What hath Trump wrought?
Jan. 6, I had just finished watching a CALS Legacies & Lunch presentation on Zoom about Johnny Cash when I signed onto Facebook to see what was going on. My news feed was flooded with posts about Trump supporters who had broken into the U.S. Capitol on the day that both the House and Senate were meeting to certify the results of the 2020 General Election. I saw photographs and videos of people shouting the president’s slogans while storming the cradle of American Democracy itself.
This prompted me to turn on the TV and what I saw was horrific.
People waving Trump flags, dressed in ridiculous costumes, using barricades as ladders, and some were even using ropes to scale the Capitol walls like they were soldiers attempting an armed insurrection.
I saw Capitol police fighting them off but what was really striking was that once the invaders were inside the Crypt the police were doing little to nothing to stop them.
Some were reportedly even taking pictures with armed protesters in the Crypt of the U.S. Capitol. What? Another time a lone Africanamerican policeman was being chased by a crowd near the Senate chamber. An Arkansas man was photographed in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. There was even a standoff in the House chamber. Where did these people come from? Well, the president was holding one of his strange rallies at the White House that day just down the street from the Capitol. The president stood behind bullet-proof glass spewing the same hate and lies that he has been for the past four years. But, toward the end of his speech, the president said, “After this, we’re going to walk down (to the Capitol) and I’ll be there with you.”
He said it again later but this time he said, “I know everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Only the President didn’t go with them.
Like a coward, the President stayed behind as an angry mob that he created marched to the Capitol, over ran the police and broke into what Presidentelect Joe Biden called the “Citadel of Liberty.”
The president also did nothing to stop the madness once it started happening.
Vice-president Mike Pence stepped in instead. When he could have diffused the situation, Donald Trump gave another speech that both condemned the mob and spewed more lies about the election, which he believes was rigged against him, even after Attorney General William Barr and numerous judges have said that it wasn’t.
According to an article in The Guardian, Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old veteran from San Diego, was killed by Capitol police as she and other members of the mob tried to break through a barricaded door.
Three other people were killed from “medical emergencies,” said the Guardian, who was quoting Washington D.C. police Chief Robert Contee — who resigned the next day. The same article reported that 14 officers were injured and there were 52 reported arrests that day. Five of them were for firearms and the other 47 for curfew violations and unlawful entry. Twenty-six of those arrests were on Capitol grounds. A cooler filled with Molotov cocktails was found on Capitol grounds and pipe bombs were reportedly recovered at both the DNC and RNC offices in Washington D.C. as well.
A Capitol police officer later died from injuries he suffered during the breach.
Even though Trump told the crowd that day to “peacefully and patriotically make you voices heard,” very few of them followed that advice. And the almost cordial way these people were treated when compared to the way police treated Black Lives Matter protesters last summer is startling.
It is apparent from his actions that the president doesn’t really care about his oath, his duties, or even his own supporters. If he did, he’d never have sent them into harm’s way to conduct an assault on the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.
The president and anyone else involved should be held responsible for their actions.