Trump Capitol Quotes

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

2020 books, 2020 quotes, trumpvirus, insurrection, capitol attack, domestic terrorism, trumpism, twitter quotes, trump twitter quotes, january 6th

When the rest of the world watches the news from America, they see a third world dumpster fire. A failed state.

Trump’s lies about the election had led to the violent assault on the Capitol. People had died. His ongoing attacks against the integrity of our elections were undermining our democracy, and could lead to still more violence. We had to find a way to defeat these fake stolen-election claims that had captured so much of the Republican Party. People had to hear the truth.

Doug Porter, a political writer, put it simply: “If Trump’s coup attempt goes unpunished, it will become a training exercise.

Yesterday's assault on the Capitol was an attack on multiracial American democracy, a fragile experiment younger than most US senators. (1/7/2021)

Perhaps the best statistical evidence for this shift lies in the 2021 Pew Research Center survey that found a growing tendency among white supporters of Donald Trump to newly adopt an evangelical identity. “In the end, their own movement was redefined as a reactionary, angry, white Christian, storm-the-Capitol movement,” Gushee said. “People who don’t have any idea about classical evangelical doctrines, but by God, they like Trump and they’re white, so therefore they’re evangelical. That is a complete collapse of moral and religious identity that evangelicals brought on themselves.

Less than two weeks after the riot, two officers committed suicide. The first was Capitol Police Officer Howard “Howie” Liebengood, a fifteen-year veteran and son of a former Senate sergeant-at-arms. The second was MPD Officer Jeffrey Smith, who took a fucking crowbar to the head during the riot from a Trump supporter. By year’s end, two other MPD officers who responded to the Capitol assault also would kill themselves: Kyle deFreytag and Gunther Hashida.

Since January 6, we had met privately several times in a town house near Capitol Hill, along with a small group of experts on authoritarianism and the rise of antidemocratic movements. We agreed that the threat posed by Donald Trump might well imperil the existence of American democracy.

When the tide sank, all boats were lowered. Trump had proven that the majority of Washington Republicans who had initially opposed him were exactly as craven as he had said they were, as he bent them to his will because they saw personal opportunity or necessity for survival, even after the Capitol riot.

The FBL later estimated that over 2,000 people entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Five people died, 172 police officers were injured, and more than 500 were arrested. The cost of the camage to the historic Capitol building exceeded $2.7 million. It took President Trump 187 minutes to post a tweet telling his supporters to "go home.

As we’ve shown previously, this plan faltered at several points because of the courage of officials (nearly all of them Republicans) who refused to go along with it. Donald Trump appeared to believe that anyone who shared his partisan affiliation would also share the same callous disregard for his or her oath to uphold the rule of law. Fortunately, he was wrong.

When Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he attempted to overturn the results in order to seize power illegally and remain in office. When the violent mob he had mobilized laid siege to our Capitol, he watched the attack on television and refused for more than three hours to tell the rioters to leave. Donald Trump’s actions violated the law and the oath he swore to the Constitution.

On January 6, 2021, many Trump supporters observed the storming of the U.S. Capitol with enthusiasm. Trump supporters may explain that existing institutions are so dysfunctional that there is just no alternative to destroying them and building entirely new structures from scratch. But irrespective of whether this view is right or wrong, this is a quintessential revolutionary rather than conservative view.

It is midnight in Washington,” Schiff began. “The lights are finally going out in the Capitol after a long day in the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.” Over the course of the next twenty-five minutes, he said it was not enough to let voters decide because if the Senate were to let Trump off, he would be free to use his power to advantage himself with impunity in the election. “He has done it before, he will do it again,” Schiff warned.

Despite the brutal violence, destruction, and death at the Capitol, despite the fact that Donald Trump’s lies—the same lies Republicans were telling to justify the objections—had mobilized the mob and caused the attack, McCarthy was going to let the travesty go on. Kevin McCarthy lacked the courage and the honor to abide by his oath to the Constitution. This wasn’t leadership. It was cowardice, and it was craven. I wanted no part of it. I got up and walked out of the House chamber.

Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.

Whatever our ex-president claims he thought might happen that day, whatever reaction he says he meant to produce, by that afternoon, he was watching the same live television as the rest of the world. A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him. It was obvious that only President Trump could end this. Former aides publicly begged him to do so. Loyal allies frantically called the administration. But the president did not act swiftly. He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily as the chaos unfolded. He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election. Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet attacking his vice president.… We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.

Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s prescription that “this president will sign whatever is put in front of him,” while also taking advantage of the White House’s lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.

Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s prescription that “this president will sign whatever is put in front of him,” while also taking advantage of the White House’s lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.

We are led by very, very stupid people,” Trump declared at a September 9 rally on Capitol Hill. But it didn’t have to be that way. “We will have so much winning if I get elected,” he vowed, “that you may get bored with the winning.

A Rationale for Violence At first, I thought I was merely witnessing the shocked aftermath of a shocking election. The Left did not expect Trump to win. As late as October 20, 2016, the American Prospect published an article, “Trump No Longer Really Running for President,” the theme of which was that Trump’s “real political goal is to make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to govern.” The election result was, in the words of columnist David Brooks, “the greatest shock of our lifetimes.”25 Trump won against virtually insurmountable odds, which included the mainstream media openly campaigning for Hillary and a civil war within the GOP with the entire intellectual wing of the conservative movement refusing to support him. Initially I interpreted the Left’s violent upheaval as a stunned, heat-of-the-moment response to the biggest come-from-behind victory in U.S. political history. Then I saw two things that made me realize I was wrong. First, the violence did not go away. There were the violent “Not My President’s Day” rallies across the country in February; the violent March 4 disruptions of Trump rallies in California, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Florida; the April anti-Trump tax rallies, supposedly aimed at forcing Trump to release his tax returns; the July impeachment rallies, seeking to build momentum for Trump’s removal from office; and the multiple eruptions at Berkeley.26 In Portland, leftists threw rocks, lead balls, soda cans, glass bottles, and incendiary devices until police dispersed them with the announcement, “May Day is now considered a riot.” Earlier, at the Minnesota State Capitol, leftists threw smoke bombs into the pro-Trump crowd while others set off fireworks in the building, sending people scrambling in fear of a bomb attack. Among those arrested was Linwood Kaine, the son of Hillary’s vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine.27 More of this, undoubtedly, is in store from the Left over the next four years. What this showed is that the Left was engaging in premeditated violence, violence not as outbreak of passion but violence as a political strategy.

The last day of March was the first at work for Mark Meadows as Trump’s fourth chief of staff, tied for the most a president had had in a single term. Meadows, as a leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, had been one of Trump’s most committed champions on Capitol Hill. As chief of staff, Meadows was intent on pleasing Trump in a way none of his predecessors had been, hoping to establish himself not only as the White House’s internal manager but Trump’s most important adviser. Meadows became the latest chief to try to show Trump he could root out press leaks just as Trump wanted, going at it with distinct vigor.

Trump having the ability to trick a mob of rubes into storming the Capitol wasn’t a reason to stop enabling him, it was more evidence that his mob must be obeyed.

As we learned in the Capitol attack, white privilege allows terrorists to approach targets without the usual law enforcement scrutiny reserved for people of color. They can strike with a surprising measure of ease. They may also escape capture or prosecution.

A poll taken the day after the assault on the Capitol revealed that 45 percent of Republicans approve of the action and believe Trump must be imposed as president by force, while 43 percent oppose or least do not support the use of violence to achieve this end. The Far Right has thus created a base of about 30 million people, an increasing number of whom explicitly reject the principle of democracy and are ready to accept authoritarian rule. We are lucky that the object of their veneration is crippled by narcissism and cognitive decline. It is only a matter of time, however, before a new Trump emerges, less delusional and more competent; the pathway to the installation of an authoritarian regime against the will of the majority of the electorate is now well established.92

The culmination of the Trumpist GOP–Far Right alliance occurred on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of violent protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of the presidential election results.33 Trump mostly used populist performance in daily White House press briefings and on Twitter to rebuff expert knowledge and epidemiological protocols coming from the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the U.S. agency primarily responsible for pandemic response), to tout untested treatments like the antimalarial drug Hydroxchloroquine, to refuse to wear a mask, to call for the “liberation” of states from lockdown orders, and to ratchet up nationalism and nativism.

Trump has to do one thing right now, declare the Insurrection Act and fucking fix this. Now, the Congress, Nancy Pelosi was eating ice cream while we were fucking ... I was ... I was fucking depressed in New York. Before I went campaigning. Stuck in an apartment, she was fucking eating ice cream on fucking late night TV. NOTE: As we’ve discussed, at the time of The Event, poor people were feeling the cumulative effects of nearly a year of being locked down in their shitty apartments because of COVID. During this same time, Nancy Pelosi made the brilliant decision to conduct a tour of her lavish home on Late Night TV and spent special time going over her collection of exotic ice creams.

Biden should be the first motherfucker that wants to fucking make sure the audit ... he came on TV, fucking addressed the nation in fucking said we were extremists. Why don’t you just say, “hey, maybe these guys want to be heard?” We’ll talk to ... we’ll talk to Joe Biden. We’re not, we’re not fucking the NBA players that won’t even talk to Trump. We’ll talk to Joe Biden and we’ll talk to him. me: Who ... exactly would do that? Who would do the talking to Joe Biden? Like, is there an organization for what’s happening here? Dominican Guy: (proudly) I’ll talk to Joe Biden myself.

All evidence points to the reality that the deadly siege on the Capitol was a well-planned, well-coordinated, and well-funded attack instigated and fostered by Trump and his Republican allies.

Two days after the January 6, 2021, violent assault on the United States Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, General Mark Milley, the nation’s senior military officer and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed an urgent call on a top secret, back-channel line at 7:03 a.m. to his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, chief of the Joint Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.

Smith, 55, described sitting in the aisle seat in row 26 on the Alaska Airlines 5 p.m. flight out of Washington Reagan National Airport to Seattle on the day after the insurrection at the Capitol. He was surrounded by what looked like nearly 100 MAGA hat–wearing Trump supporters.

people might conclude that this was just more proof that you obviously couldn’t hold Trump responsible for executing on anything, much less an attack on the U.S. Capitol.)

I viewed President Trump as the modern day version of Guy Fawkes.

Biden should have said, “Trump is what happens when you don’t have enough Washington experience. Trump is what happens when you don’t know your way around Capitol Hill like I do. For those of you who miss the Obama years, I’m your guy.

Eight other Republicans, including Hawley and Cruz, objected to the votes from one or more states, even as the Capitol was still stained with the mud and blood of insurrectionists

No, no, no!” Trump shouted. “You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”196

Those same troops were nowhere in sight months later when an overwhelmingly white mob, composed of white nationalists and Trump supporters, stormed the United States Capitol, smashing windows and ransacking offices while lawmakers were in the process of certifying president-elect Joseph Biden’s electoral victory.

When ObamaCare was being passed, Senator Chuck Grassley--a towering giant in this body; a strong, principled conservative--introduced a commonsense provision to ObamaCare that said: If you are going to force ObamaCare on the American people, if you are going to create these health insurance exchanges and you are going to force millions of people into these exchanges, then Congress should not operate by better rules than the American people. So he introduced a simple amendment designed to treat Members of Congress just like the American people so that we didn't have this two-class system.   It has been reported--I was not serving in this body at the time--that amendment was voted on and accepted because Democratic Senators believed the bill would go to conference and in the conference committee they could strip it out and it would magically disappear. But then, because of the procedural games it took to pass it, they didn't have the opportunity to do that, and suddenly, horror of all horrors, this bill saying Congress should be bound by the same rules as the American people became the law of the land.   So what happened? Majority leader Harry Reid and Democratic Senators had a closed-door meeting with the President here in the Capitol where they said, according to public news reports: Let us out of ObamaCare. We don't want to be in these exchanges.   One would assume they are reading the same news reports the rest of us are reading--that ObamaCare is a train wreck, that it is not working--and the last thing Members of Congress wanted to do was to have their health care jeopardized. And the President directed his administration to exempt Members of Congress and their staff, ignoring the language of the statute, disregarding the language of the statute and saying: You guys are friends of the administration. We are taking care of you.   I

All my life, I have binge-watched crime dramas and love movies with cops being the heroes, but this wasn’t a movie. This was real life and it was happening in real time. At the conclusion of the two-hour meeting, I wanted to tell the taxi driver not to take us back to the DNC but right to the Pentagon. This was a war, clearly, but waged on a different kind of battlefield. During that twelve-block ride up Capitol Hill, we didn’t say a thing. Henry looked left, Ray looked right, Tom was checking his phone, and I was in suspended disbelief looking straight up at the dome of the U.S. Capitol. As soon as we got back into the building, we sat numb and silent on the couches in Debbie’s office. I am not one to tremble, because I am my daddy’s girl and I do not scare easily.

Jan 6: Trump supporters storm the US Capitol, leading to the deaths of five people. Somewhere a poet writes in moonless light & all at once puts her pen down.

When I was writing The Between during that tumultuous time after Hurricane Andrew, I wondered if a white supremacist as the story’s villain might feel too “old fashioned.” I naively thought perhaps the sacrifices of my parents and the people they worked with in the civil rights era had created a world where the violent racism referenced in my book might not ring as true. Then the Oklahoma City bombing happened the same year The Between was published, carried out by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, and white supremacy and racism gained prominent voices from the highest level of the United States government. On January 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol to try to invalidate the presidential election—in large part because they did not want Black votes counted. Like

Anna Eshoo, the senior California lawmaker close to Pelosi, had a painful conversation with her daughter about the experience of interacting with Republicans after the riot. To the seventy-eight-year-old Californian, after a quarter century in Congress, the physical space of the Capitol felt defiled. There was a pervasive sense of violation, she says: “I think it’s with all of us—that they were there, what they did, what they said, how they desecrated the place and how close we came to the government being overthrown.” When her daughter asked how it felt to go to work with Republicans who were still denying the election results, Eshoo offered one of the most wrenching comparisons imaginable. “It feels like being in the same room with your rapist,” she recalls saying.

There’s still a lingering afterglow here from the euphoria earlier. A feeling that maybe some great victory has been won and there is a reason to be optimistic. On the other hand, I see a guy tying a hangman’s noose when I get closer to the monument. He grins maniacally as he ties it. “Traitors get the rope,” he says in a hollow, emotionless voice that sends chills down my spine. “Hey man, you’re gonna do whatever you want to do, I’m not going to try to stop you. I’m just gonna say that I think that might backfire.” I say, pointing at the tied rope in his hands. “I think that if anyone in the media sees that they’re gonna say it’s racist. I think you’re running the risk of making your whole movement look bad. This isn’t my fight, but you might want to think about that. OK, I spoke my piece.” There is a pause, he stares at me, his expression unreadable. “Traitors get the rope,” he says in a hollow, emotionless voice that sends chills down my spine. It’s like he’s a recording. He just says the exact same thing, in the exact same way, every time anyone tries to talk to him. Why do I even care if these people make themselves look bad? They’re not my people. At least some of them look bad because they are bad; right? Do I really think the guy with the hangman’s noose is just misunderstood? In my travels, I’ve seen many instances where the media was unfair to Trump supporters, but I’ve also met some damn creepy mother-f*ckers, especially in the last few weeks. Maybe the old protester in me just hates to see all this effort go into an anti-government demonstration and have nothing good come out of it.

I spend some time talking to a guy who has a remarkably calm voice, considering he’s only a few feet away from the line of police shields. “I hope that today is kind of the ... the catalyst for the Trump supporters and the populist right to, to realize that the populist left, the Antifa and the BLM movement, we all have a very common enemy, and that’s the establishment politicians,” he says. Ah! How often did I dream that dream in my idealistic youth? Then he calls out the government for “giving us back six hundred dollars after they close all of our businesses and stuff.” He argues for a “peaceful divorce” between the states, in which the federal government still handles dealing with foreign countries and a few other important matters, but individual states were free to have vastly different laws that fit their own culture. So, Texas could have unrestricted gun access and California could have Medicare For All, they just couldn’t force other states to do things they didn’t want to do. Which, for the record, is pretty much the way America used to work, during the 70 years between the ratification of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War. This guy has actual plans! He’s thought of solutions beyond signaling how angry he is and hoping everything takes care of itself after that! I don’t agree with all his ideas, but at least he has them. “But what I’m saying is,” he goes on, “All the people here today, and all the people who have been protesting throughout the year, for the BLM and Antifa and the populist left, all want the same thing.” He eyes the line of black body armor with a troubled look on his face and walks off. NOTE: Let’s just cut through the noise and dwell on that for a minute. Breathe. Stop and Think. What did he just say? Just when I think these people are all nuts, I meet that one. Who the hell was that guy? Why can’t there be more like him?

Trump is Caesar,” he says. “That’s what I keep saying!” I gush. “I’ve been saying that for years.” “He’s gonna lead us across the Rubicon,” he says. “I think he already crossed the Rubicon,” I say. “I think this is him getting assassinated.” There is a pause and then he looks at me. “All of these politicians,” he says slowly and evenly, “They don’t understand that they’re paving the way for somebody so much worse than Trump. This movement isn’t going to go away. I’ve already talked to people who say things crazy, things like they want to overthrow the government. People who hadn’t been saying that three years ago.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had scored points during the BLM protests by writing a letter opposing additional law enforcement and National Guard deployment,[108] and on the night before Trump’s gathering was planned, she sent out a similar letter, saying flatly that, except for the small deployment of 340 unarmed National Guard to direct traffic, “the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without notification.”[109] In fact, federal agencies had offered to reinforce security at the Capitol for the 6th, but they were rebuffed.[110] The mayor of D.C. has mostly escaped blame for The Event, but I have to wonder how history might’ve been different if she’d accepted the additional security instead of sending that letter.

The corporations silenced the president. I, for one, had not realized that was how the system worked. And I am not a little concerned about what that precedent will mean for future presidents, presidential candidates, and candidates running for any elected office. All of them literally cannot win elections without social media and they apparently can be kicked off social media whenever the owners of the companies get mad at them. Even if the outcome in Trump’s case might seem reasonable on the surface, what system led to that outcome? This move puts private, for-profit social media companies in a position to control what any politician can say, not just Trump. But hey, that won’t contribute to the collapse of my democracy later on down the line, right?

In the spirit of accuracy, I think it’s fair to note that Trump also sent out two tweets throughout the day telling the mob to stay “peaceful,”[116] and then when he told the mob to “go home,” they did, almost instantly. Trump’s supporters want to give him credit for that, but while I suppose it’s better than nothing, it’s not so great when you really think about it. If Trump had the power to stop them at any time, why the hell didn’t he call them off the moment they broke into the building? During his second impeachment, a member of Congress, a Republican no less, recounted a story that Trump was on the phone with one of them as they begged him to call off the mob, but even though he knew the building was overrun he just said, “I guess these people are more upset by the election than you are.

As I’ve mentioned before, unlike a better planned “march” there was no one on the ground who could make the mob stop, Trump was the only one on earth who could stop them, and instead of doing that, he spent his time trying to get concessions from Congress, as they fled the building and begged him for help. Surely THAT’s a crime, isn’t it?

Even if Trump wasn’t a criminal mastermind who planned everything three steps in advance, he still took advantage of the situation. It stands to me as a testament to the Democrats’ stupidity that they failed to charge him with that eminently more provable offense, as well as his criminal negligence in planning his “march.” Instead, the Democrats concocted a much harder-to- prove accusation about Trump knew in advance everything that was going to happen. But that too falls outside the scope of this book. So, Trump belatedly did the right

What really happened that day? Well, if you listen to the internet, behind every corner there’s an evil genius who masterminded it. Trump! Antifa! The Proud Boys! The Police! They’re all brilliant strategists who knew exactly what would happen months in advance! But you should never bet on genius when stupidity explains just as well.

The Event was created by our overlapping stupidity. And all the stupid people learned nothing, by the way. On both sides of the great political divide, they continued to double down on their stupid ways, doing their same stupid things that were, in the words of the guy I watched the certification with, “paving the way for somebody so much worse than Trump.

... I include this anecdote here because I want future generations to understand just how easy it was to catch the mainstream media lying during my time period. Everybody who cared to apply even the slightest skepticism could see that television, newspapers, and internet news outlets lied and exaggerated all the time. And every lie hurt Trump’s movement and helped Biden’s, it never went the other way, unless you checked the conservative media like Fox News or AM radio stations.

Julius Caesar was a public official, extremely popular with the common people, who started breaking the rules and amassing more power than the government’s checks and balances were supposed to allow. The common citizens felt the government had always failed to tackle the rampant problems of poverty and corruption, and they felt no matter who they voted for, the government ignored them. The citizens of Rome had reached a point where they didn’t care if Caesar overthrew the Republic, so long as he did something to help them. Caesar, for his part, claimed he was the one person trying to solve the big problems his Republic faced; he claimed that out-of-touch elites were not giving him a fair chance, nor giving him the credit he deserved for being, essentially, the most terrific, amazing guy ever.[15] So, if anything, I raise my voice and pause dramatically for effect, Trump is the one who seems like Caesar in any Roman Republic metaphor! So, these two women are basically waving a sign saying their own leader should be stabbed to death.

1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, there had already been several battles and many shots fired leading up to that moment. I find it amazing that people who claim to love America can know so little about American history. This fake version of the Revolution was relayed to me by multiple people and always in the context of telling me we should repeat it. I suspect, but I cannot prove, that this “no shots fired” version of 1776 was shared on online forums by people encouraging Trump supporters to break into the building. I think someone online was telling them, “Look! Just go down into the building and force them to resign. You can do it with no shots fired. That’s what George Washington did, so it’s OK for us to do it too.

Even though I’m not on Trump’s side, I feel the media consistently downplays the size of his crowds.

For those of you in future generations who’ve never seen “Trump, Live in Concert,” the experience is ... uncanny. His voice is oddly nasal, and just slightly higher pitched than most other men; not pleasing, yet impossible to ignore. He sounds somehow self-confident and whiny at the same time. He often speaks without a teleprompter, which is unheard of in my time, he just makes up 90-minute rants on the spot. And although the results can be unconventional and even bizarre, it also feels more like a real conversation than any politician I’ve ever seen.

Trump’s own lawyer finds the courage to cut him off, but by that time he’s laid out so many accusations that it’s impossible to even remember them, much less respond. So Raffensperger ignores 95% of Trump’s accusations and mostly just says that his numbers are all wrong. Which hey, they probably are, but I wanna hear WHY they’re wrong! How is an engaged citizen in a decaying republic supposed to analyze who’s the bigger liar if this is all they give me?

that, but at a minimum, it seemed worth looking into. Yet the State Farm Video was mostly downplayed by the mainstream media, and when the story was mentioned at all, it was oddly easy to catch the media contradicting each other. ABC News, for example, confirmed the election workers were sent home because of the burst pipe, reporting, “... the election department sent the State Farm Arena absentee ballot counters home at 10:30 p.m.”[18] Whereas the independent fact-check website Politifact rated President Trump as “pants on fire lying” for his claim that election workers were sent home, reporting: “Those officials have said there was never an instruction for election observers to leave.”[19] Obviously, those can’t both be true, and I really did want someone, anyone, to dig into the story for me.

Trump’s so close right now! If he could just shut up, he’d either get an answer to soothe his concerns or prove to the world that Raffensperger is covering up something suspicious. All he has to do is wait for an answer to the question that he already fucking asked ... but he can’t do it!!! Trump starts talking again. Lured away by the sweet sound of his own voice, he gets distracted talking about his angry feelings, he piles questions on top of each other, and seems to forget what point he was building towards, and so his one good point about the poll watchers has been safely buried under a heap of bad ones. It’s like he doesn’t understand the concept that no one can answer you if you don’t stop talking.

he mentions that the buses taking the Vietnamese to MAGA events across America are all free. I ask who pays, but he doesn’t know ... interesting. Some rich benefactor is paying to send busloads of South Vietnamese to Trump events, presumably so they’ll talk about fighting communism. But who? Who’d think that was the best use of their limited resources?

We have to HOLD not only for our CHILDREN, for our COUNTRY, but for our WORLD! THIS ISN’T ABOUT TRUMP! THIS NEVER WAS ABOUT TRUMP! HE WAS SIMPLY THE CATALYST THAT BROUGHT ALL OF US LIKE-MINDED, SANE-THINKING PEOPLE TOGETHER! HE IS THIS ... epicenter. (pause) And they are pushing us back again.

many of the Trump supporters who came to D.C. left messages to their loved ones explaining that they might never come back.[47] This is important because it implies what happened was at least somewhat planned in advance by at least some of those involved, and those people were anticipating violence might happen.

We can also see here that he believes that the entire pandemic is a “farce” staged for political purposes. He also thinks The Media has been censoring and misleading since at least the beginning of the Trump presidency. These aren’t just his beliefs; they’re the reasons why he stormed the Capitol. People argue a lot about what peoples’ real motives were when they stormed the Capitol. He just told you.

Joe Biden himself, in a presidential debate, called them “an idea, not an organization.”[62] But that’s … not true. When I was in Philadelphia, it took me five minutes to google the local Antifa chapter’s website, where they were busily organizing to take pictures of people at Trump events and sending those pictures to the people’s employers, to get them fired for being white supremacists.

It was hard not to think the Proud Boys and Trump had some kind of nudge-wink arrangement, similar in some ways to Biden claiming Antifa was only an idea.

As a Capitol Hill staffer for Texas representative Michael McCaul, Miles Taylor saw Trump from the perspective of a committed Republican. Later, after serving in senior positions in the administration, Taylor became so disaffected with Trump that he wrote the famous “Anonymous” critique of the president that ran on the op-ed page of the New York Times. But long before Trump was even a candidate, he had an inkling there would be trouble: “In the middle of the 2016 race, I was working on Capitol Hill at the time, on the House side, as the policy director on the House Homeland Security Committee. Michael McCaul was chairman, Paul Ryan was Speaker. And we were in the midst of developing something for Paul Ryan called the Better Way agenda. Ryan wanted to put out an optimistic center-right vision for America’s future. Very policy oriented, but also a brand that Republicans could run on for years. He wanted this to be enduring. And I think, frankly, and had it been successful, he would have seen it as the centerpiece of his time as Speaker.

Lest we conclude this is a fringe movement involving only a small percentage of American Christians, statistics show that nearly two-thirds of mainline Protestants7—members of the supposedly “liberal” Christian denominations—and two-thirds of all Christians taken together8 agree with many of the sentiments, if not the actions, of the thousands who marched on the Capitol on January 6. Many of us have neighbors, friends, and family members who agree at least with the beliefs underlying that violent insurgence. Based on the best research to date, approximately half (52%) of Americans either fully embrace or lean toward the main tenets of Christian nationalism. 9 While this percentage decreased slightly between 2007 and 2017, Christian nationalists have become more visible and vocal since Trump’s election in 2016. The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center (9/ 11) caused an upsurge in nationalistic fervor and a parallel rise in Islamophobia.

Can I speak with Pelosi? Yeah, we’re coming for you, bitch! Mike Pence? We’re coming for you too, fucking traitor!”1 A mass of insurrectionists started to chant, “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” They were well aware that a hanging platform with a noose was set up outside the Capitol. For the members of Congress, death was a near thing.

The consequence of these conspiracies became manifest on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of Trump supporters, encouraged by right-wing media and Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly insurrection aimed at overturning the election. There was a time in the United States that such startling violence would have bought at least a few days of unity. But with blood still drying on the Capitol floor, more than one hundred Republican members of Congress voted to overturn the election and spread conspiracies about a “false-flag” operation that had already begun to circulate within right-wing media. Over the next twenty-four hours, hosts went on air to denounce the violence, then immediately began to argue, falsely, that left-wing agitators and Antifa were responsible for the insurrection.

It gets worse. Much worse. In June 2017, a left-wing activist, armed with a rifle and a 9 mm handgun, walked up to a practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game and started shooting at Republicans. Sometime before, he’d tweeted: “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” My friend Republican Whip Steve Scalise was so badly injured he almost died. Matt Mikaf, a lobbyist and former legislative assistant, was critically wounded and underwent surgery. Another legislative aide, Zack Barth, was shot in the calf. Two Capitol Police officers, David Bailey and Crystal Griner, were injured just before they took down the shooter.

The Loss of Freedom In the month of January 2021, when the MAGA Trump march in Washington, D.C. ended with a forced break-in at the U.S. Capitol, the media and talking heads of journalists interviewing so-called experts in political science began to express their real views, not just toward a few hundred instigators, but toward anyone and everyone who was conservative, and especially any Trump supporter. They made it clear that everyone, including all of the 75 million people who voted for Trump, needed to be forced to undergo “reprogramming” in a special government-sponsored camp. These same types of camps are used in China to “assist” (actually force) a person in changing their beliefs. In this case, these camps could be used to establish conservative ideology as wrong. One person suggested organizing special camps to force “these people” to undergo evaluations. One progressive publicly said it would be acceptable to separate parents from their children if need be. The radical left began saying that those in the House and Senate who believed there was voter fraud should resign, or at least be put on a no-fly list, which is a penalty for anyone being labeled a possible domestic terrorist. This is pure Marxist-style harassment.

These days, anyone who supports my father is a target. Just as the anti-Trump revolution was beginning, Senator Rand Paul, one of my father’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, was brutally attacked by his neighbor, an avowed lefty. The man ran down a steep hill to gain momentum and then blindsided Senator Paul, who had headphones on and his back turned. He never knew the man was coming. The senator had six broken ribs and blood in his lungs. Doctors who examined him said that the injuries sustained were more consistent with a car accident than a sucker punch. As he was recovering, the left celebrated. The celebration continues among some of the most callous and idiotic people on the left.

And anyway, it was Friday. Thank God it was Friday, after the worst week in the history of the Trump presidency—losing the Senate, failing in an Electoral College showdown, the Capitol attack, impeachment on the agenda, again. In fact, it was the worst week in the history of any presidency.

This Republican takeback of Capitol Hill would immediately

As an American, I acknowledge that this book is a reflection on the era associated with former president Donald Trump—especially with the shocking events after the November 2020 election, when avowed Christians, acting for explicitly Christian reasons, were at the forefront of those who sought to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the 46th US president. Their dangerous attitudes were seen most strongly in those who violently breached the US capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Despite what they had seen with their own eyes, for the GOP to condemn the people who had stormed the Capitol on January 6 as insurrectionists would be to condemn Trump, and the identity of their own base. They couldn’t risk distancing themselves from the red-pilled right, which had been schooled to line up behind Trump. Right-wing influencers and pundits had their work cut out for them in shaping a counternarrative, not only about the direction of the GOP but about objective political truth as well. Tucker Carlson rose to the challenge at the year anniversary mark with a three-part documentary series arguing that the insurrection had been a deep state trap to persecute conservatives. “The U.S. government has in fact launched a new war on terror,” he said. “But it’s not against Al Qaeda, it’s against American citizens.

Tuberville took the call from Trump about fifteen minutes after rioters broke into the Capitol and at a point of maximum danger for Pence. Secret Service agents had just whisked the vice president out of the Senate chamber. A few minutes later, at 2:24 p.m.,[6] Trump posted his infamous tweet saying, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” Just two minutes after Trump posted that tweet, rioters came within a mere forty feet of Pence as the Secret Service rushed him down the stairwell behind the Senate chamber on his way to a loading dock below the Capitol. The crowd’s reaction to Trump’s tweet proved the rioters were taking their cues from him. In video presented by the January 6 Committee, a man with a bullhorn can be seen on the steps of the Capitol reading the tweet to the crowd. After the man reads the tweet, the crowd starts chanting, “Bring out Pence! Bring out Pence!” Those chants soon changed to the more direct and unforgettable chants of “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!

In short, President Trump was informed over and over again, by his senior appointees, campaign experts and those who had served him for years, that his election fraud allegations were nonsense.

One year after the Capitol attack, the only people punished were the low-level foot soldiers, not elite coordinators like Michael Flynn, L. Lin Wood, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and not Trump himself.

And he said [to President Trump], “You have got to get on TV. You’ve got to get on Twitter. You’ve got to call these people off.” You know what the President said to him? This is as it’s happening. He said, “Well Kevin, these aren’t my people. You know, these are Antifa. And Kevin responded and said, “No, they’re your people.

On January 6, when the insurrectionists constructed a gallows and noose outside of the Capitol, they referred directly to a scene in The Turner Diaries; the entire action referenced a strike on the Capitol in that novel. This indicates that January 6 was not meant as a mass-casualty event but a recruitment and radicalization exercise to draw others into the fold. Certainly this happened immediately after the rally, as white power activists and others on the militant Right reached into the Trump base and QAnon groups in intensified recruitment campaigns.

When Trump voters revolted, when they stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, part of what they wanted restored was a racial caste system that ranked them nearer the top because they were white: the Confederate battle flags they carried that day gave them away.

He concluded by addressing his father directly: “Dad, my sitting here today in the U.S. Capitol talking to our elected officials is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union, to come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth.

Im Großen und Ganzen jedenfalls wurde die Politik des Landes in den letzten vier Jahren eher auf dem Capitol Hill gemacht als im Weißen Haus. Für Mitch McConnell ist die Wette auf Trump also bisher vollständig aufgegangen.

The most lasting critiques of the president, and of his enablers, will extend far beyond policy. From the moment Trump took office, Republicans on Capitol Hill and throughout the administration would offer a common refrain: “Focus on what he does, not on what he says.” For all Trump’s bizarre behavior and inflammatory rhetoric, they explained, he was delivering on many policies for which the party had long hungered. But this argument conveniently obscured a self-evident reality about the role of the presidency. Trump, as the American chief executive, is both the head of government and the head of state. His behavior and his rhetoric, therefore, were every bit as relevant as his policies. In certain instances, what the president said was actually more meaningful than what he did.

Certainly, Trump and his team lost big time by the Capitol incursion as the result was that the hearings that would have likely vindicated the claim that the election had been stolen were permanently interrupted and stopped.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a CNN interview that investors shouldn’t take Trump “word for word.” He promised that there would be no Washington bailout of Puerto Rico. Hedge funds

The 1/6 MAGA attack on the Capitol was the biggest terrorist attack in America since 9/11.

It was an uncomfortable snapshot for some in the party: an overwhelmingly white audience booing a black moderator on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in a state where the Confederate flag still flew on the Capitol grounds. But for Gingrich it was a moment of clarity. Where all his calculated strategies had failed, his off-the-cuff reprimand of Williams had succeeded.

It’s a slightly modified Buddhist meditation I do, and I highly recommend it. First, I think of Eleanor and my Grannybarb, two beings for whom I feel nothing but the purest love, the wake-up-and-thank-God-every-morning gratitude. I hold that feeling in my heart for a moment, to get it nice and settled in, and then I try to transfer it to myself and say, “May I be well, happy, and peaceful.” I extend it to people in my life who have brought me to a new place, introduced a new way of thinking, or just remind me of who I am working to become, saying, “May my teachers be well, happy, and peaceful.” I do and say the same thing for my family and then my friends, all while trying to extend that same deep, uncritical love to each and every one. Then it’s the indifferent people: the sweet people at my local 7-Eleven or any random person I may have seen that day. I also wish for them to be well, happy, and peaceful. Now, here is the very hard part: I try, so hard, to extend that same love and hope for goodness to the unfriendly person, and in this case, I try to think of the people I feel the very least friendly to, who are Trump, Stephen Miller, armed protestors in state capitols, etc.