January 6, 2024, marked the third anniversary of the terror unleashed on the U.S. Capitol by a frenzied mob grimly resolved to cancel – pardon my employing the locution du jour – one of the most hallowed traditions of the American political system: The peaceful transfer of power to the winning candidate.
In light of what has happened to America under Donald Trump‘s debauched presidency, it can be said that the tradition had remained in place mainly by default. When it was put to a severe test for the first time the previous year in recent memory, it came out so bruised and battered that few will now cite it with confidence as an American tradition.
Call it the Trump Effect: the erosion of values, the corruption of institutions, the suborning of the machinery of government, the capture of government and its underlying processes, the use of terror or threat of terror as an instrument of governance, demeaning high officials of the state by the use of coarse, vulgar language, utter disdain and disregard for the rule of law, and even common decency.
On January 6, 2021, American lawmakers convened in the Capitol to affix the final seal on the election of Joseph R. Biden as the 46th President of the United States. His opponent, Donald Trump, would have none of it. He had laid the ground for an insurrection by leading millions of his Twitter followers to believe that the only way Biden could win – or Trump lose – was if the vote was rigged.
Trump lost; ergo, the election had to have been stolen. The legislators were in effect convening to consecrate a theft.
“Show strength” and “stop the steal,” he exhorted them as they stormed the Capitol “That’s the only way you are ever going to take our country back.”
For the next 187 minutes, America and indeed a global television audience watched in horrified disbelief as a surging, seething, murmuring, bilious crowd, men and women, veterans and enlisted persons, scrambled up the ramparts and raced up the steps to the landing, men and women, young and old, belting out blood-curdling imprecations, smashed windows and doors and impaled police officers with flagpoles and just about any object they could weaponise.
There was no mistaking the grim resolve, the murderous frenzy with which they went about their mission.
When they bellowed “Hang (Vice President) Mike Pence” over and over again, they were not posturing or grandstanding. They had erected a scaffold on the grounds, a noose dangling ominously from it. Trump would say later that it was a pity they didn’t hand him.
From a private room in the White House, Trump watched the proceedings with glee, according to a former staffer. Not even the frantic pleas of the First Lady and his oldest son could move him to try to restrain the demons he had loosed on the Capitol.
As they slunk away, the insurrectionists performed one final act of obscenity: They plastered the chambers with excrement. That is the kind of company Trump keeps.
You would think that this assault on every good thing America claims to stand for would call forth a groundswell of denunciation and recrimination. Perhaps civil society was too stunned for words, too traumatized to make a concerted move? Perhaps the outrage, then muffled, would gather momentum and translate into an insistent demand for an accounting, for justice, and yes, for punishment?
You would think that the character who masterminded this brazen assault on the political and moral values on which America’s claim of exceptionalism rests would have by that very act disqualified himself from seeking any elected office. And if he tried to muscle his way into the local School Board, he would be disenfranchised even if, unlike Trump, the fellow was not standing trial on 91 criminal charges in various courts across the country.
Civil society could find no coherent voice, no rallying point. Even President Joe Biden, newly vested with political and moral authority, could not employ it to change the narrative. He consumed this precious capital in pursuing a bogus bi-partisanship and continued to do so even as Trump blockaded his legislative agenda at every opportunity.
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Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who had at first blush placed the blame squarely where it belonged, would declare that he would vote again for Trump if Trump secured the Republican nomination.
Even before the insurrectionists dispersed, the shock, the horror of the siege was already dissolving. With ample support from his ultra-right confederates, Trump wasted no time recasting the events of the day Trump as an excursion, and a patriotic one for that matter.
And the new narrative has taken such a hold that, if you had not witnessed the insurrection as it unfolded and had no access to their iterations and reiterations across the media, you would have entertained some doubt about whether it transpired.
Even before the insurrectionists dispersed, the shock, the horror of the siege was already dissolving.
The police who lost six of their officers to the mob were being as denounced as bullies and human-rights abusers. The insurrectionists were cast as freedom fighters and patriots, and as tourists who just took a day off to check out the attractions and delights of Washington, DC.
And even among those who witnessed it, many could be forgiven if they now doubt the evidence of their own eyes. Such has been the slickness, the intensity of the recasting.
If reality is so susceptible to manipulation at this stage before the full coming of Artificial Intelligence, wherein lies the future of society, of civilization?
But it is not sober, remorseful, penitent Trump that has achieved this improbable feat. It is the good old Trump, only more venal, more demagogic, and more sociopathic, driven by grievance and a desire to exact vengeance, not merely on those he says have corruptly employed the machinery of the state to persecute him but on virtually on all institutions of state.
In frenzied speeches before fevered crowds, he has characterized not just those institutions but the entire American establishment as illegitimate, and doomed. And it is his singular mission of his second coming to dismantle it. Perhaps he will refashion it after his own image later, but he is not letting on.
That is how we came to the conjuncture where, almost all a sudden, the concepts and ideals on which the United States founded and nurtured a political system that has been the envy of much of the world for centuries increasingly count for less and are now held with little conviction.
The Rule of Law became the rule of Trump, which could mean one thing one day, another thing the following day, and yet another thing the day after; in short, Trump’s caprice. Trump tied up the judicial system in knots, the better to emasculate it. The doctrine of “separation of powers” was exposed as the elaborate fudge it always was.
It is early yet in the Election Year, and 2024 is not 2016. Trump’s lock on the Republication nomination is so tenacious that it is almost inconceivable that he could lose it. But it is not inconceivable that President Biden, whose support has slipped significantly among younger voters and minorities could lose the race the way Hilary Rodham Clinton lost it to Trump in 2016.
If that happens, Biden’s blank cheque underwriting Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal war in Gaza is sure to be cited as one of the reasons.