After the insurrection – The terrible scenes on Capitol Hill

THE MOST important book of the Trump era was not Bob Woodward’s “Fear” or Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” or any of the other bestselling exposes of the White House circus. Arguably it was a wonkish tome by two Harvard political scientists, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, published a year into Donald Trump’s presidency and entitled “How Democracies Die”.

After many years researching democratic slippage in Eastern Europe and Latin America, the duo admitted to experiencing double-take as they turned to their own country: “We feel dread…even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here.” An invasion of the Capitol Building on January 6th by thousands of Mr Trump’s supporters brandishing baseball bats and Confederate battle flags suggested they really are.

Summoned to Washington, DC, by the defeated president to protest against a congressional vote to approve the results of the electoral college, they occupied the building for over four hours, sent Vice-President Mike Pence and other lawmakers fleeing for safety and vandalised the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Four people died during the rampage, including a woman shot by police. Journalists were manhandled and had their cameras smashed by MAGA thugs in camouflage gear. Mr Trump meanwhile tweeted out his “love” for the insurrectionists. “Very special people”, he called them in a video recorded from the White House. His Twitter and Facebook accounts were both later suspended. Pipe-bombs were placed outside the nearby headquarters of the Republican and Democratic parties.

It might be argued that the Senate session that the insurrectionists interrupted was more troubling still. Over two-thirds of Republican members of the House of Representatives and over a quarter of Republican senators were on the verge of voting to magic Mr Trump’s defeat into victory by rejecting the electoral-college votes of a handful of states that he lost.

Naturally, in a familiar refrain of the golpista, the congressmen concerned claimed to be trying to protect democracy, not overthrow it. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who led the Senate effort, declared that “millions of voters’ concerns about election integrity deserve to be heard”. A 41-year-old graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law, who has rebranded himself a scourge of the elite under Mr Trump, Mr Hawley was photographed raising a fist of defiance to the MAGA mob shortly before it broke through the barricades.

The large majority of Republican voters who claim to believe that Mr Trump won re-election in November are not responding to rational concerns. If they were, they must have been reassured by the unprecedented number of court rulings, safety-checks and recounts that Mr Trump’s two-month effort to overturn the results has given rise to. His legal team’s 60-odd challenges were laughed out of court; including the US Supreme Court. His…