President Trump’s misbegotten presidency crashed and burned yesterday with a treacherous assault on American democracy. It failed, as most of Trump’s half-baked schemes do. But now the country needs a reckoning with a Republican Party that let it happen.
Senator and soon-to-be Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) got it right last night: For Americans, January 6, 2021 is another day that will live in infamy. Our country was attacked not by a foreign power, but from within. The assailant was a lame-duck president the American people wisely fired last November.
I watched Trump harangue the mob he had summoned to Washington for his last-ditch effort to bully Congress into nullifying the 2020 election results. It was a performance worthy of a dictator: A farrago of big lies about his imagined “landslide” victory, paranoid attacks on his usual stock villains – the media, even Hillary Clinton – and threats to destroy the careers of “weak Republicans” who balked at his blatantly unconstitutional demand that Congress overrule the voters and award him a second term.
It was also an undisguised incitement to mob violence, with Trump promising to lead his supporters in a march up Capitol Hill. Actually, he retired to the White House to watch his handiwork on television. Waving Trump and Confederate flags, Trump supporters stormed America’s citadel of democracy, disrupting the certification vote, sending lawmakers into hiding, trashing the Capitol and raining obscenities and abuse on the police.
Trump lit the match, but he had plenty of accomplices. The shambolic MAGA insurrection would not have happened had not leading Republican politicians played along with Trump’s claims of having been cheated of reelection.
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