Tea Party resentment led to Capitol violence
On Feb. 16, 2010, I visited various San Antonio election sites to talk with people on the first day of early voting for the Texas primary.
My first stop was on the Southeast Side at Mccreless Library, where I spoke with a bearded, middle-aged man who was a strong supporter of the growing Tea Party movement.
He confidently (and accurately) predicted that the Tea Party would fuel a huge Republican wave election that November.
But he also warned that if sketchy establishment forces conspired to take that victory away, he was prepared for revolution.
For reasons that made little sense to me, he singled out Katie Couric, then the anchor of the CBS Evening News, as someone who his like-minded reactionaries would target for violent reprisals if the GOP failed to carry the election.
I thought of that man Wednesday afternoon when a mob of ill-informed, rageaholic, conspiracy-mongering, self-appointed guardians of liberty stormed the U.S. Capitol because they couldn’t accept the fact that Congress was about to certify the election defeat of their idol,
President Donald Trump.
Over the years, I met many of the people in the Bexar County Tea Party movement. Some of them were thoughtful, articulate individuals genuinely concerned about the expanding power of the federal government.
Within the Tea Party movement, however, there always was a clear strain of paranoia, aggression, susceptibility to irrational conspiracy theories and a tendency to see policy disagreements in apocalyptic terms.
For them, then-president Barack Obama wasn’t simply a Democrat trying to expand health-insurance coverage through a plan they disliked. He was a malignant force, a Manchurian candidate bent on destroying the country.
The Tea Party movement always was most effective at articulating what it opposed. Its activists could shout down members of Congress at town halls and scare establishment Republicans with the threat of a primary challenge from the right flank. It was less effective, however, at identifying what it supported.
When Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lost to Obama in 2012, Tea Party activists were disappointed, but they weren’t about to storm the Capitol over it, because they didn’t care that much about Romney.
That changed with Trump. Beginning in 2011, when Trump stirred up a crackpot conspiracy theory that Obama had lied about being born in Hawaii, he became the kind of leader that the Tea Party understood: a human Molotov cocktail bent on blowing up all our institutions.
Wednesday’s Capitol rampage was the culmination of the energy that the Tea Party movement unleashed 12 years ago.
For all the shouting about trying to save our country from socialism, however, the insurrection had little to do with ideology. It all was about Trump’s cult of personality.
After all, one of the goals of the rioters was to confront Vice President Mike Pence, who is undeniably a more stalwart conservative than Trump will ever be.
But the rioters saw Pence as a sellout, because Trump wrongly convinced them that Pence had the unilateral power to overturn the results of an election in which 159 million people voted, but chose not to use this power.
On Wednesday, we were treated to the image of a Trump worshiper standing in Pence’s spot on the dais of the Senate Chamber, shouting: “Trump won that election!”
We were blessed with the wisdom of Richard “Bigo” Barnett, a 60-year-old man from Gravette, Ark., who broke into the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sat in her chair, put his feet up on her desk, scratched his testicles, wrote Pelosi a nasty note and walked away with a personalized envelope.
We saw Trump devotees, after temporarily stopping the vote certification, raise their fists in exultation as they exited the Capitol through a door on which someone had scrawled, “Murder the Media.”
Trump apologists scrambled to suggest that left-wing troublemakers must have infiltrated the demonstration, because, after all, Trump rallies are unfailingly peaceful.
Have they forgotten the fact that MSNBC reporter Katy Tur had to be escorted to her vehicle by Secret Service agents after a 2015 rally in which Trump stirred up the crowd against her?
Did they not see the April 2020 riot in Phoenix, where Trump devotees stormed the Arizona Capitol in opposition to statewide COVID-19 stay-at-home orders?
What about the rifle-wielding militia members who tried to break into the legislative chambers of Michigan’s state Capitol last April over similar pandemic restrictions?
“These are very good people, but they are angry,” Trump tweeted about the Michigan riot.
Wednesday, in a prepared video address, he told the domestic terrorists who vandalized the home of our national government: “We love you.”
What kind of love is this? It’s the transactional love of a narcissist who proudly owns the hard underbelly of American resentment, delusion and paranoia.
On Wednesday, his army put on an amateur civil-war show for him.