In the Trump era, a single day can feel like an eternity. On January 6, in the crowning folly of his presidency, Donald Trump voided his legacy and destroyed his political future at a single stroke. On the day that Democrats obtained a Senate majority that will allow them to unravel his tax reform and deregulations, Trump goaded a mob to vent its anger on the US Capitol. After marvelling at their success, he issued a mild, almost grudging, rebuke. Then, wrongfooted by the speed at which the political process was restored, he mouthed a scripted concession speech. Visibly annoyed by his impotence, Trump acknowledged defeat more by implication than admission, probably to distance himself from the wreckage of his presidency and its likely legal consequences.
Despite the initial panic, the vandalisation of the Capitol was neither an attempted coup nor an insurrection. It didn’t even succeed, ultimately, as an act of intimidation. It only confirmed the moral bankruptcy of Trumpism. After years of “law and order” posturing, and repeated praise of militarized policing – particularly when it involved attacking Black Lives Matter protesters for “trespassing” or “endangering federal property” – the ethnonationalist assertions of the Trump base finally collapsed under the weight of their hypocrisy. As the feminist scholar Brittany Cooper has said, Americans tend to see White violence as protest and Black protest as violence. The MAGA crowd’s raid on the Capitol underscores the need to upend those assumptions. It also shows the danger of having parallel political realities in which millions of citizens can disbelieve an exhaustively certified election result even after more than 60 legal claims to its legitimacy have been dismissed – in many cases by staunchly Republican judges – for lack of evidence.
Some historians have compared the Capitol raid to an 1856 showdown between Southern Congressman Prescott Brooks and Senator Charles Sumner. Incensed by withering criticism of his kinsman in a famous anti-slavery speech, Brooks assaulted Sumner within the Senate chamber and almost beat him to death with a cane. The attack is often seen as an indication that America’s political passions were no longer compatible with its democratic norms, and that it was destined to vent these frustrations in the ensuing Civil War. Mercifully that outcome remains unlikely in the United States, if only because Trump’s malevolence has imploded so spectacularly. Since the election he has done little more than play golf and share conspiracy theories with his base. His inaction on the pandemic and his obsession with alleged electoral fraud ultimately discouraged Georgia’s Republicans from voting in the runoff elections which determined control of the Senate. In other words Trump has ended his political career by handing over both the presidency and the Senate to his opponents, leaving the GOP with the Gordian tangle of incoherent policies, unresolved resentments and blatant corruption that have marked his presidency from the start.
With 11 days left until a transition to the Biden presidency, Trump can still cause mischief and, at least in his own mind, prepare a self-pardon. To forestall this the Democrats have threatened a second impeachment and urged vice-president Mike Pence and the Trump cabinet to remove him by invoking Article 25 of the constitution. This is political theatre rather than genuine hardball, but it seems a suitably melodramatic end to a presidency that has always framed itself more as a lead in a television reality show, concerned with ratings, than as the head of a constitutional republic concerned with democracy.
