Watching President Trump’s mob smashing its way into the U.S. Congress on Jan. 6 triggered emotional and intellectual horror similar to that of seeing Notre Dame Cathedral engulfed in flames in April 2019. Because what was being destroyed in each case was not merely a beloved building but a cherished symbol of ideas central to our civilization.
The towering flames of 2019, however, were accidental and in another quarter of the globe. The destructive violence of the president’s 2021 insurgents was, by contrast, here at home and deliberately incited by the political leader who swore to protect and defend those very ideas, codified in the Constitution, that were being assaulted.
In the two months since the election, Trump has stoked this disaster with ever more brazen lies, persuading a portion of his voters that he won the election by a landslide and that America is being defrauded of its democracy. Immediately before the riot began, he told supporters at a rally on the National Mall not to “take it any longer” and to march on Congress. Rudy Giuliani called for “trial by combat.”
This was demagoguery of the most grotesque kind. It should mark Trump with permanent disgrace, bring on him legal remedies, and disbar him from public life forever. If you need an unbeatable definition of “too little, too late,” look no further than the president’s video calling for peace while repeating yet again the canard that the election was stolen, and his statement in the middle of the night pledging a peaceful transfer of power.
Shortly before the Nov. 3 election, businesses in downtown Washington, fearing a Trump victory, erected extra protective boards on their street fronts, adding to those they’d hidden behind since the BLM and antifa riots last summer. But more boards went up in recent days as Trump partisans flooded into the capital to reverse his loss. It revealed “on the ground” that two months of incitement by the president dramatically switched the location of political violence to the Right. Vandals from the Proud Boys inflicted extensive damage on D.C. weeks ago, and they are glorying in the Capitol Hill mayhem now.
In our two magazine editorials this week, we make it plain that this sort of direct action is unacceptable from wherever it comes. All decent people should condemn it. That means it should be denounced now by those of us on the Right, just as it should have been denounced last summer by those on the Left. There is more red, white, and blue among the Trump rioters, who smashed the preeminent symbol of our democracy, but they have no more claim to righteousness than the arsonists in black, who torched the headquarters of law and order in cities around the nation.
We devote much of this magazine to the horrific events in the federal capital. Let me direct your attention to magnificent photos by our staff photographer, Graeme Jennings, who “ate a lot of tear gas” to get them.
