The madness of Trumpism on full display

The whole world was watching, and on Wednesday we didn’t look so good.

Rabid, armed supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump invading the Capitol was one thing to behold. It was even worse that not long before, the president had directly addressed the mob and fanned the flames that led the gathering of MAGA fans to storm the Capitol, which was criminally easy to do, with security unaccountably light.

That president then watched on television from the Oval Office as the horde descended on the legislative branch of our federal government, which at the moment was engaged in the solemn constitutional formality of certifying the duly elected next president of the United States of America.

It was chaos that President Donald Trump himself created.

It was bedlam that led to many police officers being injured and a woman being killed.

One “stop it now” tweet from him, and it would have been over. Instead, he filled the phones of the seditious confederacy of 2021 with tweets calling for them not to stand down but asking them, mildly, “to please support our Capitol police and law enforcement,” which was an easy thing for them to decline to do. Instead, the presidential non-anger was powerful catnip to the mob who tried to take democracy down.

The Capitol steps were so easily breached by the throng the president deployed it makes us wonder what law enforcement in Washington, D.C. was thinking on a day that its leaders surely knew would be filled with rancor after weeks of presidential dog whistles and a promised march on Washington by intensely inflamed partisans of the president.

The American flag was taken down; a Trump 2020 flag was raised. The members of the Senate and the House were put on lockdown, and the vice president evacuated. Seeing little resistance, the rabble, many of them armed, easily broke the outer Capitol windows and rolled into the halls of our Congress. They sat grinning in their ninja suits in the well of the United States Senate. They burgled the office of the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, feet up on the desk. The invading army burst the panes of glass on the ornate doors that lead into the deliberative chamber of that House, causing the staff of the sergeant of arms to draw their weapons there for the first time since the 1950s.

But let’s leave the sadly manipulated people out of this. The real sedition comes from the president and his aides de camp. From apologist Rudy Giuliani, who called for a “trial by combat” over the certified election results. From Ivanka Trump, his daughter and adviser, who tweeted that the disloyal militia marching on the Capitol were “American patriots.”

Late in the afternoon, when Trump released a video in which he was finally expected to order his blind followers to stand down, he did not do so. Oh, he mumbled that “you have to go home now” after the mob had already started to disperse. But most of the agitprop was more encouragement: his failed re-election effort was “stolen,” he told the faithful; he actually won in a “landslide,” not lost by 7 million votes; “it was a fraudulent election,” and “they could take it away” because they, whomever they might be, are “so bad and so evil.”

President Trump can’t leave office soon enough. He is a demagogue, a liar, a fraud. The Republican Party ought not to indulge his attempts to seek the presidency again and must cease to indulge his delusions any longer.