned to fire CIA director Gina Haspel’s deputy director and
replace him with the woefully-underqualified Kash Patel (see November 9 entry) in
order to install a loyalist near the top of the CIA. As with the post-election
firing of Defense Secretary Mike Esper, this would be a significant and confusing
move for a lame duck administration to make.
In response, Haspel told Trump she would resign
if her deputy was let go. Following the meeting, Trump got together with Mike
Pence and other senior aides who recommended keeping Haspel happy, so Trump
left Haspel’s deputy in place.
Another one of Trump’s machinations was thwarted
when the U.S. Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit by the state of Texas challenging results in
four other states, saying Texas did not have “a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another
state conducts its elections.”
December 14 should have put an end to Trump’s efforts
to steal the 2020 presidential election. On that day, the Electoral College met and certified Joe Biden’s win.
According to Biden, seven Republican senators called to congratulate him. Trump
allies Mitch McConnell, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin publicly congratulated the president-elect.
While some Republicans in swing states won by
Biden engaged in kabuki
theater by appointing legally-meaningless
alternate electors, Trump continued his efforts to subvert democracy. As reported by CNN, “Trump's
assistant sent [deputy attorney general Jeff] Rosen and [Justice Department]
official Richard Donoghue a document claiming to show voter fraud in Antrim
County, Michigan. An aide to Donoghue forwarded the document to the US
Attorneys for the Eastern and Western Districts in Michigan. Less than an hour
later, Trump tweeted that [Attorney General William] Barr would be leaving the
Justice Department just before Christmas, elevating both Rosen and Donoghue to
the top spots at [the Justice Department].”
The day after the electoral college
validated Biden’s win, December 15, Trump
tweeted, “This Fake Election can no longer stand” and invited Jeff Rosen to the
Oval Office, where he pressured his next attorney general to put Justice Department backing
behind election lawsuits, 61 of 62 of which would be rejected by Democratic and Republican judges, including Trump
appointees.
A document dated December 17 would
later become a potential smoking gun in the investigation of the coup attempt. Included
in a privilege log provided to the January 6 committee by the attorney for Bernard
Kerik (see January 4 entry), the withheld document was titled, “DRAFT LETTER FROM
POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020
ELECTIONS.”
The timing and presumed content of the
document dovetailed neatly with the meeting Trump held with top advisors on December
18. According to CNN, a screaming match took place in the Oval Office between those who
supported the rule of law and those who did not. Firmly in the latter category
was Trump’s former national security advisor, convicted
felon Michael Flynn, who had recently
said that Trump should declare martial law, seize
voting machines, and force a new election. Not surprisingly, two of the suggestions
which came up at the Oval Office were that Trump declare a national emergency (which could be used as a justification for martial
law) and that Lin Wood (see November 19 entry) be
named Special Counsel to investigate
voting machines, which would require approval from the attorney general. In an interview with Rachel Maddow this week, Politico reporter Nicholas
Wu said of the overlap between the December
17 document and the controversial topics discussed on December 18, “It’s
unclear exactly if these two things are linked, but…that’s quite a
coincidence.”
On December 19, according
to reporters Kaitlin Collins, Kevin Liptak, and Pamela Brown, “Trump's campaign legal
team sent a memo to dozens of staffers…instructing them to preserve all
documents related to Dominion Voting Systems and Sidney Powell in
anticipation of potential litigation by the company against the pro-Trump
attorney.”
The same day, Trump tweeted
“Statistically impossible
to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there,
will be wild!”
The drumbeat of propaganda continued on December
21, when Trump tweeted
that he’d “won in a landslide” and “[needed] backing from the Justice
Department,” and December 22, when he tweeted a video with the claim that “The rigging of the 2020 election was only the final
step in the Democrats’ and the media’s yearslong effort to overthrow the will of the American people.”
Attorney General William
Barr resigned on December 23.
On December 26, Trump
tweeted more lies about the election (calling it “the biggest SCAM
in our nation’s history”), attacked the FBI, the Justice Department, and the
courts for following the rule of law, and referenced his January 6 rally. He also called Frances Watson, the top elections investigator in the
Georgia Secretary of State’s office, and employed flattery to try to get her to
take another look at the ballots in a state he’d lost by over 11,000 votes.
As the date of congressional certification grew closer, Trump became increasingly desperate. On December
27, he pressured his new Attorney General, Jeff Rosen, to review “election
fraud” in Pennsylvania and Arizona that William Barr had already found to be inconsequential.
Rosen reportedly told Trump that the Department of Justice “can’t, and won’t,
just flip a switch and change the election.” In response, Trump told Rosen to “just
say that the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me and the [Republican]
congressmen.”
Trump also tried to get
Rosen to sign on to a lawsuit (which had already been rejected by the
Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel) asking the Supreme Court to
toss out electoral college votes in six states Trump lost and order a “special election.”
Trump wasn’t the only one
badgering Rosen. Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark (the Assistant Attorney General for
the Civil
Division in the Department of Justice) made five cracks at Rosen, trying to get him to challenge election results in key
states lost by Trump.
Rosen’s second-in-command
also felt the heat. Coaxed by Trump, Pennsylvania representative Scott Perry called Richard Donoghue, the Deputy Attorney General, to try to
get the Justice Department to review debunked voter fraud claims in
Pennsylvania. In addition, Perry tried to convince Donoghue to grant more power
to Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark to look at election results. (Perry would later
duck the January 6 committee, citing his devotion to “the rule of law.”)
On December 28, Clark
peddled conspiracy theories around
the Justice Department and sent a message to Jeff
Rosen and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue requesting their sign-off on
a letter which asked Georgia’s Republican legislature to call a special session
to investigate election “irregularities” and choose a slate of electors for
Trump. Donoghue responded via email that signing
such a letter was “not even in the realm of possibility.”
Mark Meadows did his part on
December 29 when he urged Rosen and Donoghue to consider the right-wing myth that the number of votes cast in Pennsylvania was larger
than the number of registered voters and to take a look at “Italygate” (a theory that Biden supporters in Italy had used satellites to
change a massive number of votes in several swing states from Trump to Biden).
Meanwhile, Trump’s personal
assistant Molly Michael emailed Rosen, Donoghue, and Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall a
legal complaint baselessly claiming that the six swing states Trump had lost by
the narrowest margins (NV, WI, PA, MI, GA, AZ) had violated the Electors Clause
of the Constitution, with a request to file a case before the U.S. Supreme
Court.
The following day, December
30, Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon called the president and suggested he lure Mike Pence back to
Washington (from a skiing vacation) in order to pressure him about the January
6 certification, in hopes that they could “kill the Biden presidency in the
crib.”
As Trump worked on Pence, presidential aspirant Josh Hawley, a Republican senator
from Missouri, made a savvy play for future Republican primary voters when he became
the first senator to announce his intent
to object to electors for Joe Biden on January 6.
Trump’s minions continued
to pressure the Justice Department. In two of five known emails Mark Meadows sent to the DOJ asking them to review far-out conspiracy
theories, Trump’s chief of staff that day sent Justice officials disinformation about Italygate and alleged voter
fraud in Fulton County, Georgia. (Meadows
also forwarded debunked
conspiracy theories to “the FBI, Pentagon, National Security
Council, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”)
Trump’s outside attorney, Kurt Olsen, called Jeff Rosen and said that Trump expected him to file Molly
Michael’s Supreme Court lawsuit (see December 29 entry) by noon that day. Rosen
refused to comply.
Unable to get the new Attorney General to
do his bidding, Trump invited Rosen and Donoghue to the White House on New
Year’s Eve. At the meeting, Trump reportedly said that he was
considering replacing Rosen with Jeffrey Clark because Rosen hadn’t been
aggressive enough in investigating alleged voter fraud.
On January 1, 2021, Rosen received
a 13-minute YouTube video about Italygate from Mark Meadows and a Trump-appointed
judge in Texas rejected
Arizona representative Louie Gohmert’s lawsuit claiming Mike Pence could pick
and choose which electors to accept.
January 2, 2021 was a big day in the annals of failed election
theft.
Eleven Republican senators, including former and likely future
presidential candidate Ted Cruz, made a joint statement in which they referred
to ill-defined fraud and advocated “an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed
states.” The senators’ public pretense was that the audit was necessary in
order to assuage millions of Americans who had doubts about the legitimacy of
the 2020 election. Polls cited showed that one-third of independents,
two-thirds of Republicans, and 39% of all voters held the baseless belief that the election had been
“rigged.”
In plain English, the senators were
contending that since four out of every 10 Americans were gullible enough to
believe ludicrous Republican lies about the election, a 10-day “audit” giving
Republicans more openings to spread ludicrous lies about the election to
gullible Americans was necessary in order to “restore faith in American
Democracy.”
While his congressional sycophants stretched irony past the breaking
point, Trump made a heavy-handed attempt to flip Georgia. During an infamous hour-long
conference call, Trump tried to bully conservative Republican Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger into “[finding] 11,780 votes” for him—just enough to give Trump
Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes.
Trump also called 300 state legislators, telling them they could
overrule the will of the voters in their states.
In another Justice Department setback for
Trump, Jeff Rosen wrote Jeffrey Clark back and asserted, as his second-in-command Richard Donoghue had on December
28, that he was “not prepared to sign” a letter asking Georgia’s Republican
legislature to investigate alleged fraud and send an alternative slate of
electors for Trump.
On January 3, 2021,
Mark Meadows received a text which said, “I heard Jeff Clark is [going to replace Jeff
Rosen] on Monday [January 4]. That's
amazing. It will make a lot of patriots happy, and I'm personally so proud that
you are at the tip of the spear, and I could call you a friend.”
Because Rosen insisted on following the
rule of law, Trump held a meeting that Sunday with Clark, Rosen, and Donoghue
to decide if he wanted to replace Rosen with Clark, who would be certain
to abuse the powers of the Department of Justice (DOJ)
to try to push voter fraud lies and pressure Georgia to give their electors to
Trump. This was one of nine
times Trump tried to get his DOJ to undermine
democracy, according to a Democratic Senate judiciary report.
Rosen told congressional investigators that Trump began the meeting
by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything
to overturn the election,” and implied that he could keep his job if he agreed
to send Jeffrey Clark’s letter to Georgia legislators.
Trump backed off of his threat to replace Rosen after “Donoghue
and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steve Engel made
clear that there would be mass resignations at DOJ if Trump moved forward with
replacing Rosen with Clark.”
Though he left Rosen in place, Trump fired the U.S. attorney who covered the Atlanta area, Bjay Pak,
because Trump felt Pak hadn’t done enough to investigate alleged fraud in his
district. Pak’s replacement, Trump loyalist Bobby Christine, later concluded
that “There’s
just nothing to” Trump’s claims of voter fraud in
Fulton County.
Earlier that day, all ten living defense secretaries, including the
recently deposed Mark Esper, penned an
op-ed in the Washington Post in which they advocated for an orderly
transition of power and said that acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller
and those working under him “are each bound by oath, law and precedent to
facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so
wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that
undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.”
Trump and his collaborators weren’t yet accepting that there would be a “new
team” on January 20.
According to Peril by Bob Woodward and
Robert Costa, on January 4, 2021, General Mark Milley was turned down
when he suggested to Trump cabinet members that permits for a January
6 protest at the Capitol building be revoked (due to the possibility of
violence).
That same day, Trump’s lawyer John Eastman presented
Mike Pence with a
six-step plan to toss the electoral college votes
from seven states Trump lost. If Pence carried out the plan, neither candidate
would have 270 electoral college votes, which would throw the election to the House
of Representatives, allowing Republicans to ignore the voters. A second option
was to have Pence adjourn the counting, allowing time for states Trump had lost
to send alternate electors. Eastman had advocated for this scheme on a Steve Bannon podcast two days earlier
and sketched out its details in a two-page
memo that had been sent to Republican senators
Lyndsey Graham and Mike Lee, both of whom would conclude that Trump’s fraud claims
were baseless.
Speaking to Jim Acosta on CNN, famous Watergate
reporter Carl Bernstein said
of the Eastman memo, “I think what we are seeing in these memos particularly are blueprints
for a coup….The actual blueprints in document form in which the president of
the United States, through his chief of staff, is sending to Mike Pence's, the
vice president's, staff a blueprint to overturn an election, a blueprint for a
conspiracy led by a president of the United States to result in an
authoritarian coup in which the
election is stolen.”
The nerve center of the authoritarian coup attempt was a war room at the Willard Hotel, one block from
the White House. In the weeks before January 6, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani
led a team of conspirators who attempted to overturn Biden’s victory by
injecting disinformation about voter fraud into the right-wing media bloodstream, encouraging Trump supporters in swing
states to pressure their state legislators to block certification of
Biden’s victory, pushing state legislators directly to block certification of
Biden’s victory, and trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the power to
deny state-certified electoral college votes.
At various times Giuliani was joined by Steve
Bannon, John Eastman, Bernard
Kerik (see December 17 entry), and Phil Waldron
(see November 25 entry), author of a 38-page
PowerPoint detailing ways to overturn the
election.
Exhaustive details of the Willard team’s disinformation
and public pressure strategies were revealed just this week in a document given to the January 6 committee by Bernard Kerik’s
attorney.
While Trump and his war room cabal brainstormed
ways to manipulate Mike Pence, other Republicans gave the vice president sound
interpretations of constitutional law. Conservative
judge J. Michael Luttig told Pence’s staff that there was no legal basis for him to
reject electoral college votes, advice he also received from conservatives John Yoo (who’d authored the Bush
Administration torture memo) and former
vice president Dan Quayle.
That night, appearing
at a rally for two Republican senators facing
runoffs in Georgia, Trump told the audience Biden
wasn’t “taking this White House. We’re going to fight like hell.”
The imminent threat to democracy was far greater than was known to the
U.S. public on January 5, 2021, the day before the official counting of
electoral ballots.
Mark Meadows received a text from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan advocating for Pence to question
electoral votes and sent out an email demanding that the National Guard “protect pro-Trump people.”
The Secret Service “warned
the U.S. Capitol Police that their officers could face violence at the
hands of supporters of former President Donald Trump.”
Washington D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser requested
National Guard backup, but Donald Trump’s Defense Department handcuffed the
Guard’s mission. According to Paul
Sonne, Peter Hermann, and Missy Ryan of the Washington Post, “the
Pentagon prohibited the District’s guardsmen from receiving ammunition or riot
gear, interacting with protesters unless necessary for self-defense, sharing
equipment with local law enforcement, or using Guard surveillance and air
assets without the defense secretary’s explicit sign-off.” In a directive that
would have disastrous consequences, “The D.C. Guard was also told it would be
allowed to deploy a quick-reaction force only as a measure of last resort,”
which forced local D.C. officials to get approval from Trump’s Defense
Department for rapid deployment, a bureaucratic hurdle which hadn’t existed
previously.
As D.C. girded for trouble, Trump riled his
supporters up with a tweet that read, “Washington is being inundated with people who don’t want to see an
election victory stolen by emboldened Radical Left Democrats….Our Country has
had enough, they won’t take it anymore!”
Sensing that Pence wasn’t going to intervene on his behalf, Trump called
his apparatchiks at the Willard Hotel late in the evening and strategized
about how they could delay the vote count long enough to get three swing states
to de-certify Biden’s electoral votes or send alternate slates of electoral
votes to the Capitol.
One of the central figures at the Willard Hotel was Steve Bannon. Liz
Cheney, the future vice chair of the January 6 committee, would later say,
“Based on the committee’s investigation, it
appears that Mr. Bannon had substantial advance knowledge of the plans for
January 6th and likely had an important role in formulating those plans.”
On his podcast the night of January 5, Steve Bannon
concluded
ominously: “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going
to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say
is, strap in…. You made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in.
Let’s get ready.”
***
Prior to January 6, 2021, the
electoral college vote count and certification had been purely ceremonial.
But since none of Trump’s
banana republic tactics to overthrow the election had worked, the president’s fundraiser Caroline
Wren, campaign operative Katrina
Pierson, chief of staff Mark
Meadows, Republican members of Congress, and right-wing
activists planned one
final, grand charade: a “Stop the Steal” rally followed by a “Save America March.”
Activists involved in the planning bought
burner phones with cash to communicate with
members of the White House, including chief of staff Mark
Meadows. It would later come
out that “Trump’s political operation reported paying more than $4.3
million to people and firms that organized the Jan. 6 rally since the start of
the 2020 election.”
According to Hunter Walker of Rolling Stone, event planners also
collaborated with fringe-right members of Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert (see January 1 entry), Paul
Gosar (later to become one of the biggest defenders of the insurrectionists), Madison Cawthorn (who spoke at the rally on January 6), Andy Biggs, and Lauren Boebert (later accused of giving “reconnaissance tours” of the Capitol building to
seditionists-to-be in the days before the insurrection).
Two of Walker’s sources (both activist event planners) said
that Gosar—who allegedly made phone calls to the sources on January 6—promised
that Trump would grant them pardons if they incurred
any legal trouble as a result of the rally. Right-wing activist Ali Alexander, one of the key organizers of the “Wild Protest,” had also mentioned collaborating with Biggs, Gosar, and Mo Brooks (who spoke at
the rally) in a video which was later deleted. Walker’s sources further
contended that Mark Meadows was warned in advance about potential violence, though there’s no
evidence he did anything to stop it.
The rally and the march were a prelude to the
formal challenge by 13 Republican senators and 140 House members to Joe Biden’s
seven million-ballot win. The challenge would consist of regurgitated fraud claims
which had been rejected for lack of merit in more than 60 judicial cases,
by judges of all ideological stripes. Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro would
later brag about his role in recruiting members of Congress for
this cynical political stunt. He and Steve Bannon came up with a plan called
“the Green Bay sweep.” The aim was to get challengers to delay the electoral
vote certification as long as possible in hopes that several hours of televised
hearings (full of Republican propaganda about a “rigged election”) would
pressure Mike Pence to flip and end American democracy.
Before the ceremony, Trump called vice president
Mike Pence and told him, “You can either go down in history as a patriot…or you
can go down in history as a pussy.”
Pence chose to go down in
history as a patriot.
Just before the count began, he released a public letter stating the obvious—that he lacked the constitutional authority to
unilaterally decide which electoral votes to accept or reject.
Concerns about The U.S. Constitution and
long-established democratic precedents were absent from the speeches at Trump’s
rally on the Mall, which included numerous incitements to violence.
Lead-off speaker Mo Brooks, clad
in body armor, said, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking
ass!” Donald Trump, Jr. told congressional Republicans who intended to
honor the election results, “We’re coming for
you, and we’re going to have a good time doing it” and that if they didn’t
change their minds and oppose Biden’s certification “I’m gonna be in your backyard in a
couple of months.”
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said, “Let’s have trial by combat,” which was “an eerie reference to battles to the death in the series
‘Game of Thrones.’”
Donald Trump headlined at high noon and
talked tough from behind bulletproof glass. He trotted out a litany of lies
about the election, “used the words ‘fight’ or ‘fighting’ at least 20 times,” and said “You’ll never take back our
country with weakness. You have to show strength. You have to be strong.”
By 1:00 p.m.—five minutes before Nancy Pelosi brought Congress to
order—Trump supporters had busted through barrier fences around the U.S.
Capitol.
Trump finished with a call to action, just minutes
after the formal count had begun:
“We will never give up; we will never
concede….We will stop the steal. We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,
and we’re going to the Capitol…We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the
weak ones…the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our
country.”
While Trump returned to the safety of the
White House, his ally, Paul Gosar (one of the members of Congress who had
collaborated with the “Stop the Steal” organizers), began the GOP stalling
tactics, objecting to electors from Arizona. The two houses of Congress
separated to “debate” Gosar’s objection.
At 1:30 p.m., insurrectionists at the back of the Capitol overtook police,
forcing them inside the building. Unaware of these dangers, Congress continued
the proceedings. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, who had voted with
Trump 91%
of the time, said “Voters, the
courts, and the states have all spoken — they've all spoken….If we overrule
them, it would damage our republic forever.”
As McConnell spoke, a crowd of 8,000 equipped with “riot helmets, gas masks, shields, pepper spray,
fireworks, climbing gear...explosives, metal pipes, [and] baseball bats” surrounded
the Capitol.
At 2:11 p.m., Trump supporters—heavily represented by right-wing hate groups, former members of law enforcement and the military, and including at least one Trump appointee, busted
through a police line to storm the Capitol,
the first hostile takeover of America’s seat of government since
1814.
The Senate was called into recess at 2:20 p.m. The House soon followed.
Now inside the Capitol, insurrectionists assaulted Capitol police officers, attacked journalists, traumatized members of Congress and congressional aides,
and contributed to multiple members of
Congress getting Covid-19.
Under the surface appearance of random chaos were a number of determined seditionists
with concrete goals. Some targeted the offices of
specific members of Congress in hopes of kidnapping them, or worse, while others
appear to have ransacked the Senate parliamentarian’s office in an attempt to intercept electoral college ballots. There were allegations that plotters may have had help
from Republican representatives and/or members of the Capitol police force.
Because local officials’ authority to call for
backup had been taken away by the Trump administration one day before the certification, it was left to Capitol police chief Steven Sund to beg Trump
allies in the Department of Defense for backup. Trump’s military officials stonewalled
Sund, who started
calling at 1:49 p.m. for help.
Around 2:30, Sund “pleaded” with Lieutenant Generals Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn,
the brother of Michael Flynn—who had suggested
that Trump declare martial law—to deploy the
National Guard. Accompanying Sund were Major General William Walker (the
commander of the DC National Guard), Walker’s counsel (Colonel Earl Matthews),
and D.C. chief of police Robert Contee.
According to Matthews, Piatt told Sund he didn’t like “the optics” of “having armed military personnel on the grounds of the Capitol,”
though the Defense Department had had no concern about “optics” in June 2020
when they had deployed armed military personnel at peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.
After Contee said he would notify D.C. Mayor
Muriel Bowser and ask her to have a press conference to expose Piatt and
Flynn’s decision, Piatt’s cover-your-ass fallback
suggestion was to have “Guardsmen take over D.C. police officers’ traffic
duties so those officers could head to the Capitol.” This too was baffling, since
there was no good reason to send the police (rather than the Guard) and a hand-off
would take more time than sending the Guard directly to the Capitol. As reported by Politico, Matthew’s
36-page memo
about January 6 said that “Every D.C. Guard leader was desperate to get to the Capitol to help…then stunned by the delay in deployment.
Responding to civil unrest in Washington is ‘a foundational mission, a
statutory mission of the D.C. National Guard.’”
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy had been invited to
the call but was “incommunicado or unreachable for most of the afternoon,”
according to Matthews.
As Trump’s Defense Department officials let
insurrectionists ravage the Capitol, several Republicans—including former New
Jersey governor Chris
Christie, senator Lindsey Graham, House minority
leader Kevin McCarthy, and former advisor Kellyanne Conway—called the White
House to try to get Trump to act.
But the commander-in-chief wasn’t taking calls.
He was too wrapped up in watching the attempted coup
he’d fomented on TV. As one aide told a reporter, “‘He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was
live TV….If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV,
he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.’”
Since Trump wasn’t answering, numerous
Republicans tried to get to him by texting one of the key
players in efforts to overturn the election,
chief of staff Mark Meadows. While at the
White House with the president, Meadows received pleas to have Trump call off the insurrection from
Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Brian Kilmeade,
congressional Republicans under siege in the Capitol, and Donald Trump, Jr.
President Trump was unmoved, even when
Ivanka asked him to stop the violence, perhaps because he felt the rioters kept his hopes alive by obstructing the vote
count. According to Republican congressional representative Jamie Herrera
Beutler, who was with Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy (inside the
Capitol), “When McCarthy finally reached the president on January 6 and asked
him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially
repeated the falsehood that it was anti-fascists that had breached the
Capitol….McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump
supporters. That's when, according to McCarthy, the president said, ‘Well,
Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’”
This was of a piece with a
report from Republican senator Ben Sasse that Trump was “confused about why other people on his
team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to
get into the building.” Sasse also mentioned that Trump was talking to the
other people in the room about “a path by which he was going to stay in office
after January 20.”
At 2:24 p.m., as “America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of
lawmakers, breaking into offices and reveling in their own astounding
impunity,” Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage
to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,
giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent
or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify….USA demands the
truth!”
While lawmakers hid from
rioters, Trump called Republican Tommy Tuberville to push the Alabama senator
to stall the electoral college vote certification whenever it could safely
resume. Trump reached Tuberville around 2:26 p.m. and was notified that Mike
Pence and his wife and daughter had been whisked away from the Senate floor. (It
would later come out that the seditionists missed Pence and his family by one minute.)
As Trump
ally Mitch McConnell would later say at Trump’s
second impeachment trial, the president “kept pressing his scheme to overturn
the election. Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice
President Pence was in serious danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners
was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet
attacking his own vice president.”
Trump made half-hearted attempts to defuse the
situation with tweets at 2:38 (“Please support our Capitol Police and Law
Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”) and
3:13 p.m. (“I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No
violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and
our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”).
Around the time of Trump’s 3:13 tweet, some
of his supporters showed their dedication to law and order by harassing the
Capitol police who were protecting members of Congress huddled in the Speaker’s
Lobby. Once they convinced the officers to abandon their posts,
insurrectionists started smashing the windows inside the doors to the lobby. Many
of them continued even after they saw an officer pointing a gun at them on the
other side of the door. One of the insurrectionists who refused to back off was
QAnon follower Ashli Babbitt. Moments after Babbitt was fatally shot, tactical officers appeared,
clearing the area and moving the attackers away from the lobby.
At 4:06 p.m., president-elect Joe Biden tweeted
a speech
in which he said, “I call
on President Trump to go on national television now, to fulfill his oath and
defend the Constitution and demand an end to this siege. This is not a protest.
It is an insurrection.”
Pressured by aides since his tweets
had had no discernible impact on his followers, Trump released a slightly more assertive
video plea at 4:17 p.m., two hours into the breach. But even then, he fed the
ill-founded rage at the heart of the insurrection:
“It was a landslide
election. And everyone knows it. Especially the other side. But you have to go
home….There’s never been a time like this when such a thing happened when they
could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. This
was a fraudulent election….Go home. We love you. You're very special.”
The National Guard finally arrived at 5:20 p.m., three hours and 31 minutes after
the initial request from Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund.
This jaw-dropping delay happened despite the
fact that Mark Meadows, who was with Trump, was in “non-stop” communication all day with Kash Patel (see December 11
entry), the chief of staff for Defense Secretary Christopher Miller—whom Trump
had installed after losing the 2020 election. One has to be naïve not to at
least wonder if the parties were conspiring to delay Guard deployment,
as Miller was perfectly aware of how dire the situation was from early on and yet
reportedly didn’t sign
off on the
deployment until 4:32 p.m., two hours and 43 minutes after Steven Sund first
asked for backup. (One further wonders if Miller’s predecessor, the “insufficiently
loyal” Mark Esper, would have waited so long to
sign off.)
The Capitol was cleared at 5:34
p.m.
At 6:01 p.m., Trump tweeted “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred
landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away
from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long….Go
home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
With an hour to go before the vote count would
resume, Rudy Giuliani called what he thought was Tommy Tuberville’s cellphone
and left a voicemail. Giuliani mistakenly dialed the
wrong senator, who gave the
recording to The Dispatch. In the
message, Giuliani asked the senator to organize objections to ten states won by
Biden in order to drag the vote count-and-certification out as long as possible,
preferably until the end of the following day. Giuliani said that the delay
would give Republicans more time to present evidence of “fraud” in key swing
states. Another goal could have been to impede the certification in order to
allow more time for the resolution of a longshot election lawsuit that was
before the Supreme Court (who would
refuse to expedite the claim on January 11).
After Mike Pence had re-started the official
vote count, Trump’s lawyer John Eastman emailed Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob,
claiming that Pence was breaking the Electoral Count Act because debate was
going “past
the allotted time.”
Jacob didn’t reply to the email.
Pence officially
certified Joe Biden’s victory at 3:42 a.m., January
7, 2021.
Biden’s win was certified despite the objections
of two-thirds of House Republicans and eight Republican
senators who came out of their hiding spots
to push the false election fraud narrative which had jeopardized their safety just hours earlier.
The most concise summation of January 6 came
from Republican Liz Cheney, the daughter of ultra-conservative
former vice president Dick Cheney and the chair of the House GOP Conference who
had voted with Trump 93% of the time during his single term in office. On the eve of the January
13, 2021 House of Representatives vote which would give Donald Trump the
distinction of being the
only president to be impeached twice, Cheney
released a statement:
“On January 6, 2021 a violent mob attacked the United
States Capitol to obstruct the process of our democracy and stop the counting
of presidential electoral votes. This insurrection caused injury, death and
destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.
“Much more will become clear
in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the
United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this
attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have
happened without the President. The President could have immediately and
forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a
greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath
to the Constitution.”
Cheney’s matter-of-fact statement
was rare on the right side of the aisle. Only six Republican senators and 10 House
members supported impeachment.
Remarkably, Republican denial about
Trump’s role in the insurrection has only
deepened in the year since the impeachment vote, despite all of the
information exposing a GOP web of complicity that now includes over
1,000 public figures (according to Public Wise’s Insurrection Index).
Republicans
killed a Senate investigation of January 6. When Democrats
proposed a bipartisan House committee, Republicans tried to plant two
aggressive perpetrators of the Big Lie on the committee: Jim
Banks and Jim Jordan, the latter of whom texted Mark Meadows on January 5, suggesting Mike Pence could
block certification.
Republicans
demoted Liz Cheney for her unwillingness to stay on message and replaced
her with Trump
toady Elise Stefanik. GOP strategists are primarying all of the Republican House members who supported
impeachment that are up for re-election in 2022.
The House
select committee that emerged, which includes Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam
Kinzinger (both of whom voted for Trump in 2020), has been stonewalled by many
of the people who could have the most information about January 6, including Lee Eastman, Jeffrey
Clark, Roger
Stone, Steve
Bannon, Bernard
Kerik, and—after he’d disappointed his master by giving the committee two thousand texts and thousands of pages of
email records—Mark
Meadows.
Trump is
trying to block the committee from seeing notes and phone records from
that day as well as his financial
transactions in the weeks surrounding the
insurrection.
Not only is Trump unrepentant about
his role in the severe trauma
inflicted on Capitol law enforcement, injuries
to more than 150 officers, the deaths of five law enforcement officers (an Iraq War vet who was bashed in the head with a fire extinguisher and four who committed
suicide), the
$480 million taxpayer-funded tab to secure the Capitol with 25,000 National Guard members before
Joe Biden’s inauguration, the $1.5
million dollars in damage done to the citadel of
American democracy, let alone the damage done to America’s reputation
abroad and long-standing tradition of peaceful transfers of power, Trump embraces January 6.
ABC
reporter Jonathan Karl, who interviewed Trump for his book Betrayal: the Final
Act of the Trump Show, said, “I was absolutely dumbfounded at how fondly he
looks back on January 6th. He thinks it was a great day. He thinks it was one
of the greatest days of his time in politics.”
Meanwhile, the Big Lie that fueled
the insurrection looks even more preposterous than it did a year ago, as swing
state recounts have only reinforced Biden’s legitimacy.
Georgia did three recounts, one by hand. All three
verified a Biden margin of over 11,000 ballots.
An independent audit of Arizona’s largest
county, Maricopa, found no
change in Biden’s margin of victory. Arizona’s
Republican legislature didn’t like this finding, so they hired Cyber Ninjas, a Trump-supporting
cybersecurity company, on the taxpayer dime. The
Cyber Ninjas’ audit increased Biden’s Maricopa margin by 360 votes.
A recount of Wisconsin’s two biggest Democratic
counties requested by Republicans padded Biden’s 20,000+-vote margin by another 87 ballots.
Michigan’s recount validated Biden’s comfortable 154,000-vote margin.
A thorough
AP study of the six closest swing states found a total of less than
475 potentially fraudulent votes. Not all of the ballots were necessarily
fraudulent (thus the word “potentially”), not all of the ballots were
necessarily counted, and the ballots came from Democrats, Republicans, and
independents. Joe Biden won each of these states by more than 10,000 votes.
Despite irrefutable real-world evidence that Biden won the 2020
presidential election, most Republican officials across the country have refused
to acknowledge Trump’s loss or actively doubled down on the Big Lie out of fear
of incurring Trump’s wrath or agitating his hordes of followers. Right-wing media
has followed in
goose-step formation.
This chorus of lies and complicity of silence has played to the false
victimhood at the core of the conservative identity, transforming the
Republican Party into an authoritarian
cult whose followers by and large lack the critical thinking skills (or the
will) to process factual information which is at odds with what they want to
believe.
68%
of Republican voters still believe that Trump was robbed of a second term. That
figure rises to 82% among Republicans whose main (dis)information
source is Fox and 97% of Republicans who take Newsmax and One America News
Network at face value. 30% of Republicans are so dismayed by Donald Trump’s
election loss that they believe “violence
might be warranted,” a number which jumps to 40% among the Newsmax and One
America crowd.
The main cause of this lizard
brain hostility is fear.
Fear of modernity, fear of technology, fear of the competitive, ever-shifting global
economy, fear of the heightened influence of women, fear of the increased
visibility of LGBTQ Americans, and—perhaps most of all—fear of changing
racial demographics, all of which have been aggressively weaponized through
Republican politicians’ polarizing
culture war distractions.
According to a recent poll by
the Public Religion Research Institute, only 29% of Republicans feel that
American life has improved since the patriarchal, Caucasian-dominated, gays-closeted,
pre-civil rights 1950s, two-thirds feel being Christian and born in the U.S.
are an important part of American citizenship, and 80% feel the diversifying U.S.
is at risk of losing its “cultural identity.”
The consequences of the Republican
Party’s proto-fascist
lurch are reflected in America’s status as a “flawed democracy” for five straight years in
the Democracy Index, the 2021 report of the International Institute for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance, which recently listed American democracy as
“backsliding”
for the first time, and the Freedom
House assessment (done before January 6, 2021) which showed the
state of U.S. democracy in freefall, comparable to Mongolia and Panama,
countries with a limited history of free and fair elections.
It seems perfectly logical that Republicans
are scheduling this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in
Hungary, a former democracy which provides a blueprint for the GOP’s dream
of an oligarchic America with fixed elections. (Trump even endorsed
Hungary’s dictator, Viktor Orbán,
for another term.)
And it’s likely to get worse after
the 2022 mid-terms.
The historical
data is clear: parties in control of the White House and both houses of
Congress routinely lose seats, and often lose a lot of seats, in mid-term
elections. Barack Obama lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats in his first
mid-term election. Even Bill Clinton, who was exceptionally
skilled at messaging, lost 52 House seats and eight Senate seats in his first
mid-term. Mass
retirements among House Democrats are a key indicator that power is about
to switch hands; being in the minority party in the lower chamber of any
legislature can be a thankless task.
If Republicans win back the House
of Representatives, they will kill the select committee investigating January
6. Jim Jordan, who texted Mark
Meadows the day before the insurrection with the suggestion that Pence could
ignore state-certified electoral votes, would become the head
of the House Judiciary Committee, which would engage in a series of
hyped-up hearings to taint a relatively
scandal-free Biden Administration and distract people from the GOP’s culpability
for January 6.
At the state level, Republicans
will probably win back governor’s mansions, flip legislatures, and increase
their margins in legislatures they already control, allowing them to throw down
an
iron curtain of voter suppression in key
states. After 2022, expect more and stricter voter ID laws which punish
Americans for the crime of Voting While
Black, more laws to make
it harder to vote by mail, more laws to replace
bipartisan election administrators with
right-wing Republicans eager to target and disenfranchise as many Democratic
voters as possible.
Supporters of democracy hold out hope that Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin
will magically transcend their current roles as corporate-funded
Agents of Doom to support a
filibuster carve-out for The Freedom to Vote Act, which would supersede
state-level voter suppression legislation passed on GOP party-line votes. But so far Sinema and Manchin have given
no indication that they’re willing to change the
filibuster rules, and even if they did, the bill would ultimately have to get
past a 6-3 Republican Supreme Court majority which has shown hostility to free and fair elections.
Sure, anything can happen. I don’t
have a crystal ball. Biden’s economy is humming, the pandemic could calm down,
the mid-terms are 10 months off—an eternity in politics.
But from where we sit now,
America’s future looks bleak.
Come 2024, we may discover that
January 6 was not a low point, but a mere dress rehearsal for the death of the
world’s oldest democracy.
This feature was originally published at RawStory
Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia (a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearlythe best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely betterthan Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
