I've been watching some of the impeachment trial today, the expertly made case that Donald Trump knowingly incited an insurrectionist mob on January 6th - a mob he had created and cultivated by his big lie about election fraud over months, indeed years. It was shocking to remember that he had been planning to hold on to office despite losing from long before November 3rd, and then to follow through the depressing series of legal and extralegal methods he explored after it. But it was shocking also to see affront after affront after affront lined up. Only now that he is out of office have things calmed enough that we can focus on them; while he was president he was in constant motion, interrupting reckoning with each violation of a norm by an even more brazen violation of another.
Now there is distance to see them line up. The chaos was targeted. So should we have seen it coming? Perhaps. He'd refused to commit to accepting defeat already in 2016, and worked tirelessly to undermine confidence in the government, its structures and its people. He indulged violence among his supporters, rhetorical and real. His words to the Proud Boys, "Stand Back and Stand By," immediately became their new slogan. When a motorcade of his supporters tried to drive a bus of Biden staff off a road in Texas - remember that? - he tweeted "I love Texas." And on and on. And as one effort to bend the rules after another failed, after enough state Republicans resisted his pressure to disenfranchise their voters, there was always January 6th. I know I felt queasy the weeks leading up to it, knowing something would happen, probably violent (and those hundred-plus Representatives and Senators who, even after the ransacking of the Capitol, voted to reject electoral votes didn't disappoint). I knew at the time that I was in denial, but stayed in denial. I trusted that Trump was fading away with his cancelled twitter noise, but had a harder time imagining what his most ardent followers - encouraged by people up and down the Republican Party in questioning the election's validity - would do.
The story being told by the impeachment managers leaves out the complicity of Republican Senators - they're jurors for the case who might, at least in principle, be swayed by the evidence - but it's plenty depressing. The likely outcome - acquittal, thanks to these Republicans' indifference, intimidation or acquiescence in an understanding of politics as war - is depressing, too. But meanwhile, wow. Our republic was in grave danger. Still is. The calvary is coming, Mr. President, tweeted the semi-literate leader of Women for America First, and he thrilled to the old-fashioned image of a decisive turn in the tide of battle. The cavalry!! Or maybe "calvary" wasn't a typo. His devotés didn't know what to expect of January 6th either, just something "historic" of which they wanted to be part. As it turned they saw their idolatrous cause crucified, but many still expect resurrection.
