Trump fanatics invade Capitol as his presidency disintegrates
https://socialistaction.org/2021/01/12/trump-fanatics-invade-capitol-as-his-presidency-disintegrates/
January 12, 2021
By Jeff Mackler
Chaos and disarray marked an electrified Washington, D.C. political
scene in the days immediately following the Wednesday, Jan. 6 President
Donald Trump-instigated rampaging mob that stormed the Capitol Building
aimed at preventing an in-session joint meeting of the U.S. House of
Representatives and Senate from certifying Joseph Biden’s Nov. 3
Electoral College victory.
The several hundred rightwing racist rioters – a small portion of the
several thousands that Trump mobilized for a rally earlier in the day –
carrying Trump and Confederate flags, an array of weapons paraphernalia,
military gear and noxious gas explosives, easily breached the Capitol
Police’s unusually thin line of security. The raging Trumpists,
virtually unhindered for two-plus hours, smashed Capitol building
windows with iron bars, entered the Capitol Dome and took possession of
the Senate chambers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, among several
others, was occupied and vandalized. The handful of overwhelmed security
guards inside proved helpless to intervene; some literally took selfies
and high fived the rioters, according to a report by Amy Goodman’s
Democracy Now! Senate security officials organized the hurried
evacuation of the assembled members of the House and Senate while others
barricaded the doors to the House in an armed standoff against the
marauding intruders.
This high drama violent spectacle was captured live and broadcast around
the world including videos of frightened elected officials seeking
refuge under desks or laying on the ground as the chamber was inundated
with tear gas.
Trump’s mass rally
At least 25,000, perhaps 50,000 Trump supporters had rallied earlier in
the day at the Ellipse near the White House for a long planned
Trump-initiated “Stop the Steal” mobilization to challenge the joint
session’s expected Biden certification. Said Trump in tweets to build
the rally. “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there! Will be wild!”
Trump addressed the rally for an hour proclaiming, “You’ll never take
back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have
to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing
and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated.” Declaring
that he would “never concede,” and claiming that he won the election,
Trump’s presidency was nevertheless disintegrating. The joint session
reconvened early the next morning to certify Biden’s victory, with 139
House members and 10 Senators dissenting. Hours later, a deflated Trump,
with his staff and cabinet members resigning in droves, tweeted that he
would assist in the transition to the new president but that would not
attend Biden’s Jan. 20 inaugural.
Earlier in the day Trump promised to join the planned “Stop the Steal”
march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, but instead immediately
headed to the White House, where he later frantically phoned hoped for
loyal Republicans, who had been evacuated from the Capitol and
sequestered to safe and unidentified locations, to press them to reject
Biden’s certification when the session resumed. Trump’s son and featured
rally speaker Donald Trump Jr., denounced VP Mike Pence and other
Republicans for refusing in advance to use the joint session to reject
Biden’s certification. The marching crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!
Hang Mike Pence!” A Reuters photographer, Jim Bourg, stated that he
heard Capitol Hill rioters declaring “they hoped to find Vice President
Mike Pence and execute him by hanging him from a Capitol Hill tree as a
traitor.” Pence was present when the rioters later entered the chambers,
mocked, but unharmed.
Said Trump Jr. at the rally, “We’re coming for you and we’re going to
have a good time doing it.” Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolf Giuliani,
who previously played a key role in filing some 60 failed lawsuits
challenging the election results, egged on the crowd of rightwingers,
“Let’s have trial by combat… Stand up and fight!”
Minimal security forces present at Capitol
With regard to calling on security forces to defend the beleaguered and
occupied Capitol, not to mention to rescue the sequestered
congresspersons and senators, the increasingly disoriented Trump,
viewing the moment as his last hope to retain his presidency, played no
role. In his absence, VP Pence took charge of calling in various police
agencies to protect House and Senate members. In a matter of hours, not
minutes, a virtual army of National Guard troops, Capitol Police, FBI
and other armed forces appeared and slowly, gently to be sure, cleared
the area following the DC Mayor Muriel Bowser” declaration of a 6:00 pm
curfew. Most of the occupying racist bigots were initially allowed to
freely leave the premises. The great portion of the original marchers
that headed toward the Capitol, wanting no part of a confrontation with
security officials, gradually dispersed and disappeared. But thousands
remained.
Capitol Police shot and killed one of the intruders, 35-year-old Air
Force veteran Ashli Babbitt of San Diego, later described by officials
as a strong QAnon conspiracy theory believer. Four other Trump
supporters outside the Capitol were later reported to have died due to
unspecified “medical emergencies.” Some 14 rioters were initially
arrested; 83 more were subsequently taken into police custody as of Jan.
9. One member of the Capitol Police died, reportedly from injuries
inflicted from a fire extinguisher.
DC Mayor Bowser, in anticipation of planned acts of violence from
organized rightwing groups, including the neo-fascist Proud Boys, had
earlier in the week requested the Pentagon to deploy the National Guard.
Weeks before the event thousands of Facebook and Twitter communications
revealed violent far right intentions. Her request was denied according
to some reports, on Trump’s orders.
The stunning absence of Capitol security, especially when some 535
members of the House and Senate were present – the formal elected
national leadership of the U.S. – appeared to be no accident. A day
after the security fiasco, with lawmakers demanding accountability from
responsible officials and an investigation demanded Republican leader
Mitch McConnell, among others, Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund
submitted his resignation. By the end of Thursday, the top security
officials in the Capitol also resigned including Senate Sergeant at Arms
Michael Stenger and his House equivalent.
Ongoing resignations from Trump’s team
VP Pence’s recent break with Trump in refusing to use the proceedings to
challenge the election results put him among a rapidly growing group of
top Republican officials who have deserted Trump’s two-month campaign to
retain the presidency. Resigning Trump cabinet members immediately
following the Jan. 6 Capitol takeover included Transportation Secretary
Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Said DeVos in her
resignation letter to Trump, “There is no mistaking the impact your
rhetoric had on the situation.” No doubt, DeVos, Trump’s reactionary
champion of the privatization of public education and the sister of
Trump pal Erik Prince, founder of the private mercenary army
corporation, Blackwater USA, (now called Academi) considered resigning
rather than take the political risk of voting against Trump’s removal
should Pence invoke procedures to do so under the 25th amendment to the
Constitution.
Mick Mulvaney, a former White House chief of staff now U.S. special
envoy for Northern Ireland, also quit Trump’s administration as did a
number of White House officials, including deputy national security
adviser, Matthew Pottinger and Stephanie Grisham, chief of staff and
press secretary to first lady Melania Trump.
Trump fired a State Department official, Gabriel Noronha, who wrote that
the president was “entirely unfit to remain in office.” Noronha tweeted,
“President Trump fomented an insurrectionist mob that attacked the
Capitol today. He continues to take every opportunity to obstruct the
peaceful transfer of power. These actions threaten our democracy and our
Republic. Trump is entirely unfit to remain in office, and needs to go.”
Noronha added, “All government officials swear to uphold and defend the
Constitution. That is where our loyalties must lie, not to any man or
political party.”
After Chad Wolf, acting Department of Homeland Security secretary, urged
Trump to “strongly condemn the violence” at the U.S. Capitol. Trump
removed him as the president’s nominee to head the agency.
Former Attorney General William Barr, who resigned just before
Christmas, said that Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 was a “betrayal of
his office and supporters.”
The kid glove treatment of the racist Trump mob that aimed at physically
preventing the certification of Biden’s presidency stood in marked
contrast to last summer’s brutal clubbing, gassing and blinding rubber
bullet firing violence and mass arrests unleashed against the peaceful
DC mass mobilizations to protest the Minneapolis police murder of George
Floyd. Trump took the lead in orchestrating that horror, pretending to
invoke the authority of the 1807 Insurrection Act. Whether or not the
relative absence of security forces on Jan. 6 will be attributed to
Trump himself or to complicit racist security forces remains to be
determined.
Biden, himself, with a decades long record of complicity with, if not
facilitation of southern racist segregation norms, not to mention his
more recent role crafting racist mass incarceration oriented
legislation, felt to the need to comment on the near absence of security
forces. Said Biden, “No one can tell me that if it had been a group of
Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated
very, very differently from the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol.
We all know that’s true. And it’s unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.”
Debate over Trump impeachment vs, invoking 25th amendment to remove Trump
Whether to impeach Trump with a second House resolution or to press his
now estranged VP Pence to invoke the 25th amendment to immediately
remove Trump from office are among the issues now under discussion at a
time when Trump’s very stability, if not sanity, is being questioned as
never before. House Speaker Pelosi was reported to have called General
Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss barring
Trump from access to the secret doomsday security codes required to
launch nuclear war!
The 25th amendment allows Vice President Pence and a majority of Trump’s
sitting cabinet to affirm that the president is unable to fulfill the
duties of his office. If they should so affirm, Pence, who to date has
declined invoke the 25th amendment, would immediately becomes the acting
president and then president, following a required two-thirds vote of
the House and Senate. In the waning days of Trump’s presidency neither
of the above scenarios is likely. Should one or another come to pass
nothing of great import for the American people will result, other than
the further humiliation and possible prosecution of an already ruling
class-discredited Trump and a legal ban on his running for president in
2024.
On the real issues of the day – the great issues of out times – an
unprecedented economic crisis where the real rates of unemployment and
underemployment have approached 40 percent, where millions face
immediate eviction or foreclosures, where daily COVID-19 deaths have
reached 4,000, where a raging climate crisis threatens cataclysmic
disaster and the U.S. imperial war machine inflicts daily horrors on
poor and oppressed people around the world – neither party of the ruling
rich has any solutions.
Historical truths revealed
The unfolding events surrounding the storming of the Capitol
inadvertently revealed some historical truths long hidden from public
scrutiny. Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, for example, in
countering Ted Cruz’s joint session move to establish a commission to
review the elections results rather than certify them as the law
requires, invoked the memory of an 1877 Electoral College commission
whose “compromise” effectively changed the outcome of the 1876 election.
Referring to this “devastating Compromise of 1877” Durbin stated, “The
senator from Texas [Ted Cruz] says we just want to create a little
commission. Ten days, we’re going to audit all the states…and find out
what actually occurred. It’s parallel to 1876, Hayes and Tilden. Don’t
forget what that commission achieved: It was a commission that killed
Reconstruction, that established Jim Crow, that even after a Civil War
which tore this nation apart, it re-enslaved African Americans, and it
invited the voter suppression we are still fighting today.”
Perhaps well intentioned, Durbin, a Democrat, got some of his facts
wrong. The 1876 election between Republican Rutherford Hayes and
Democrat Samuel Tilden saw Tilden win the popular vote. But Republican
Hayes negotiated an Electoral College win based on his agreement to
withdraw the occupying Northern federal troops from the Southern States.
The North’s troops were permanently stationed there at the end of the
Civil War to prevent the defeated slavocracy plantation owners, founders
of the Democratic Party, White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan,
from regaining power and effectively nullifying the newly-enacted
constitutional amendments that guaranteed equal rights to former slaves.
In short, in return for the presidency the Republicans placed the former
slavocracy Democrats back in power, where their heirs, including those
who joined the Republicans in the Nixon era, remain today. In any case,
today’s Republicans had no such booty to offer or inclination to entice
Democrats to part with Biden. Indeed, the ruling class as a whole
understands quite well that a Biden presidency, minus Trump’s moronic
bluster, will not differ in its fundamentals from the decisive
bipartisan polices adopted over the past four years.
Jan. 6 was no insurrection or coup attempt
“What happened at the U.S. Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against
the United States, incited by the president,” said Democratic Party’s
now Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer of New York. Republican Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from Kentucky called the attack a
“failed insurrection.” [Editor’s note: With the recent election of
Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock the Democrats
captured the Senate majority.] Contrary to the multiple assertions of
insurrection or an attempted coup, what took place on Jan. 6 was the
product of the delusions of an egomaniac narcissist accidental
president, Donald Trump, who believed that he could game the capitalist
system and bypass its fundamental ruling class power brokers, not to
mention its beholden national security state apparatus and military
establishment. All of the above largely deserted Trump either during the
pre-election period or immediately after.
Today’s class polarization
The Jan. 6 DC Trump mobilization was matched by much smaller
mobilizations in other cities, including in Los Angeles, where a Black
woman observing the event was brutally attacked. The fact that some 74
million voted for Trump in 2020 informs us that in increasingly
desperate times, wherein millions of workers and small business owners
have seen their lives fundamentally undermined by massive plant
closures, pension and health care losses and a generalized bipartisan
attack on their standard of living and quality of life, significant
numbers have turned to reactionary “anti-establishment” demagogues like
Trump. We have seen similar phenomenon around the world from, England to
Eastern Europe to Brazil in Latin America. In the U.S. many supporters
of these reactionary currents, but far from all, have been imbued with
virulent scapegoating racist and anti-immigrant prejudice. In these
increasingly difficult times they are susceptible to Trump’s
hatemongering and even more so to high-powered tirades against the
corporate “Washington, D.C. swamp dwellers.” But these currents have far
from coalesced into fascist-type formations that in times of great
stress and when powerful working class mobilizations threaten capitalist
prerogatives are called on to use force and violence to defend
capitalist rule. No such fascist force exists today. Indeed, of the tens
of thousands of Trumpists in Washington on Jan. 6 only a relative
handful of posturing bigots and individuals associated with Proud Boy
neo-Nazis stormed the Capitol, believing with zero foundation that they
could alter the Nov. 3 election result, not to mention the nature of
”democratic” capitalist rule.
Humanity’s future
In glaring contrast, an estimated 20 million youth and working people in
2,000 U.S, cities joined the summer Black Lives Matter mobilizations
that exceeded in sheer numbers any other working class mobilizations in
U.S. history. Today, neither the reactionary Trumpists or the fighters
for Black freedom, liberation and social equality have established
definitive forms of organization, the former tied to an increasingly
discredited ranting demagogue incapable of dealing with an
out-of-control deadly pandemic and a debilitating economic crisis and
the latter momentarily detoured into the graveyard of social movements,
the Democratic Party.
Today, humanity’s future rests more than ever in the capacity of working
people to build new and independent fighting formations to defend their
interests and meet the challenge posed by capitalist barbarism. This
will in time focus on the building of a qualitatively expanded, militant
and democratically organized trade union movement in alliance with all
the oppressed and exploited. Such a movement will champion workers’
interests in communities across the country, at the point of production
and in the political arena via the formation of a mass fighting labor party.
Humanity’s future also rests on the emergence and consolidation of a new
and independent Black, Latinx and Native American leadership to champion
the struggles of the most oppressed and exploited and establish
democratic control of their communities while opening the way to the
formation of independent Black and Brown parties in the political arena.
To help organize and unify the diverse social struggles ahead requires
the construction of a deeply rooted mass revolutionary socialist party.
Socialist Action aspires to be that party. Join us!
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George H. Smith “It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain,
emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how
comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on
the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands,
on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his
reason, is contradicting himself. There can be no knowledge of what is
good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there
is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through
reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is
destructive to human life.” ― George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God