First of all, I want to make it clear I was appalled by the events of 1/6/21, a day when the Congress was scheduled to ratify the electoral college victory of Joe Biden in the 2020 general election. I knew that Trump was playing with fire by scheduling a DC rally before the Congressional vote. The formal electoral college votes took place on 12/14/20 and results were publicly announced. Pence earlier rejected Trump's attempt to set aside Biden's winning electoral votes, and then Senate Majority Leader McConnell publicly congratulated Biden on 12/15/20. Dems were in control of the House. The Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act provided no wiggle room for Trump to contest Biden's election victory. I'm not sure what Trump hoped to accomplish by protesting the vote, strictly a formality; not having the votes in Congress. It's not even a Hail Mary pass, because that assumes more time on the clock, and the courts had already shut down all Trump's related appeals.
I'm not sure what Trump thought was going to happen when he encouraged his protestors to march to Capitol Hill. But this is a guy who encouraged policemen not to treat arrested suspects so gently, said that he could shoot someone on the streets in NYC and wouldn't lose supporters, promised to pay legal bills of supporters who attacked hecklers at rallies. When a couple of early Boston supporters pissed on a sleeping Latino and beat him with a metal pipe, Trump paid lip service to breaking the law but understood their concerns about immigrants. Then there was his morally ambiguous "very fine people on both sides" response to the Charlottesville rally/tragedy. He is constantly trying to shift the blame on the other side (Antifa, etc.) and loathed being critical of his far-right supporters. If pressed, he might pay lip service to a few bad apples on his side (it was like pulling teeth to get him to concede even that), but he would pair it with a counter-accusation. He falsely claimed that he saw film of the protestors and that there were a number of conventional right-wingers/Southern conservatives among them. WRONG! I do oppose the ideological attacks against Southern statues and monuments; etc.; I often feature relevant content from Brion McClanahan and the Abbeville Institute. But neither I nor any real conservative I know would ever have had anything to do with this far-right freak show in Charlottesville. They did not speak for me. Murdering a counter-protestor is unconscionable.
The problem with Trump's counter-productive, incompetent handling of these encounters could be and were perceived by the alt-right whackos as "wink-and-a-nod" support, they were his army, and he would have their back. Of course, Trump would pay enough wiggle room for plausible deniability by paying lip service to "peaceful protests" at his rally that it's difficult legally to hold him responsible for the overrun of the Capitol. But Trump vows if reelected next year there will be pardons and apologies for those convicted in the Jan. 6 overrun of the Capitol.
I do not exonerate Trump for what happened on Jan. 6; he as Commander-in-Chief had a responsibility to secure the Capitol so the Congress could exercise its constitutional responsibilities, whether or not Trump favored its likely outcome. It's clear that Trump resisted calling off his mob tooth and nail and it was hours before National Guardsmen appeared on site to secure the Capitol. Whether Congressional leadership reacted proactively, there is no doubt Trump failed to take action once there was unlawful incursion of the Capitol. In my view, it was a dereliction of duty, pure and simple. The House Dems passed an incitement charge for impeachment; I held my nose and supported it because the House can define what is an impeachable crime, although I don't think they could make a case in the federal courtroom. The Senate trial took place on Feb. 9; Trump was already out of office, and conviction required a super-majority in a split Senate. No doubt GOP Senators did not want political blowback from their pro-Trump constituency, never mind its pointless nature with Trump out of office.
How do Trump's actions square against his signature support of police? Many Capitol policemen were injured during the incursion, and I think he has to rebuild his credibility. But in a country where Dems have openly called for defunding the police, Trump may get another chance.
I've also been critical of Congressional leadership, They have a role in Capitol Hill security oversight. I do know there was considerable discussion after the electoral college vote in mid-December over Trump's planned Jan. 6 rally, I remember reading rumors online before Jan. 6. Here are some discussions:
For weeks, the far-right supporters of President Donald Trump railed on social media that the election had been stolen. They openly discussed the idea of violent protest on the day Congress met to certify the result.
“We came up with the idea to occupy just outside the CAPITOL on Jan 6th,” leaders of the Stop the Steal movement wrote on Dec. 23. They called their Wednesday demonstration the Wild Protest, a name taken from a tweet by Trump that encouraged his supporters to take their grievances to the streets of Washington. “Will be wild,” the president tweeted.
Ali Alexander, the founder of the movement, encouraged people to bring tents and sleeping bags and avoid wearing masks for the event. “If D.C. escalates… so do we,” Alexander wrote on Parler last week — one of scores of social media posts welcoming violence that were reviewed by ProPublica in the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s attack on the capitol.
And this:
One FBI employee wrote in a Dec. 26, 2020, memo about planning for Jan. 6 that was unfolding on a pro-Trump forum called TheDonald.
“They think they will have a large enough group to march into DC armed, and it will outnumber the police so they can’t be stopped," read the notification in the eGuardian system, which is meant to help federal, state and local law enforcement officials coordinate. "They believe that since the election was stolen, that it’s their constitutional right to overtake the government and during this coup no U.S. laws apply. Another group of Proud Boys will be in DC already and are planning on blocking the roads with their cars in order to stop traffic."
And this:
THE INSPECTOR GENERAL’S findings...In one passage, the report presents a series of messages that two “collectors,” officials responsible for trawling through open-source information to identify domestic security threats, exchanged late on the night of January 2, after one of the officials noticed that people were sharing a map of the Capitol online. “I feel like people are actually going to try and hurt politicians,” the official who came across the map wrote...Proud Boys — a right-wing street-fighting gang — were in town the night before. A few hours later, the first official wrote again. “Like there’s these people talking about hanging Democrats from ropes like wtf,” they said.... By 2:53 a.m., the first official had arrived at a succinct description of the threats they were seeing: “I mean people are talking about storming Congress, bringing guns, willing to die for the cause, hanging politicians with ropes,” they wrote. the collectors generally concluded that the statements online were hyperbole, and not true threats or incitement, because they thought storming the U.S. Capitol and other threats were unlikely or not possible
I'm not going to go into the Congressional investigatory committee's extensive information, including early reports buried in DHS. Many officials claim they never heard similar warnings. Reportedly National Guard assistance was offered to Capitol Police before Jan 6:
Three days before supporters of President Donald Trump rioted at the Capitol, the Pentagon asked the U.S Capitol Police if it needed National Guard manpower. And as the mob descended on the building Wednesday, Justice Department leaders reached out to offer up FBI agents. The police turned them down both times, according to senior defense officials and two people familiar with the matter.
and
The U.S. Capitol Police chief who was in charge during last week’s deadly riots reportedly asked his supervisors ahead of time for permission to request that the D.C. National Guard be on standby if the situation spiraled out of control – but was denied.... But Sund told the newspaper that House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving rebuffed the idea, arguing he was uncomfortable with the "optics" that such a move would bring in advance of Wednesday’s protest.
All of this was in a context of constant mainstream media coverage of alt-right groups and right-wing militias as extremists and domestic terrorists (consider post-Charlottesville discussions). Lots of people are, of course, playing CYA, saying the key intelligence never got to them, shifting blame to staffers, some of them allegedly filtering reports as "just talk, people venting, not meaning what they're saying" You have a POTUS calling the election "stolen", who basically well before Election Day hinted he would not accept an election loss:
From 7/19/20: "President Donald Trump refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2020 election and ensuring a peaceful transition of power in an interview with "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace aired Sunday.In the interview, Trump repeated his frequent false claim that mail-in ballots are inherently "rigged" and said that he is "not a good loser.""
From 10/29/20: "President Donald Trump has refused to say he’d accept the results of the election in the event that he loses, and in the closing days of the race, some of his supporters have taken his faulty or unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud to heart. At a packed outdoor rally in this battleground state [AZ] Wednesday, Trump said the polls that show him trailing the Democratic nominee Joe Biden are “fake”"
We had stuff like this:
The warnings of Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol were everywhere — perhaps not entirely specific about the planned time and exact location of an assault on the Capitol, but enough to clue in law enforcement about the potential for civil unrest.
On Dec. 12, a poster on the website MyMilitia.com urged violence if senators made official the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
“If this does not change, then I advocate, Revolution and adherence to the rules of war,” wrote someone identifying themselves as I3DI. “I say, take the hill or die trying.”
Wrote another person: “It’s already apparent that literally millions of Americans are on the verge of activating their Second Amendment duty to defeat tyranny and save the republic.”
From Nov. 17:
After several thousand supporters of President Donald Trump protested the election results and marched to the Supreme Court, nighttime clashes with counterdemonstrators led to fistfights, at least one stabbing and more than 20 arrests.
Several other cities on Saturday also saw gatherings of Trump supporters unwilling to accept Democrat Joe Biden’s Electoral College and popular vote victory as legitimate. Cries of “Stop the Steal” and “Count Every Vote” rang out
The demonstrations in the nation’s capital went from tense to violent during the night and early Sunday. Videos posted on social media showed fights, projectiles and clubs as Trump backers sparred with those demanding they take their MAGA hats and banners and leave. Police said they made 21 arrests on a variety of charges, including assault and weapons possession
Trump himself had given an approving nod to the gathering Saturday morning by sending his motorcade through streets lined with supporters before rolling on to his Virginia golf club. People chanted “USA, USA” and “four more years,” and many carried American flags and signs to show their displeasure with the vote tally and insistence that, as Trump has baselessly asserted, fraud was the reason.
And this:
The Capitol Police ignored critical intelligence ahead of the Jan. 6th riot, including overlooking a warning that, “Congress itself is the target,” according to an internal watchdog report obtained by NBC News.
[T]he inspector general found that the Capitol Police’s intelligence unit warned three days before the riot that supporters of Trump, who believed his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, had made specific plans to target Congress on Jan. 6 and were “actively” promoting violence.
“Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th,” a Jan. 3 threat assessment said, according to the report.
I know. It sounds like Monday morning quarterbacking; it sounds easy after the fact, like the fragmented intelligence before 9/11. I have no background in policing or physical security. But given the unrest even before Trump's court challenges were exhausted, it was clear that the Capitol Police were undermanned for an estimated 2000-2500 protestors breaching the Capitol. AP estimated 10K at the rally. We know some came with Molotov cocktails and/or wearing tactical gear. Only a couple of hundred inadequately equipped officers (of about 1900) were in or about the Capitol, dealing with a desperate mob determined to "stop the steal" in the Senate's ceremonial ratification of state elector results.
The police were clearly ill-prepared and outmanned to deal with the size and extent of the Trumpkin mob, even though it was unarmed. Would a proactive National Guard presence have deterred the incursion? I think so. What we know is National Guard arrived by 5:40pm and had secured the Capitol within just over 2 hours.
And be clear: I'm not arguing the poor security posture on Jan. 6th exonerates Trump's dereliction of duty. That's like blaming the victim for the crime. Trumpkins broke the law, damaged public property and injured policemen.
Granted, the circumstances of Jan. 6th were highly unusual; we had never had a defeated incumbent POTUS refuse to accept an election loss; off the top of my head, John Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George HW Bush. We hadn't seen a similar breach in DC since the War of 1812.
On the other hand, leftists and the mainstream media seemingly seem to want to commemorate Jan 6 as morally equivalent to 9/11. Every few weeks on Twitter, Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trumpkin trespassing on Jan. 6, was shot dead by a Capitol policeman. Trespassing is not a capital crime, and she did not pose a threat to the policeman who killed her. The leftist Twitter trolls call her a "domestic terrorist". It's gotten to the point where I repeat myself on Twitter. So, I've started to ignore the trend when it appears. I don't like Trump making her a martyr for the cause of Trumpism, either. I have a libertarian concern with abuse of the government monopoly of force. "Real" domestic terrorism is like the Oklahoma City bombing.
But when leftists start calling 'insurrection' and 'sedition', I don't see any reasonable evidence of a military coup; lawmakers were safely evacuated from the breach, and the protestors were unarmed. (Some may have had weapons but were not reported used.) Wikipedia lists it as a "rebellion" here, Note that many of the rebellions, like the Whiskey Rebellion, included the use of arms. I haven't seen evidence of any coordination of the Capitol break-in with government insiders. Pence himself rejected Trump's demand to reject Biden's winning electors, even though Pence had a vested interest as Trump's running mate. I think the involvement of the National Guard or military was inevitable. The military takes an oath to uphold the Constitution. The POTUS cannot lawfully violate the Constitution even as Commander-in-Chief. The fact remains a reluctant Trump finally told his mob to stand down and the National Guard secured the capital.
The leftists have exaggerated the nature of the incursion, including the use of the term "deadly". There were 4 deaths on Jan. 6: 3 protestors from medical emergencies and the police execution of Ashli Babbitt. There has been much speculation about officer Sicknick, who had been assaulted and died later (ruled from natural causes: strokes), and reportedly 4 officers later committed suicide. Certainly, there was violence; reportedly 114 officers had injuries: "According to The Post, 65 D.C. police officers suffered concussions, swollen ankles and wrists, bruises, and irritated lungs from pepper spray. Officers were pushed down stairs, trampled and punched." "The [GAO] report also notes that 150 officers reported using force 293 times that day." I've done some queries and found very little coverage of injuries suffered by protestors from police use of force
In summary, I first note that I've been Never Trump from the get-go of his initial candidacy. I voted for the Libertarian Party nominee in 2016 and 2020. I also opposed Biden but acknowledged his constitutional election. Trump's post-election meltdown was unprecedented in American history but not completely unexpected since he had signaled that he would not be willing to accept a loss, despite innumerable polls showing him significantly behind Biden. He stoked the flames with crackpot conspiracy theories and himself tweeted Jan 6th was going to be 'wild'. He himself deliberately targeted the Jan. 6 vote in Congress, scheduling the rally before it. He no doubt knew some of his far-right fringe supporters would show up and do whatever it took to "stop the steal". I see the incursion of the Capitol as unlawful but spontaneous and opportunistic as barricades were breached by aggressive protestors, a protest run amuck. Trump was playing with fire. But I don't see this as a serious plot to overthrow the US government. I see this as a tragic consequence of incompetent security planning. I don't see after violent post-election protests and the symbolic nature of the Jan 6th vote, the legislators didn't see themselves as targets of Trumpkin wrath for their role in "stealing the election". I can't guarantee there wouldn't have been an incursion, but the fact is the protest ended when National Guard troops secured the Capitol, and Congress quickly ratified Biden's victory. There was no follow-up attack, and weeks later Trump vacated the White House. Trumpkins who violated federal laws are being prosecuted, convicted and serving sentences. Let that serve as a warning to protestors who go beyond their First Amendment rights.
As for leftists, there has been no comparable outrage over post-Floyd violent protests.
