The storming of the Capitol and a historic second impeachment

In the final instalment of our series recapping an unprecedented presidency, Joe Sommerlad looks at the events of recent weeks and the appalling consequences of Trump’s Big Lie

The cosplay coup (EPA)

It seems entirely fitting that a 20-part series about the presidency of Donald J Trump should have to be extended into a 21st installment to accommodate the extraordinary chaos of his final weeks in office.

Just two days into 2021, the president – still clinging to his claim that the election had been “stolen”, despite no evidence having been found to prove his claims of “mass voter fraud” and with over 60 court cases thrown out – found himself mired in yet more scandal, once again regarding his behaviour on a phone call.

As had been the case with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenksy in July 2019, Trump was recorded pressuring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, into doing him a favour, this time asking the official to help him “find” the 11,760 votes he needed to overturn the swing state’s election result after it had unexpectedly turned blue for Joe Biden.

The Washington Post got hold of the tape of the hour-long exchange and duly published it, prompting legendary journalist Carl Bernstein to brand the incriminating audio “worse than Watergate”.

The following Tuesday, the same state held two Senate runoff elections that saw Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff beat Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, flipping the upper chamber of Congress to give their party the majority in the process and smoothing President-elect Biden’s legislative path considerably.

The result was a triumph for civil rights in America.

The Reverend Warnock, who preached at Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s old stomping ground, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, became the southern state’s first black senator and Ossoff, a 33-year-old former intern to John Lewis, its first Jewish senator. The latter was also the youngest man to enter the chamber since Biden himself in 1973. Both had overcome viciously negative campaigns by their rivals straight out of the MAGA playbook to come out on top.

But the mood of jubilation would quickly be lost in the shocking events of the following day: Wednesday 6 January 2021, a moment to live on in infamy through the ages.

A joint session of Congress was scheduled to enable the legislature to formally recognise November’s election results state by state, the procedure usually a formality presided over by the vice president but which granted lawmakers an opportunity to raise any objections they might have to the count.

Grandstanding Republican senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz – no doubt with eyes on future presidential runs of their own – were among those declaring their intentions to protest the certification, pushing the Trumpian lie to the bitter end.

The president himself had meanwhile been using his Twitter account to heap pressure on Mike Pence to overturn the result by weaponising his customarily ceremonial role.

Republican senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz –no doubt with eyes on future presidential runs of their own – were among those declaring their intentions to protest the certification

Against the backdrop of Pence’s refusal to do so, the president and his allies spoke at a “Save America Rally” on The Ellipse in Washington, an event planned and coordinated for months on social media by “Stop the Steal” campaigners like Ali Alexander, with Trump promising supporters the gathering would be “wild” in a pre-Christmas tweet.

An angry crowd of loyalists – QAnon believers, Proud Boys, local government Republicans and ordinary working folk led on by the Big Lie, all decked out in Trump-branded merchandise – crossed the country to attend.

They were whipped up by the likes of congressmen Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks, Don Jr and Rudy Giuliani, the latter two declaring respectively that the collective would “come for” disloyal members of their party and that the election controversy should be resolved through “trial by combat”, all other avenues having been blocked.

When Trump himself took to the podium, behind bullet-proof glass with the White House as his backdrop, he declared: “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they’re doing and stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”

He concluded his remarks by saying: “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue; I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

While Trump, of course, actually failed to join them on the march, the mob duly did as he had demanded and descended on the US Capitol Building.

DC and Capitol Hill police, apparently understaffed and reluctant to present a show of force similar to that deployed against Black Lives Matter activists the previous summer, looked helpless as they tossed flash-bang grenades at the mob, whose members quickly scaled inauguration scaffolding, smashed press cameras and shoved through the barricades.

What followed was the first attack on the seat of American democracy since British soldiers set it alight in 1814. The protesters stormed inside, broke windows, looted offices, stole souvenirs, scratched “Murder the Media” onto a door, took selfies in offices and livestreamed the whole disgraceful affair while terrified representatives cowered in locked rooms, the certification process brought to a halt for several hours before going ahead in good order.

Shocking images of rioters like Jake Angeli AKA the QAnon Shaman – shirtless and wearing buffalo skins and facepaint – Eric Munchel, dressed like a special forces commando with a fistful of zipties to use as handcuffs, and Richard Barnett, sprawled with his boots on House speaker’s Nancy Pelosi’s desk, flooded social media.

Many would eventually be arrested in the coming weeks, including Confederate flag-bearer Kevin Seefried and neo-Nazi Robert Keith Packer, pictured wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie, but their occupation nevertheless left five people dead – QAnon zealot Ashli Babbit and police officer Brian Sicknick among them.

Heroes emerged, like black officer Eugene Goodman, who single-handedly stopped the mob bearing down on a hallway that would have led them to the congresspeople and senators they planned to kidnap (or execute).

Meanwhile pipe bombs had been planted at both Democratic and Republican headquarters, cops were brutally attacked with flag poles and fire extinguishers and cries of “Hang Mike Pence!” had rung out in an appalling, nightmarish perversion of democracy that brought the condemnation of leaders around the world.

Ultimately, it could all have been far worse, but the episode will nevertheless go down in the history books as a truly shameful one.

Where was Donald Trump in all of this? 

Watching on TV in the West Wing – reportedly pleased with the spectacle but disappointed the rioters looked “low class” - and ignoring appeals from the likes of Kellyanne Conway, Lindsey Graham and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to call off his dogs.

When he finally did release a video condemning the violence, he told the “patriots” to go home but added: “You’re very special, I love you.”

In the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, the president was temporarily banned from Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat and permanently from Twitter (costing him arguably the true source of his power) and was swiftly impeached by the House of Representatives for a second time, the article accusing him of “incitement to insurrection”.

In voting for his unprecedented second impeachment, Speaker Pelosi – whom an “assassination party” had gone looking for – said Trump represented “a clear and present danger” so long as he remained in office and accused him of trying to “repeal reality” in fighting the election result.

Speaker Pelosi accused Trump of trying to ‘repeal reality’

Never admitting that he was at fault, the president – largely silenced without Twitter – slunk out of view for his final days in office, ducking Biden’s inauguration to hole up in Mar-a-Lago to resume his busy schedule of denialism and plotting how best to monetise his bloated sense of self-regard going forward, as banks and corporations shun his businesses and district attorneys circle like sharks scenting blood in the water.

His supporters, meanwhile, felt duped, expressing their anger on Reddit forums about “the final betrayal” he had carried out in distancing himself from them in a second statement accusing his tinpot army of having “defiled the seat of American democracy”.

“F*** Donald Trump. This f***ing piece of s*** dragged us into DC for what? To leave us holding the bag? What the f***,” wrote one.

“Wow, what an absolute punch in the gut,” said another.

One would-be revolutionary at the 6 January rally had brandished a flag bearing the motto: “We stand up now or we stand for nothing.”

How unthinkably humiliating for this individual to have been talked into risking everything he held dear, only to then have to face the reality that “nothing” was precisely what he had stood for, because the election never was stolen, merely lost.

Nothing, that is, but the overblown ego of the 45th president of the United States, a man who could not accept the simple truth that the only real “loser” in all of this was himself.

In four years, Donald Trump had lost the House, Senate and presidency, diminished America’s standing on the world stage, never come close to completing his border wall or “draining the swamp” and overseen almost 400,000 deaths from coronavirus, ending the transition with a failed insurrection during which he had betrayed total indifference as to how many people got hurt in his impossible, deluded battle against inconvenient but inescapable facts.

He leaves the White House with the lowest-ever approval rating of a departing president in American history while still dreaming of a triumphant return in 2024 that may not be allowed to come to pass, leaving behind a toxic trail of pain and division that will beset his party and the country for years.

"Tired of winning?" Hardly.

Read the full The Trump Review series here