I was napping when they broke into the Capitol. My wife, Martha, woke me to tell me the news. At that point, the riot (or “insurrection,” if you prefer, although I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms at the time) was a couple hours old; it appeared that Congress was safe, our representatives tweeting and cuddling each other in their undisclosed safety bunkers. Ok, I don’t remember any reports of “cuddling,” but I like to think of Susan Collins and Chuck Schumer holding each other tight.
Martha said she thought we were watching an important moment in American history. I said I didn’t think so; there’d already been so much insanity during Trump’s four years in office that the scene struck me as just another example–though a particularly dramatic one–of MAGA’s criminal exuberance. It was, I thought, Trump’s political death knell.
Five years after the fact, with our criminal president reinstated for a second term, I understand that day—and especially its aftermath—differently. January 6, 2021 was the day America broke.
(It was also the day my wife proved once and for all that she is the more acute observer of American political life in our marriage. Joke’s on her, though, because I have a Daily Beast column and she does not.)
Although it’s hard to believe now, bipartisan condemnation of the president was quick and vociferous. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared Trump to be “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events.” Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack.
Senator Mitt Romney described the event as an “insurrection, incited by the President of the United States.”
An impeachment quickly followed, but many of those same Republicans who had placed the blame for the attack at Trump’s feet refused to fulfill their oaths. McCarthy voted against the impeachment. Once impeached in the House, McConnell and nearly every other Republican voted against convicting Trump. Had they done so, we would not be currently contemplating invading Cuba, Colombia, Greenland, Mexico, and Canada. Had they done so, people would not be getting kidnapped every day on American streets. Had they done so, children would not be dying from measles. Had they done so, Stephen Miller would currently be sleeping upside down in a cave.
The great American experiment, one predicated on George Washington’s example of voluntarily relinquishing power, has been revealed to be little more than a gentleman’s agreement among white men in knee breeches. From the moment he was acquitted in the Senate, Trump’s every action has been calculated to burn the parchment it was written on. We call it the Constitution.
Today, Republicans have exposed our founding document as little more than a gussied-up suggestion box, or maybe a stylebook to be followed or disregarded at the discretion of those in power.
Pick an amendment, any amendment. Chances are, this administration or its cronies have broken it. First? Fourth? Separation of powers? Maybe you’re an Emoluments Clause guy—good for you? (Well, bad for you actually.) The only two amendments these guys seem to respect are the Second and Fifth. I don’t blame Trump. He’s been clear about his intention to govern like a strongman from Day One. Every single person who abdicated their duty to remove this guy from public office is complicit, most of them proudly so. It is those people, many of them the same people who were cowering in the House chamber five years ago today, who handed Trump the hammer he’s currently using to destroy the nation.
“Nobody can stop us,” Trump said the other day, referring to his stated intention to bully the entire Western Hemisphere into subjugation under threat of invasion. He was talking about other militaries of other nations but he might as well have been talking about his own country. For once, he was telling the unexpurgated truth—nobody’s going to stop them. Not now.
Back then, though, he could have been stopped cold. If the Senate had done their job, if the Supreme Court had done theirs.
McConnell did this. McCarthy did this. Mike Johnson did this. Merrick Garland. American timidity exemplified by Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. Those who might have stopped him sat on their hands and dithered and worried about offending his deplorable base. Only one party is actively attempting to delete the Constitution, but political cowardice cuts across the aisle.
Like so many Americans, I first thought Trump’s first four years of cage-rattling had failed to break us. That the election of Joe Biden heralded a return to an imperfect but sane status quo, one which preserved a world order that’s served the United States pretty f’ing well since the end of WWII. All of that is now gone. JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Marco Rubio have decided to replace the careful, slow language of diplomacy with the utterances of a preschooler: “Mine!” At home, our domestic tranquility, always fitful, is gone, replaced by a deep and growing disquiet. Neighbors are eyeing each other with suspicion, the way I imagine it must have been like in the later days of the Weimar Republic. I know it’s almost always inaccurate to make Nazi comparisons. Almost always.
Five years ago, America broke. We didn’t know it then, of course, and for a little while, it appeared that the nation might hold. Biden was our “return to normalcy” moment, but normalcy was already lying cold and dead on the coroner’s table. The Frankenstein monster Trump constructed from its corpse is now operational and rampaging across the globe.
Maybe things need to break now and again. Maybe we needed to taste the corrosive bite of rust on our tongues before finally setting about the hard work of mending and repair? It’s certainly true that America deferred much of her maintenance over the past couple centuries; maybe we needed to take a wrecking ball to her in order to see what remains standing. My fear, and I think the fear of lots of Americans like me, is that when the dust clears from our wanton destruction, there won’t be much of anything left at all.
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