Storming the Capitol

Donald Trump has become the best friend his enemies could have imagined. He might believe that he is following his gut, but his recent actions seem to be following the script his enemies wrote.

After contributing mightily to the Republican double defeat in the Georgia senate elections, Trump chose yesterday to incite an insurrection. For those who had declared Trump to be an autocrat, it was Heaven sent. 

After hearing him exhort them to reject the election results, Trump’s most fervent supporters stormed the United States Capital. Legislators were running for their lives. Trump’s enemies could barely contain their glee. The caricature they had spent years creating had come to life. Trump had proven them right.

If he had acted with decorum, he would have made them appear to be deranged. He chose not to do so. 

The result, the considerable successes he had had during his presidency-- think the Middle East-- will be drowned out by the din of those who have consistently believed him to be unfit for office.

By what logic he could have decided to lend credence to his enemies, I do not know. But, do it he did, and he and the Republican Party will be paying for this for a long time.

Miranda Devine explained the stakes in The New York Post:

The storming of the US Capitol yesterday by a group of fired-up Trump supporters was a tragedy for the Republican party, for conservatives and populist nationalists, and for Donald Trump and his legacy.

It has bestowed the great gift of the moral high ground on the most undeserving people in the world: Joe Biden and the left.

They now have a free pass to persecute their ideological enemies while enacting their pet cultural Marxist projects and changing this country irrevocably for the worst.

They will be unimpeded by a Senate now in Democratic control, thanks to Tuesday’s Georgia runoff debacle.

For Georgia, we can blame Trump’s irrational efforts to overturn the November election result, and a clueless GOP establishment which offered Peach State voters two candidates so cartoonishly wrong for the times they may as well have begged the MAGA base to stay home. A guy who made his money outsourcing jobs to China, and a wealthy elitist with a fake southern accent.

Of course, the American left ran its own nationwide insurrection for months this past year. It continued unimpeded by politicians, by local law enforcement and by the mainstream media. 

So, Trump and his supporters must have decided that the Democratic strategy worked-- so why not try it ourselves. True enough, the people who refused to condemn the summer insurrection have been quick to defame the Trump supporters who stormed the capital yesterday. And yet, the two actions are not comparable. 

At the least, the leftists who incited the summer rioting were smart enough not to stand up and declare themselves the leaders of the movement. A leaderless mob looks more like a spontaneous outburst. It allows for deniability.

If Trump supporters, faced with his unwillingness to place himself as the leader of the march, had rioted, it would have been one thing. When Trump held yet another rally, in Washington, to incite the rioters, he was taking ownership of the events.

He made a similar mistake when he held a series of incoherent press briefings about the coronavirus epidemic. Surely, he wanted to appear to be leading the fight against the virus. Surely, he imagined that if the pandemic had waned he would garner the credit. Unfortunately, the virus had other ideas, and besides, when Trump attempted to offer information about the virus, he exposed his inability to understand the situation.

Since Trump was a political amateur, he should not have presented himself as a conquering hero. Since he was a science amateur he should not have pretended to be able to lead the fight against the virus. He might have thought that he was a great communicator, but clearly he was not. 

He was not the first great leader brought down by his own hubris.

Yet, the summer insurrection was not of a piece with what we saw yesterday.

For one simple reason-- the United States Capitol building is a sacred space. It represents the nation, in ways that civic buildings in Portland and Minneapolis do not. 

If you have been running a campaign to restore American patriotism, if your political career is based on restoring national pride after the Obama administration sundered it, you should certainly not attack the greatest architectural instance of it. A minimum of intelligence would have warned you off.

True enough, as you will be thinking, the armies of the American left spent the summer destroying national monuments, destroying the statues of patriots, attacking police officers and forcing American schoolchildren to absorb unpatriotic beliefs.

And yet, the United States Capital building is of another order of magnitude. In attacking it, Trump supporters gave the patriotism issue back to the Democrats.

Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post:

The shocking scenes in and outside the Capitol complex were not displays of too-zealous patriotism. They were unpatriotic and unAmerican.

No matter how upset the protestors were over the election, there can be no excuse for violence and forcible trespassing into government offices, including the House and Senate chambers. What started as a legitimate expression of widespread discontent devolved into a riotous mob that destroyed any credible grievance it had.

It was a bad day for America.