She had warned America that he is a fascist and now, in front of political colleagues, TV viewers and the watching world, she was the one who would have to officially put him back in power.
Few would envy Kamala Harris, the outgoing US vice-president, having to maintain a cool, zen-like exterior on Monday as she formally announced Donald Trump’s victory – and her own defeat – in the 2024 presidential election.
“The votes for president of the United States are as follows: Donald J Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes,” said Harris, wearing a maroon suit and silky bow shirt. Even then there was to be one more insult as Republicans in the House of Representative interrupted her with loud applause and cheering.
The vice-president stood ramrod-backed, hands folded, wearing a half-smile, half-grimace as the acclaim went on, eventually reaching for the gavel to restore order. “Kamala D Harris of the state of California has received 226 votes,” she then said, prompting counter-cheers from Democrats.
Harris said the results were a “sufficient declaration” of the election of a president and vice-president starting their terms on 20 January. Senator JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, wearing Trumpian white shirt and red tie, fist-bumped Senator Bill Cassidy; Harris shook hands with the speaker, Mike Johnson, who patted her on the back; and the entire chamber – Democrats and Republicans – stood and applauded.
It was a rare moment of unity in a political era marked by disunity, ending a formal process that had been extraordinary in its ordinariness. Four years after a pro-Trump mob attacked the US Capitol in an effort to overturn his election defeat, this was a January 6 without rancour or bloodshed.
This time no defeated president urging his supporters to “fight like hell”; no challenges to the integrity of the vote; no Confederate flag brandished in the corridors of power; no QAnon shaman storming the Senate; no mob calling for the vice-president to be hanged.
Four years later the Capitol was covered in snow with roads blocked off for miles. Police were out in force and non-scalable fencing erected for what has been designated a national special security event. Sealed electoral certificates from each state were brought into the House chamber in mahogany boxes and allowed to stay without being rushed to safety.
The public gallery was only half full and there were no disruptions as four tellers – referring to Harris as “Madam President” of the Senate – took turns reading the results from each state. Most were greeted with polite applause as if at a piano recital. But Trump’s victory in Florida was greeted with clapping and a yelp from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas delegations also celebrated raucously.
John Thune, the new Republican majority leader in the Senate, sat in the front row with chin on hand, wiggling his right leg like a tall man in economy on a long flight. Across the aisle, his Democratic counterpart Schumer sunk into his chair, staring ahead, hands folded, barely moving. Further back was Jamie Raskin, among those who fled for their lives on January 6, later a key figure on the House panel that investigated it – who knows what he was thinking.
It was all wrapped up in half an hour, after which various Republicans posed for selfies with Vance on the House floor. But this was a case of two cheers for democracy. Monday went smoothly for a simple reason: Trump won.
Democrats, who have raised symbolic objections in the past, including during the disputed 2000 election that Al Gore lost to George W Bush, had no intention of objecting. “There are no election deniers on our side of the aisle,” the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said on the first day of the new Congress.
Having laid siege to the Capitol, Trump and his allies have spent four years laying siege to the truth. There is no better example of polarisation in America – and the alternate-reality “mirror world” fostered by one side – than the events of 6 January 2021.
The objective truth is that a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol with clubs, chemicals and other weapons. The attack led to five deaths; more than 140 police officers were injured in the carnage. “What I saw was just a war scene,” Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards later told the House January 6 committee. “I was slipping in people’s blood.”
In a statement released on Monday, Frederica Wilson, a Democratic congresswoman, said she still trembled at the date January 6, recalling: “We ran and crawled on our knees to safety with the fear of death hanging over our heads. They left the statues in statuary hall broken and smeared with excrement and blood. Police officers were bloodied, beaten, battered, and died. It was like playing a role in a horror movie and hoping that it would soon come to an end.”
But in the Maga [Make America great again] universe, such memories are rendered illegitimate. In this telling, January 6 was a heroic attempt to “stop the steal” of the 2020 election. Trump has called it a “day of love” and vowed to pardon those convicted of crimes; Congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia compared it to a “normal tourist visit”; Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, has repeatedly promoted a conspiracy theory accusing the FBI of orchestrating the attack.
Most telling has been how, over the past four years, Trump has gone from disgraced pariah to wronged victim to conquering hero. He was impeached for his role in January 6 and condemned by even staunch Republican allies. Yet one by one they came back to the fold and became complicit in rewriting history. Trump now regularly plays an eerie, tinny version of the national anthem sung over a phone by January 6 prisoners (recast as martyrs) – weaponising a day of shame into a political asset.
The exercise was surely made possible by the fracturing of media. No longer could a handful of trusted news anchors tame a lie and keep it caged. A powerful rightwing ecosystem – including Elon Musk’s X – has systematically neutralised, undercut and spun the eyewitness accounts from January 6. The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2024 American Values Survey found that 62% of Republicans continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
As in George Orwell’s 1984, the past, it seems, has been abolished. “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered,” Orwell wrote.
Like Vice-Presidents Gore and Mike Pence before her, Harris did her duty on Monday. America has returned to a peaceful transfer of power. Yet the unpalatable truth was that the candidate who tried to overturn the previous election is legitimately returning to power. Democracy had prevailed to elevate a man who spits in its face.
