As Susan Bro watched the footage of a mob of white Trump supporters breaking into the US Capitol and halting the official count of the 2020 election results, she was “mad as hell”, but she was not surprised.
Bro’s daughter, Heather Heyer, was murdered in 2017 while protesting against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump had responded to Heyer’s death by saying there were “very fine people on both sides”.
On Wednesday, Trump responded to open insurrection in the halls of Congress, which left at least four people dead, by repeating false claims about having the election stolen from him and telling the mob: “Go home. We love you. You’re very special.”
“This path has always been predictable,” Bro said from her home in Virginia. “For people to now go, ‘I never knew this would happen,’ why not? How would you not see this happen?”
“This is sort of an inevitable conclusion,” she added. “It’s been coming, at least openly, for months, but the trajectory was set years ago.”
The playbook for the Maga invasion of the nation’s Capitol building on Wednesday has been developing for years in plain sight, at far-right rallies in cities like Charlottesville, Berkeley, and Portland, and then, in the past year, at state Capitols across the country, where heavily armed white protesters have forced their way into legislative chambers to accuse politicians of tyranny and treason.
“No one should be surprised,” said Sarah Anthony, a Black state lawmaker who was on the legislative floor in Michigan’s Capitol on 30 April when hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters, including white militia members with guns, tried to force their way inside. “This has been escalating in every corner of our country for months.”
From screaming matches in the lobby of the state house in Michigan to looting the office of speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, the demonstrators have grown bolder and their aims more ambitious.
But many elements of these incidents repeat each time: the chaotic mix of well-known extremists and unknown Trump supporters who showed up to participate; the strikingly soft and ineffectual response from the police; the expressions of shock from Republican lawmakers that any of their supporters would take action in response to the lies they had been repeating; and of course, the behavior of Trump himself, who first openly incites the violence, and then, when it spirals out of control, praises it instead of condemning it.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
