Insurrection

I received an upbeat marketing email this morning from a consultant I’ve done business with. It said,

Happy New Year, Paul,

I can’t remember ever being as excited about the new year as I am this year! As the dumpster fire that was 2020 recedes in the rearview mirror, 2021 feels ripe for a reset.

Clearly, that email was written and queued up for sending before yesterday’s events in Washington, DC. It turns out it’s a bit early to assume that all the dumpster fires are in the rearview mirror.

As did many others, I spent hours sitting, agog, in front of the television yesterday as a mob of Trump supporters, incited by the president, stormed the U.S. Capitol, sending legislators and their staffs into hiding.

Indicative of the scope and horror of those events was the fact that the historic victories of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, which will hand control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats, barely made it onto the front page of the paper.

I’m numb. The only consolation to all the mayhem is that the dangers of Trump’s presidency, and the consequences of Republicans’ acquiescence to or outright endorsement of his abuses, have now been made plain. If I had to guess, I’d predict that the rogue’s gallery of representatives and senators who helped Trump convince his base that the election might yet be overturned — people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz — will not suffer anywhere near the consequences they deserve.

In a post on November 7, I celebrated Joseph Biden’s win in the presidential race but cautioned, “Now we get to see what Trump does next. How much damage can an outraged, puerile narcissist who holds the most powerful office in the world do in 2½ months?” I wish I could say, “Now we know,” but in fact we don’t yet know. There are two weeks left before he leaves office and he is still goading his supporters with false claims of a stolen election. I would not want to be the head of the Secret Service detail charged with keeping Joseph Biden safe during his inauguration.

At this point, any powers I may presume to have for anticipating the future fail me. I hope, as Rachel Maddow asserts, that hundreds of those rioters who invaded the Capitol will be indicted, tried, and sent to jail for a very long time. I hope that a large majority of Americans recoil from the president for what he has wrought. I hope leaders in the Republican Party engage in a humbling reckoning, renew their commitment to democracy, and reconsider their determination to promote divisiveness and cast their political opponents as enemies.

But I honestly don’t have confidence that any of those things will happen. Only time will tell.

There was good news yesterday amidst the horrors. In addition to the Warnock and Ossoff victories in Georgia, there was Mitch McConnell’s speech to Congress before the Capitol was invaded. There was a time when I would have said that McConnell was every bit as much a threat to our democracy as Trump was. I was wrong. When faced with a choice between pandering to Trump’s supporters and honoring the Constitution, McConnell unequivocally opted for the latter. Many will say it was too little, too late. I can’t entirely disagree. Nonetheless, McConnell got on the right side of history by the skin of his teeth.

To a lesser extent the same might be said about Mike Pence, Lindsey Graham, and a handful of others. Back in the ’70s, many high-profile Washingtonians considered it a badge of honor to be on Nixon’s enemies list. Today there is a similar cachet to being one of those Trump has deemed disloyal, and a concomitant dishonor to being one of his ever-shrinking band of trusted allies.

The word “unprecedented” continues to accrue new meaning. Members of Trump’s cabinet have reportedly discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to declare Trump unfit for office and remove him. That would once have been strictly the province of a Robert Ludlum novel — one of his less plausible ones.

It may be that the best we can hope for is that Trump spends the rest of his presidency skulking in the White House or at Mar A Lago nursing his grievances while law enforcement thwarts the insurrectionist ambitions of his most fanatical supporters. Facebook and Instagram have suspended Trump’s accounts at least until the end of his presidency. At this writing Twitter also suspended him, but for only 12 hours. I fully expect Trump will continue to violate Twitter’s rules on election misinformation, so maybe it will see fit to make the suspension permanent. Then perhaps we wouldn’t hear from him any more than we see him.

I could ramble on, but real life beckons. It’s time to turn off the news, have lunch, visit my mother — and daydream about a near future in which Democrats control both the House and Senate, and a well-intentioned adult occupies the Oval Office.