“It’s just drama,” sighed Jaime Herrera Beutler last Wednesday as the new Republican majority in Congress repeatedly fumbled its first automatic obligation, taking 15 votes to elect a speaker. Beutler herself took no part in the posturing and play-acting. Having voted in favour of impeaching Donald Trump after the riot at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, she missed her chance for re-election when Trump pushed one of his loyalists to challenge her.
The Trumpist ousted Beutler in a run-off, then lost to a Democrat in the general election: Trump had his petty revenge, for which the Republicans paid. Though he continues to whip up drama, he has lost his capacity to direct it, and so the unscripted, absurdly improvised drama reels on – in the short term comic but, as it confounds the country’s government, in the long run probably tragic.
It all began when Trump announced a demonstration on 6 January 2021 to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. “Be there,” he bellowed in a tweet, “will be wild!” His supporters answered the call, avid for what used to be called a “wilding”, the kind of rampage that juvenile gangs go on. Trump sent his followers to “fight like hell” at the Capitol, where they smeared shit in the marble halls, set off smoke bombs, and stampeded through a mess of ransacked documents, broken glass and splintered wood.
He also gave them a target for their rage: in a tweet, he declared himself disappointed by his vice-president, Mike Pence, who had refused to overturn the electoral result. Told that Pence was at risk of being lynched, Trump is said to have shrugged: “Maybe Mike deserves it”.
Washington’s current disarray is a delayed epilogue to that ruinous afternoon. Kevin McCarthy, who on Friday night squeaked through a 15th ballot by just four votes to be elected speaker, led the Republican minority in 2021. Frightened by the mob’s incursions, he privately told colleagues that he had “had it” with Trump, and in a public statement the next day accused him of inciting an insurrection. Two weeks later, tail between legs, he travelled to Florida to beg forgiveness. McCarthy first enraged rightwing Republicans by denouncing Trump, then sickened the centrists by cravenly apologising to him; his hopes of advancement have been curtailed by his own slithery reversals.
The report of the select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol minutely documents the first stages of this collapse into dysfunction and self-destruction. “Jan 6th is gonna be epic,” a leader of the Proud Boys militia predicted; the 850-page report certainly is, and, in half a dozen different commercial editions, it has turned into something of a publishing bonanza. Even before its release two weeks ago, pre-orders had made it Amazon’s top bestseller. With luck, it may frighten Americans into recognising how shaky their political system is – or will they consume it as docudrama, the end of democracy as a ready-made Tom Clancy thriller?
In her introduction, Liz Cheney takes care not to accuse the rioters, arguing that Trump preyed on their patriotic zeal. He certainly profited from their gullibility, enticing them to donate $250m to finance his “big lie” – yet he was also their creation, obliged to act out their fantasies. He told his supporters that their mission was to save the country but was prevented by the secret service from joining their march down Pennsylvania Avenue. He then retreated to the White House dining room, where he watched the mayhem on Fox News.
Though he worried that his supporters looked a little “trashy”, he loved the thought that they were prepared to die for him. The report makes it clear how scarily militarised they were: along with the inevitable assault rifles, they were also armed with scissors, needles, brass knuckles, bows and arrows, ingredients for Molotov cocktails, machetes, tomahawks, and flagpoles repurposed as battering rams or cudgels.
Some of them believed they were the advance guard of an epochal convulsion. One group babbled about storming the Bastille; for others the precedent was the Bolshevik assault on the Winter Palace. A faction whose rallying cry was “1776!” saw the riot as a reprise of George Washington’s war against the Imperial British monarchy.
History mattered less to the many troglodytes in the crowd, one of whom grunted, “We’re gonna fuck some shit up”, while another vowed to haul Nancy Pelosi, then speaker, out of the Capitol and ensure that her head banged on every stone step on the way down.
Washington DC, so proud of its white neoclassical democratic shrines, was renamed Fort Trump, a lawless town on the frontier where liberals were to be “drug through the streets” by cowboy vigilantes. Before the big day, helpful information circulated online about erecting gallows and correctly tying a hangman’s knot. The neo-Nazis who joined the revels had an even fouler scenario in mind. One of them wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with the slogan Camp Auschwitz, and a comrade – now, it is good to know, in jail in New Jersey – proudly showed off his wispy homage to Hitler’s moustache.
As the crowd battered its way into the Capitol, the InfoWars fabulist Alex Jones babbled through a bullhorn about an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil. But the puppeteers who planned the attempted coup viewed it all with wry detachment, imagining they could do their manipulating at a safe distance. The report quotes a campaign manager who spoke of needing to “motivate” support to keep Trump in the White House, which meant bullying state legislators to ignore votes cast for Biden. The Breitbart demagogue Steve Bannon asked Trump to “provide the narrative engine for how we go forward”: narrative here meant fiction, industrially propelled.
Trump himself enjoyed the sheer effrontery of his advisers as they invented scenarios about fraudulent ballots. “Sounds crazy,” he commented approvingly when a lawyer suggested that US vote-counting machines had been fitted with software designed in Venezuela to ensure that the dictator Hugo Chávez never lost an election. For these cynics, Jones’s apocalypse was the ultimate sporting finale.
Bannon recommended a tactical dodge to overturn the election that he based on the Green Bay Sweep, a blocking strategy worked out by Wisconsin’s NFL football team, with Pence improbably cast as the hyperkinetic quarterback. The supposed constitutional expert, John Eastman – who admitted to a confidante that the justification he devised for the coup was legally unsound – preferred to think of it as a boxing match. His bogus plan, he said in a memo, was “BOLD, certainly”, but “we’re no longer playing by the Queensbury rules”. Pence, catching the mood of nihilistic frivolity, dismissed Eastman’s advice as “rubber room stuff”, metaphorically consigning him to a padded cell.
Late in the afternoon, Trump emerged from seclusion, titivated his hair, dabbed at his orange make-up, and recited an unrepentant television message telling the mob to go home in peace. The putsch had failed, but he assured the fanatics that he “loved” them, then solemnly commanded, “Remember this day for ever!” He probably hoped that 6 January would be commemorated as a festive date; instead it has become America’s trauma, a primal scene in which the fragility of the country’s institutions was exposed. And because the mob he summoned had its own unstoppable momentum, it also warned Trump of his increasing irrelevance. Ever the slick opportunist, he got himself elected by exploiting popular grievances with which he had no genuine sympathy. What he windily called “the greatest movement in the history of our country” is now moving on without him.
In November, even Sean Hannity’s show on Fox cut away from Trump’s enervated announcement of his third presidential run. Last week, Trump urged Republicans to capitalise on their “great victory” – actually a fiasco, for which his own meddling in the midterm elections was to blame – and “make [a] deal” to install McCarthy; his entreaties were ignored.
In a Congress that took a historically long time to elect a speaker, the process that Trump instigated rumbles towards a dead end. During the week long stalemate as the majority Republicans battled each other, government was unable to function, although in truth it may have no interest in being drearily functional. For Trump’s legatees, politics is drama, and the exercise of power consists of performing for the cameras. Between the inconclusive speaker ballots, assorted Republicans valiantly proclaimed all was going according to plan. One representative, nominating McCarthy for the fourth ballot, said that “the American people are in charge”, and crowed “how lucky we are to be citizens of the greatest country in the history of the world”.
A colleague putting a rival candidate forward said “we are making history here” – yes, but of the wrong kind, since the last time such a farcical deadlock occurred was in 1923. The State Department even felt compelled to cover the country’s embarrassment by announcing that the squabbles in backrooms and the squalid trading of favours showed the world what democracy looked like when busily at work.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was more candid after being caught in a huddle with the Republicans Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar, an unlikely pair of confederates for this Democratic firebrand: Gaetz has been accused of sex trafficking across state lines, and Gosar once tweeted a video which showed him righteously slashing Ocasio-Cortez’s throat with a sword. She explained that the three of them were discussing the rules for adjourning a session of Congress. “In chaos,” she zestfully added, “anything is possible.”
Mike Fanone, a former police officer, also seemed to be enjoying himself. During the attack on the Capitol, rioters beat him with pipes, stunned him with a Taser and threatened to shoot him with his own gun; he suffered a heart attack, burns and traumatic brain injuries, though he got a book contract and a gig on CNN for his pains. Hearing that McCarthy was prematurely squatting in the speaker’s office, Fanone paid him a courtesy call last week – just, as he said, “to rub it in”.
AOC and Fanone may live to regret having smirked at this state of happy anarchy. On that 6 January, former White House aide Hope Hicks protested that Trump’s complicity meant that “we all look like domestic terrorists now”. She was more prescient than she could have known: now, with the Republicans back in power, the country has foes who are entirely homegrown and who loudly assert their patriotism. The cabal that sabotaged McCarthy is known as the Taliban 20; other Republicans, recalling 9/11, have called them hijackers. “We’re going to war,” one of McCarthy’s strategists informed CNN, apparently unaware that he was leading a charge against his own side.
Midway through the week, Biden felt obliged to remind the legislators that “this is the United States of America”. He was speaking in sober earnest, but it sounded like a joke.
When Pence resumed the ceremonial confirmation of Biden’s win late at night on 6 January two years ago, he insisted with his usual smarmy piety that “the presidency belongs to the American people”. It was his rebuke to Trump, who thought of the office as a private plaything. Just who are these oft-invoked people? On 6 January 2021, the people in question were white Christian nationalists packing heat and baying for blood. Woe betide the populists on the day when the populace actually pays heed to them.
