Do You Still Think Donald Trump Is Only Joking?
Everyone was looking forward to the new year. Twenty Twenty had been a bust. The pandemic, the election, Donald Trump, and the protests for racial justice had worn us out. We were all looking forward to 2021. But life doesn’t start anew at any one point in our annual trip around the sun. The presidential election was over. Voters came out in record numbers to defeat Trump and elect Joe Biden as our next president. But two elections in Georgia on January 5 would decide the fate of the Senate. And the president’s unsubstantiated claims the election was stolen from him continued unabated into the new year.
Congress would count the electoral votes on January 6, officiated by the President of the Senate, Vice President Mike Pence. Normally, this is a pro forma event designated by our Constitution. But even after losing 63 court challenges to overturn election results in five battleground states, Trump and his sycophants continued to claim fraud. However, numerous recounts and certifications by state officials confirmed this had been one of the most secure elections on record. That didn’t satisfy the president. Instead, he continued to use his social media bully pulpit to weaken Americans’ confidence in our democratic institutions and to incite his followers to come to Washington to protest.
And they came. Trump, along with Don Jr. and Rudy Giuliani, spoke to a crowd of thousands earlier that day. A day after the Democrats regained the majority in the Senate, Junior wanted to send a message to Republican legislators on the Hill as the electoral college counting began. “This should be a message to all the Republicans who have not been willing to actually fight,” he said. “The people who did nothing to stop the steal. This gathering should send a message to them: This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.” Giuliani called for a “trial by fight.”
If the crowd wasn’t already fired up, the president lighted the match. There was nothing new about Trump’s words. They were the angry lies and diatribes against everyone who had been disloyal to him. He called President-Elect Biden “illegitimate.” He called the election a “criminal enterprise.” His supporters cheered. “We love Trump,” they shouted over and over. After over an hour of recounting every alternative fact about the election, voter suppression, “The Wall,” and his presidency, he said, “So we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue…. We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
Trump had no intention of walking with the crowd to the Capitol. He took safe refuge in the White House. But hundreds did, and we know what happened. These were no longer protesters. They were a mob of hardcore thugs who breached the security perimeter and occupied the Capitol building as Congress counted the states’ Electoral College votes. The last time this happened was in August 1814 when British troops set the building on fire, using furniture and Library of Congress books as fuel. Trump’s “patriots” erected a noose on Capitol Hill! Four people died, one, a woman protester from San Diego, was shot by a Capitol police officer. Despite that, Donald Trump refused to back down. The blood of these deaths are on Donald Trump’s hands.
Where were the police? Where was the National Guard? Reporters saw some officers taking selfies with the mob. Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, mobilized the state’s National Guard after receiving a request from DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. He received a call from House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, who was bunkered in an undisclosed place with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, pleading for help. But it took an hour and a half before Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy would call to approve the request. Aides had to cajole Trump into calling out the National Guard. And, while he issued a one minute video asking his flock to leave peaceably, in his next breath he once again stated the election had been rigged.
Law enforcement knew his plans for that day. Where were they? This contrasted with the huge police presence during the summer’s peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in DC, where hundreds were arrested and many still have scars from rubber bullets. Yet, at the Capitol siege, police arrested only 52 mostly white rioters (47 of which were for curfew violations). If, after all these years, you still don’t believe in institutional racism, here’s your proof.
Despite this unprecedented act — an insurrection started by a sitting president — many Republican lawmakers continued to contest the electoral vote count. Conservative writer, George Will wrote in The Washington Post,
“The three repulsive architects of Wednesday’s heartbreaking spectacle — mobs desecrating the Republic’s noblest building and preventing the completion of a constitutional process — must be named and forevermore shunned. They are Donald Trump, and Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. … Trump lit the fuse for the riot in the weeks before the election, with his successful effort to delegitimize the election in the eyes of his supporters. But Wednesday’s explosion required the help of Hawley (R-Mo.) and Cruz (R-Tex.).” (A photo of Hawley shows him making a clinched fist salute to the Capitol Hill mob.)
“The Trump-Hawley-Cruz insurrection against constitutional government will be an indelible stain on the nation. They, however, will not be so permanent. In 14 days, one of them will be removed from office by the constitutional processes he neither fathoms nor favors. It will take longer to scrub the other two from public life. Until that hygienic outcome is accomplished, from this day forward, everything they say or do or advocate should be disregarded as patent attempts to distract attention from the lurid fact of what they have become. Each will wear a scarlet “S” as a seditionist.”
The Republican Party now lives in the gutter.
Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, many of us knew who we were dealing with. Yet it took his entire four-year term to prove he couldn’t care less about this country. And, despite his supporters’ excuses over the years that his racist, narcissistic, and misogynistic statements were “just jokes,” he wasn’t joking. Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, revealed during his 2016 campaign, and his video refusal to repudiate the violence on Capitol Hill are bookends to his destructive legacy. He’s got two weeks to go in his term. But, as we’ve seen, he has no qualms about doing as much damage as he can in the time he has left. For this reason, we should relieve him of his office either by impeachment or the 25th Amendment.
Despite Trump’s treason, it was his enablers, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Lindsey Graham, and others, who, for their own selfish purposes, allowed this nightmare to continue. They are not going away. We have lost lives (350,000 American deaths from COVID-19 for starters), the poor have gotten poorer and the rich richer. We’ve lost faith in our government. And racial injustice continues. The rancor is palatable. There is nothing exceptional about America now, and the blame sits squarely on the Republican Party.
The new year will begin for me on January 20. It will not be easy to rise from the depths our country has fallen. I’m looking forward to a more just society governed by those who respect our institutions, want to improve the lives of our citizens, and believe self-interest is secondary to service to our country. Most of all, I hope we’ve learned our lesson. The huge potholes in our Constitution and governance need repair. The Department of Justice is not the President’s personal law firm. White supremacy — domestic terrorism — is more dangerous to us than ISIS. Yet our laws are woefully inadequate to monitor and limit the power of these domestic hate groups.
I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions. But this year I’ll make an exception.
This poster is part of a series of posters about the sorry state of American political discourse. Jeff Gates does these under the guise of the Chamomile Tea Party. This poster is part of a group of images he’s been doing since the beginning of 2020 about the election, the pandemic, and social justice. Download a high resolution copy of this poster for free. In fact, all Chamomile Tea Party posters are free to download under a Creative Commons license.
Follow the history of our country’s political intransigence from 2010–2020 through a seven-part exhibit of these posters on Google Arts & Culture.