Wednesday was a bad day. None of what happened made any sense.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, who governed permissively during the riotous summer of 2020, used the words “law and order” during a press conference, explaining how the city would respond to a riot at the Capitol. President Trump said his vice president has no courage.
The rogues who forced their way into the Capitol trod all over the nominal priorities of Trump’s administration: conservatism, respecting police, law and order. They put a lie to the notion that he would be remembered as a champion of institutional conservation and to all that posturing about the self-preserving import of appointing conservatives judges (and presumably, by extension, respecting the rulings of Republican-appointed judges). Those judges had ruled on this matter.
It was all so stupid, so reckless, so contradictory, and self-defeating. The Senate’s President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley cut off Sen. James Lankford, who was in the middle of explaining his objections to Arizona’s electors, because Trump’s foot soldiers breached the Capitol. In the video feed, an aide can be heard coming up to Lankford and saying, “Protesters in the Capitol.” Yes, Trump, the disrupter, and his many friends, the disrupters of his own cause.
The categories we might have relied on before in distinguishing between the tradition and institution-hating Left, the revolutionary summer protesters and rioters on one side and the “law and order,” “back the blue” types on the other, are of little use after today. They are united in that they will stop at nothing — not at locked doors and not at police.
Those in the Republican leadership who insisted early on that Trump deserved his day in court to adjudicate fraud claims could justify it for a time on institutional, procedural, and legal grounds. In his speech on Wednesday, Lankford suggested that millions of people who question the election are being told to sit down and shut up. That’s what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others were trying to avoid in saying that Trump “had a right” to court challenges. That’s what editorial boards were trying to avoid as they waited for the United States Supreme Court to rule on the Pennsylvania case before exhorting Trump to stop. The election challenges had a shelf life.
We had only a hint of what Trump, chaos agent, meant until today. And his trespassing crusaders wrecking-balled his last shot at persuasion. I can only imagine that it really, truly ended today. The stakes are now tenfold higher for any congressional election dissenters than they were before.
It’s wrong to say that this storming of the Capitol was always going to happen. It could have been avoided, but it is right to say that it was the natural next step. The things standing in the way of mob rule are procedures and institutions. Trump and his followers became unwilling to grant respect or deference to either.
