Elections

Growing inequality and sputtering economies have helped fuel a wave of leftist victories that may soon extend to Brazil and Colombia.RIO DE JANEIRO — In the final weeks of 2021, Chile and Honduras voted decisively for leftist presidents to replace leaders on the right, extending a significant, multiyear shift across Latin America.This year, leftist politicians are the favorites to win presidential elections in Colombia and Brazil, taking over from right-wing incumbents, which would put the left and center-left in power in the six largest economies in the region, stretching from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.Economic suffering, widening inequality, fervent anti-incumbent sentiment and mismanagement of Covid-19 have all fueled a pendulum swing away from the center-right and right-wing leaders who were dominant a few years ago.The left has promised more equitable distribution of wealth, better public services and vastly expanded social safety nets. But the region’s new leaders face serious economic constraints and legislative opposition that could restrict their ambitions, and restive voters who have been willing to punish whoever fails to deliver.The left’s gains could buoy China and undermine the United States as they compete for regional influence, analysts say, with a new crop of Latin American leaders who are desperate for economic development and more open to Beijing’s global strategy of offering loans and infrastructure investment. The change could also make it harder for the United States to continue isolating authoritarian leftist regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.With rising inflation and stagnant economies, Latin America’s new leaders will find it hard to deliver real change on profound problems, said Pedro Mendes Loureiro, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Cambridge. To some extent, he said, voters are “electing the left simply because it is the opposition at the moment.”Poverty is at a 20-year high in a region where a short-lived commodities boom had enabled millions to ascend into the middle class after the turn of the century. Several nations now face double-digit unemployment, and more than 50 percent of workers in the region are employed in the informal sector.Corruption scandals, dilapidated infrastructure and chronically underfunded health and education systems have eroded faith in leaders and public institutions.Homeless people lining up to receive lunch from volunteers in São Paulo in August. “The issue now is the frustration, the class system, the stratification,” one analyst said.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesUnlike the early 2000s, when leftists won critical presidencies in Latin America, the new officeholders are saddled by debt, lean budgets, scant access to credit and in many cases, vociferous opposition.Eric Hershberg, the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, said the left’s winning streak is born out of widespread indignation.“This is really about lower-middle-class and working-class sectors saying, ‘Thirty years into democracy, and we still have to ride a decrepit bus for two hours to get to a bad health clinic,’” Mr. Hershberg said. He cited frustration, anger and “a generalized sense that elites have enriched themselves, been corrupt, have not been operating in the public interest.”Covid has ravaged Latin America and devastated economies that were already precarious, but the region’s political tilt started before the pandemic.Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s leftist ex-leader, has a sizable advantage over Mr. Bolsonaro in a head-to-head matchup, according to a recent poll.Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe first milestone was the election in Mexico of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who won the presidency by a landslide in July 2018. He declared during his election night address: “The state will cease being a committee at the service of a minority and it will represent all Mexicans, poor and rich.”The next year, voters in Panama and Guatemala elected left-of-center governments, and Argentina’s Peronist movement made a stunning comeback despite its leaders’ legacy of corruption and economic mismanagement. President Alberto Fernández, a university professor, celebrated his triumph over a conservative incumbent by promising “to build the Argentina we deserve.”In 2020, Luis Arce trounced conservative rivals to become president of Bolivia. He vowed to build on the legacy of the former leader Evo Morales, a socialist whose ouster the year before had briefly left the nation in the hands of a right-wing president.Last April, Pedro Castillo, a provincial schoolteacher, shocked Peru’s political establishment by narrowly defeating the right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori for the presidency. Mr. Castillo, a political newcomer, railed against elites and presented his life story — an educator who worked in a rural school without running water or a sewage system — as an embodiment of their failings.In Honduras, Xiomara Castro, a socialist who proposed a system of universal basic income for poor families, handily beat a conservative rival in November to become president-elect.Xiomara Castro, who won election in Honduras, has proposed a system of universal basic income for poor families.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesThe most recent win for the left came last month in Chile, where Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student activist, beat a far-right rival by promising to raise taxes on the rich in order to offer more generous pensions and vastly expand social services.The trend has not been universal. In the past three years, voters in El Salvador, Uruguay and Ecuador have moved their governments rightward. And in Mexico and Argentina last year, left-of-center parties lost ground in legislative elections, undercutting their presidents.But on the whole, Evan Ellis, a professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College, said that in his memory there had never been a Latin America “as dominated by a combination of leftists and anti-U. S. populist leaders.”“Across the region, leftist governments will be particularly willing to work with the Chinese on government-to-government contracts,” he said, and possibly “with respect to security collaboration as well as technology collaboration.”Jennifer Pribble, a political science professor at the University of Richmond who studies Latin America, said the brutal toll of the pandemic in the region made leftist initiatives such as cash transfers and universal health care increasingly popular.“Latin American voters now have a keener sense of what the state can do and of the importance of the state engaging in a redistributive effort and in providing public services,” she said. “That shapes these elections, and clearly the left can speak more directly to that than the right.”Gabriel Boric, a former student activist, has promised a vast expansion of social services in Chile. Marcelo Hernandez/Getty ImagesIn Colombia, where a presidential election is set for May, Gustavo Petro, a leftist former mayor of Bogotá who once belonged to an urban guerrilla group, has held a consistent lead in polls.Sergio Guzmán, the director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a consulting firm, said Mr. Petro’s presidential aspirations became viable after most fighters from the FARC, a Marxist guerrilla group, laid down their weapons as part of a peace deal struck in 2016. The conflict long dominated Colombian politics, but no more.“The issue now is the frustration, the class system, the stratification, the haves and have-nots,” he said.Just before Christmas, Sonia Sierra, 50, stood outside the small coffee shop she runs in Bogotá’s main urban park. Her earnings had plummeted, she said, first amid the pandemic, and then when a community displaced by violence moved into the park.Ms. Sierra said she was deep in debt after her husband was hospitalized with Covid. Finances are so tight, she recently let go her only employee, a young woman from Venezuela who earned just $7.50 a day.“So much work and nothing to show for it,” Ms. Sierra she said, singing a verse from a song popular at Christmastime in Colombia. “I’m not crying, but yes, it hurts.”In Recife, Brazil, supplementing income by harvesting shellfish.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesIn neighboring Brazil, rising poverty, inflation and a bungled response to the pandemic have made President Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right incumbent, an underdog in the vote set for October.Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist firebrand who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010, an era of remarkable prosperity, has built a 30 percentage point advantage over Mr. Bolsonaro in a head-to-head matchup, according to a recent poll.Maurício Pimenta da Silva, 31, an assistant manager at a farming supplies store in the São Lourenço region of Rio de Janeiro state, said that he regretted voting for Mr. Bolsonaro in 2018, and that he intended to support Mr. da Silva.“I thought Bolsonaro would improve our life in some aspects, but he didn’t,” said Mr. Pimenta, a father of four who is no relation to the former president. “Everything is so expensive in the supermarkets, especially meat,” he added, prompting him to take a second job.With voters facing so much upheaval, moderate candidates are gaining little traction, lamented Simone Tebet, a center-right senator in Brazil who plans to run for president.“If you look at Brazil and Latin America, we are living in a relatively frightening cycle of extremes,” she said. “Radicalism and populism have taken over.”Ernesto Londoño and Flávia Milhorance reported from Rio de Janeiro. Julie Turkewitz reported from Bogotá. More

In December 1972, the critic Pauline Kael famously admitted that she’d been living in a political bubble. “I only know one person who voted for Nixon,” she said. “Where they are, I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.” A pithier version of her quote (“I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”) has been used to exemplify liberal insularity ever since, both by conservative pundits and by the kind of centrist journalists who have spent the past several years buzzing in the ears of heartland diner patrons, looking for clues about Donald Trump’s rise.The most important fact about the Trump era, though, can be gleaned simply by examining his vote tallies and approval ratings: At no point in his political career — not a single day — has Mr. Trump enjoyed the support of the majority of the country he governed for four years. And whatever else Jan. 6 might have been, it should be understood first and foremost as an expression of disbelief in — or at least a rejection of — that reality. Rather than accepting, in defeat, that much more of their country lay outside their ken than they’d known, his supporters proclaimed themselves victors and threw a deadly and historic tantrum.The riot was an attack on our institutions, and of course, inflammatory conservative rhetoric and social media bear some of the blame. But our institutions also helped produce that violent outburst by building a sense of entitlement to power within America’s conservative minority.The structural advantages that conservatives enjoy in our electoral system are well known. Twice already this young century, the Republican Party has won the Electoral College and thus the presidency while losing the popular vote. Republicans in the Senate haven’t represented a majority of Americans since the 1990s, yet they’ve controlled the chamber for roughly half of the past 20 years. In 2012 the party kept control of the House even though Democrats won more votes.And as is now painfully clear to Democratic voters, their party faces significant barriers to success in Washington even when it manages to secure full control of government: The supermajority requirement imposed by the Senate filibuster can stall even wildly popular legislation, and Republicans have stacked the judiciary so successfully that the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, an outcome that around 60 percent of the American people oppose, according to several recent polls. Obviously, none of the structural features of our federal system were designed with contemporary politics and the Republican Party in mind. But they are clearly giving a set of Americans who have taken strongly to conservative ideology — rural voters in sparsely populated states in the middle of the country — more power than the rest of the electorate.With these structural advantages in place, it’s not especially difficult to see how the right came to view dramatic political losses, when they do occur, as suspect. If the basic mechanics of the federal system were as fair and balanced as we’re taught they are, the extent and duration of conservative power would reflect the legitimate preferences of most Americans. Democratic victories, by contrast, now seem to the right like underhanded usurpations of the will of the majority — in President Biden’s case, by fraud and foreign voters, and in Barack Obama’s, by a candidate who was himself a foreign imposition on the true American people.But the federal system is neither fair nor balanced. Rather than democratic give and take between two parties that share the burden of winning over the other side, we have one favored party and another whose effortful victories against ever-lengthening odds are conspiratorially framed as the skulduggery of schemers who can win only through fraud and covert plans to import a new electorate. It doesn’t help that Republican advantages partly insulate the party from public reproach; demagogy is more likely to spread among politicians if there are few electoral consequences. This is a recipe for political violence. Jan. 6 wasn’t the first or the deadliest attack to stem from the idea that Democrats are working to force their will on a nonexistent conservative political and cultural majority. We have no reason to expect it will be the last.And while much of the language Republican politicians and commentators use to incite their base seems outwardly extreme, it’s important to remember that what was done on Jan. 6 was done in the name of the Constitution, as most Republican voters now understand it — an eternal compact that keeps power in their rightful hands. Tellingly, during his Jan. 6 rally, Mr. Trump cannily deployed some of the language Democrats have used to decry voting restrictions and foreign interference. “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy,” he said. “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for the integrity of our elections.”The mainstream press has also had a hand in inflating the right’s sense of itself. Habits like the misrepresentation of Republican voters and operatives as swing voters plucked off the street and the constant, reductive blather about political homogeneity on the coasts — despite the fact that there were more Trump voters in New York City in 2016 and 2020 than there were in both Dakotas combined — create distorted impressions of our political landscape. The tendency of journalists to measure the wisdom of policies and rhetoric based on their distance from the preferences of conservative voters only reinforces the idea that it’s fair for politicians, activists and voters on the left to take the reddest parts of the country into account without the right taking a reciprocal interest in what most Americans want.That premise still dominates and constrains strategic thinking within the Democratic Party. A year after the Capitol attack and all the rent garments and tears about the right’s radicalism and the democratic process, the party has failed to deliver promised political reforms, thanks to opposition from pivotal members of its own Senate caucus — Democrats who argue that significantly changing our system would alienate Republicans.Given demographic trends, power in Washington will likely continue accruing to Republicans even if the right doesn’t undertake further efforts to subvert our elections. And to fix the structural biases at work, Democrats would have to either attempt the impossible task of securing broad, bipartisan support for major new amendments to the Constitution — which, it should be said, essentially bars changes to the Senate’s basic design — or pass a set of system-rebalancing workarounds, such as admitting new states ⁠like the District of Columbia. It should never be forgotten that fully enfranchised voters from around the country gathered to stage a riot over their supposedly threatened political rights last January in a city of 700,000 people who don’t have a full vote in Congress.Jan. 6 demonstrated that the choice the country now faces isn’t one between disruptive changes to our political system and a peaceable status quo. To believe otherwise is to indulge the other big lie that drew violence to the Capitol in the first place. The notion that the 18th-century American constitutional order is suited to governance in the 21st is as preposterous and dangerous as anything Mr. Trump has ever uttered. It was the supposedly stabilizing features of our vaunted system that made him president to begin with and incubated the extremism that turned his departure into a crisis.Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of a regular newsletter about American politics. His first book, “The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding,” will be published by Random House.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

From a nondescript office building, a few dozen investigators and members of Congress are rushing to dissect what led to the worst attack on the Capitol in centuries.WASHINGTON — Behind closed doors inside a nondescript office building at the foot of Capitol Hill on a recent chilly morning, the House inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was in full swing.As congressional staff aides shuffled through the halls going about their normal business, investigators quietly pulled shades over the windows in conference rooms on several different floors and posted “Do Not Disturb” signs.In one such room sat Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer of the Stop the Steal rallies with ties to far-right members of Congress who worked to help Donald J. Trump invalidate his 2020 election loss.A floor below was Kash Patel, a former Pentagon chief of staff involved in discussions about Capitol security. He had been in constant contact with Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on Jan. 6.Facing questions elsewhere in the building were John Eastman, a lawyer who plotted with Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results; and Christopher Krebs, the Trump administration’s most senior cybersecurity official, who was fired after systematically dismantling Mr. Trump’s false declarations that the presidency had been stolen from him.The committee scrutinizing the pro-Trump mob attack has conducted much of its inquiry in private, drawing public attention mostly for the legal fights it is waging over access to evidence from Mr. Trump and some of his top lieutenants. But from a warren of offices in the O’Neill House Office Building in Southwest Washington, a few dozen investigators and members of Congress have ramped up a sprawling and elaborate investigation into the worst American attack on democracy in centuries.In recent weeks, with the anniversary of the riot looming on Thursday, the panel has redoubled its efforts in the face of mounting resistance from the former president. It is rushing to make as much progress as possible before January 2023. Republicans are favored to regain control of the House this fall, and if they do, that is when they would take power and almost certainly dissolve the inquiry.“We worked on Christmas and on New Year’s Day,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee. “The window for getting the job done requires weekends and holidays too. There’s a really firm commitment on the part of the staff to get it done.”Working in color-coded teams, investigators have interviewed more than 300 witnesses, from White House officials close to Mr. Trump to the rioters themselves, and are sorting through more than 35,000 documents. During its first three months, from July through September, the committee had fewer than 30 staff members and spent about $418,000, according to the latest documents filed with the House. Since then, the panel has increased its staff to about 40 and is looking to hire more investigators.Soon, the inquiry will enter a new phase, with plans to hold a series of public hearings in early spring to lay out some of its findings. Those will feature, among other topics, state election officials testifying to the security and accuracy of the 2020 election. A final report will be issued, “obviously before the November elections,” Mr. Thompson said.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?For now, the O’Neill building is the main hub of activity, where, depending on the day, the political operative Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, might appear outside flashing his signature Nixon-style “V for victory” sign to a sea of news cameras; or a lawyer for a Jan. 6 rally planner might arrive promoting a “treasure trove” of documents he says will leave senior Trump allies “quivering in their boots.” Reporters often dart up and down hallways trying to catch up to the various witnesses leaving the interview rooms.Inside, investigators and members of the nine-person committee are questioning witnesses, with the lawmakers — juggling busy schedules of floor votes and other congressional hearings — often bouncing between the interviews on a direct TV feed.“We are participating in the depositions and interviews regularly, and these are quite lengthy,” said Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee. “Even with other work that we have to do throughout the day, members are joining regularly to ask questions about specific areas.”The so-called green team is following the money trail connected to Mr. Trump’s efforts to promote the baseless assertion that he was the rightful winner of the election, including whether any groups defrauded contributors with false statements about widespread election fraud.The gold team is scrutinizing any plans Mr. Trump made with members of Congress to try to overturn the election and his pressure campaign on local, state and Justice Department officials to try to keep himself in power.Domestic violent extremist groups, such as the QAnon movement and the militia groups, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, are the focus of the purple team. A fourth, the red team, is digging into the Jan. 6 rally planners and the Stop the Steal movement.The committee is led by Mr. Thompson and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who serves as vice chairwoman. Its top two investigators — both former U.S. attorneys — also come from different parties.Timothy J. Heaphy, whom President Barack Obama named U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, is the Jan. 6 committee’s chief investigative counsel; and John Wood, whom President George W. Bush hired as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, is the committee’s senior investigative counsel.Mr. Wood, an ally of Ms. Cheney, is closely supervising the team focused on Mr. Trump’s direct involvement.One witness recently interviewed by the committee said arriving at the O’Neill building, a gleaming glass-encased behemoth, was like entering the British intelligence agency’s headquarters, with its modern lines and sterile feel. A congressional staffer escorted him up an elevator to a room with a U-shaped table and a large television on the wall. The TV had a live remote feed through which members of the committee could watch and listen.The witness said that before the deposition questioning began, he had been presented with a large binder full of evidence that investigators had collected on him. The lawyers conducting the inquiry were often “adversarial and hostile” in tone, he said, and were interested in the most minute details, even the moods and emotions of the people they were asking about.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.On the morning of Jan. 6, Caroline Edwards, a 31-year-old United States Capitol Police officer, was stationed by some stairs on the Capitol grounds when the energy of the crowd in front of her seemed to take on a different shape; it was like that moment when rain suddenly becomes hail. A loud, sour-sounding horn bleated, piercing through the noise of the crowd, whose cries coalesced into an accusatory chant: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Edwards, who is 5-foot-4, tried to make herself look imposing. Behind a row of bike racks, alongside four other officers, she stood in a wide stance, her hands on her hips. A man in front of her whipped off his jacket as if he were getting ready for something, flipped his red MAGA hat backward — and then the rioters were pushing the bike racks forward as the officers pushed back, trying to hold their balance.A sergeant standing closer to the Capitol looked over just in time to see a bike rack heaved up and onto Edwards, whom he recognized by her tied-back blond hair. She crumpled to the ground, head hitting concrete, the first officer down in what would prove to be a bloody, bruising battle, the worst assault on the Capitol since 1814, when the British burned the building to the ground. The crowd howled and roared, rushing past the barricade as that sergeant started screaming into the radio orders to lock all Capitol doors.Edwards’s blue cap had been knocked from her head. Once she got back on her feet, she stood, dazed and leaning on a railing for support, her hair loose and disheveled, as rioters flung themselves past the barriers, her colleagues punching back the few they could. Officers around the building heard, over the radio, an anguished call distinct from any other they had encountered on the job: “Help!”Caroline Edwards near the place where she was attacked by rioters.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesOn the other side of the Capitol, Harry Dunn, a 6-foot-7 former college football player, thought he recognized that voice. It sounded to him like Edwards, an officer he’d trained, someone whom more officers than seemed possible considered a close personal friend, including Dunn. He started running toward the west front.Inside, near the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, Devan Gowdy was putting on his riot gear when he heard that same call for help — frantic and high-pitched — and then his unit was sprinting through the building, down two flights of stairs and out a door on the west front of the building. Gowdy, blinking, took in a scene that seemed to have been spliced in from some other, unfamiliar world: A crowd of thousands raged before him. Standing on a small wooden stage built for the inauguration, he felt as if he’d been performing for a murderous, violent audience as people started throwing cans, paintballs, bolts, bottles fizzing with hydrogen peroxide. One rioter he saw was wielding a hatchet with the American flag wrapped around the blade.Many officers who worked riot control knew, from experience, to take their name tags off before heading into the fray, but Gowdy, a slender 27-year-old with nearly three years on the force, had left his on. “Hey, Gowdy! Look at Gowdy!” a rioter screamed. “Gowdy! Gowdy, you’re scared!” another jeered. One of Gowdy’s sergeants, Aquilino Gonell, a 42-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, who was close by, unable to move from his position lest the crowd burst through, heard the taunts and was chilled to the bone. Gowdy looked at him beseechingly, but what could he do? Gonell saw a rioter pull hard at the shield in Gowdy’s hand, the two of them rocking back and forth. Gonell thought his officer was hit hard in the head with his own shield; Gowdy only knows that a flagpole clattered to his feet just after he felt a blow. Another officer pulled him back to safety inside the building.Amid the chaos, Gonell lost track of the other members of his unit, a tight-knit crew that usually worked the midnight shift. Soon he was one of a few officers near the lower west entrance to the building who still had a shield — other officers had either lost theirs in battle or never had one in the first place — and was bracing himself in the doorway, barely holding on. A rioter smashed his hand with a baton. Gonell slipped on a pile of shields wet with toxic spray and feared that the rioters, grabbing his leg, his shield, his arm, would pull him apart before he was somehow able to right himself.Edwards had gathered herself and spent more than an hour — or was it days, time lost all sense — fighting off rioters or helping other officers on the lower west terrace of the Capitol. She was positioned near a friend from her shift, Brian Sicknick, when they were hit with chemical spray directly in their faces. Edwards’s hands flew to her eyes as she bowed down in pain and stumbled. Sicknick retreated to wash out his eyes, then returned to the fight. Another officer escorted Edwards, her lungs searing from toxic spray, away from the scene to get medical treatment.Anton, a 34-year-old Navy veteran in Gonell’s unit, had been ordered, along with the rest of the officers on the west front, to retreat into the Capitol. Inside, a friend grabbed his tactical vest, screaming, “They’re in the building!” They realized that if the rioters came down the interior stairs near the lower west terrace entrance, they would attack, from behind, Gonell and other officers who were fending off the crowd at that door. Anton (who asked to be identified by only his middle name to protect his privacy) ran up two flights, using his shield to shove clusters of rioters back up the stairs.Arriving two floors up, at the Rotunda, amid paintings of American generals courteously accepting their enemies’ surrender, he joined a melee that was savage, without rules or limits. By then, the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police had arrived in force as allies in the fight, its only audience the presidential statues encircling the room: a beaming Ronald Reagan, a fierce Andrew Jackson, Dwight Eisenhower in a pose of resolve. Anton took none of it in: He was punching, his fists bloody, hitting men, women, equipment, trying to push the crowd back. Even as he fought, his mind was flooding with questions: Was he going to die here? And if he did, would these demonic faces be the last thing he saw? What would it take for him to actually use his gun? And — what the hell happened to Hoyte?He had been separated from his friend, Lennox Hoyte, a 32-year-old U.S. Army veteran who served in the military police in Afghanistan. Only later did Anton learn, stricken with guilt, just how badly the day had gone for him. Hoyte was pulled into the crowd, yanked so hard that his gear ripped. Someone beat his hand with a pipe; another rioter swung a piece of scaffolding at him before he was able to tear himself free. He ended up trapped with another officer in an enclosure beneath the inaugural stage, its doors, embedded with electric circuitry, serving as their barricade. Injured, he spent hours there surrounded by a mob that kept trying to break through those doors, unable to leave as chemical spray rained down between the planks of wood overhead.Another friend, Dominick Tricoche, was off duty but drove to the Capitol after a fellow officer texted the unit’s group chat saying something serious was underway at the Capitol. Fighting, plunging into the crowd to try to help another officer who had been swarmed, he wept chemically induced tears, as if his body’s physical reaction matched the grief and terror he felt in a crowd he was certain wanted to kill him. His eyes felt as if they were merely receptacles for pain; even the air seemed to be on the attack. “Traitor! Traitor!” the rioters chanted, as someone flung a bike rack at him and he fell down a flight of stone stairs. The stone, slick and slippery with blood and tear gas, was punishing: An officer on the west front, a large man with a beard, fell hard on the stairs and was out cold for three minutes. A friend threw himself over that man’s body to protect his gun, his own hand breaking amid the trampling horde.Harry Dunn at the Capitol.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesDunn, when he rushed to the west front, found that he could not make his way through the crowd to find Edwards. He tried to help hold the line by the western lawn, positioned high above the crowd, his rifle aimed at a mob throwing smoke bombs and waving Confederate and Thin Blue Line flags. Like nearly every armed officer that day, he held his fire, out of restraint but also fear: How many rioters would fire right back? The police were clearly outnumbered.Back inside the building, Dunn positioned himself on the floor below the Rotunda, stopping rioters who were trying to get past him to an area where officers were recovering. Once Gonell was able to retreat inside, he was relieved to see Dunn. Gonell’s left shoulder was badly injured, but he was using that arm to try to help transport Rosanne Boyland, a member of the crowd who had lost consciousness and had no pulse. Dunn joined Gonell and others as they carried Boyland upstairs so she could be administered CPR (she would later be pronounced dead).By early evening, with the help of the Metropolitan Police, the Capitol Police had all but cleared the building, and the National Guard had finally arrived. Officers downstairs in the Crypt were on their knees in the hallway, racked with coughs, or standing bereft in a long line for the bathroom, which was crowded with colleagues trying to soothe their searing eyes. When Anton saw Tricoche, he looked as if he had been dipped in a vat of flour, covered in the residue of all that chemical spray.Anton was taking a break from checking that rooms throughout the Capitol were clear when he heard word over the radio that an officer — he didn’t know who — was receiving CPR. He looked down over a railing and saw, one floor below, some close friends from the midnight shift huddled over a body in uniform. He rushed to direct the E.M.T.s to the right elevator. When he joined his friends, he saw that the person they were helping was Brian Sicknick, Edwards’s shiftmate. He realized that a day that he thought could not possibly get even more horrific just had.In the Rotunda, Dunn collapsed against a wall beside a fellow officer, openly weeping. In a raw moment that would reverberate beyond that day, he called out in anguish: “Is this America?”Until Jan. 6, Anton, who patrolled outside the Capitol on the midnight shift, considered his most immediate adversaries to be winter’s frigid nights, summer’s suffocating heat and, year round, the possible complacency born of the work. The job, which he held with great pride, required staying alert for the possibility of a threat at all times, even though there were never any real indications of one. Not every officer took the job so seriously; for example, it bothered Gowdy that some officers literally slept on the job. But Anton felt that because the midnight crew was small, his responsibility at this site, whose history never failed to move him, was large. “Good job,” his colleagues used to say when they relieved him in the morning. “The building’s still here.”A violent clash against a mob of angry rioters was not the battle that the Capitol Police force was prepared or equipped to win. Military veterans like Anton make up only about 15 percent of the force; many officers, before Jan. 6, had never so much as made an arrest, much less engaged in hand-to-hand combat. In law-enforcement circles, the job was considered stable and cushy — average pay nears six figures, with federal benefits on top of that — if less than exciting. Although its budget is larger than that of the entire force serving Detroit, the Capitol Police Department is expected to provide security for lawmakers and staff in a complex of buildings on Capitol Hill covering less than half a square mile. The officers typically stood guard at checkpoints and metal detectors, provided new members and tourists directions around the labyrinthine building and monitored what were almost always small and peaceful protests on the various political issues that bring crowds to Washington.It wasn’t until around Christmas that Anton started to think that the Capitol might be facing a serious threat. Alarming warnings started coming through on every officer’s official email in the form of what were called BOLOs — alerts about people to “be on the lookout” for. Officers tended to ignore those messages, and Gonell says they did not strike him as out of the ordinary. But Anton, who had been on the force for almost three years, had never seen BOLOs anything like the ones in his inbox. The alerts included photos of people who were saying things in social media posts along the lines of: “My buddies and me are coming up there with our guns”; “People are going to get hurt.”Anton, a 34-year-old Navy veteran, repeatedly raised concerns, along with several other officers, before Jan 6.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesAnton and several of his fellow officers, especially those who, like him, were military veterans, were worried about the Jan. 6 gathering and repeatedly approached their immediate supervisor, Gonell, to demand that he raise their concerns with his bosses. What was the plan in the event of even one active shooter? Not all members of the riot squad were trained to use long guns, but Anton thought they could strategize about how to make the most of those who were. (Other officers were also alerting their higher-ups to disturbing memes and posts they were seeing on social media.) Gonell confirms that he raised their suggestions with more senior members of the force, including his own lieutenant and the captain, but was repeatedly told to put his concerns in writing, which he did, to no avail. On Jan. 5, after roll call, Lt. Rani Brooks told the officers she brought up the issue with her captain, at their request, but got nowhere. “I’m not going to say she laughed, but. …” Brooks told them, according to four officers who were there at the time. (Brooks said through a police spokesman that she did not recall using that language.)The intelligence failures that left police officers, members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence at risk are now well documented. Three days before the attack, an internal police intelligence report described what would occur with almost prophetic accuracy: “Unlike previous postelection protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counterprotesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th. Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members and others who actively promote violence may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike.” Yet the agency failed to distribute such intelligence warnings to rank-and-file officers; to fully staff the force for what was increasingly predicted to be a large and unruly event; to allow officers to use their most powerful crowd-control weapons, like stun grenades, to confront the mob, or even to train enough officers on those weapons; to equip enough of the force with riot gear; or even to produce a plan for the situation. Given the obvious and disastrous failures, Chief Steven Sund, who was in charge of day-to-day force operations, resigned shortly after the riot, as did the sergeants-at-arms of the Senate and the House, figures elected by the leaders of each chamber to serve on a board that oversees the Capitol Police force and is ultimately responsible for the building’s security.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?Unlike most police departments, which report to an executive-branch leader like a mayor, the Capitol Police Department is the rare force controlled by a legislative body. The structure has helped create a notoriously secretive agency — one that is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests and until recently has rarely held news conferences — and a sense among officers that with two often competing chambers of Congress in charge, no one is in charge.Capitol security officials have offered conflicting explanations for why the threats weren’t taken more seriously, but it has become clear that they and federal law-enforcement agencies were in a state of denial, unable to perceive what had seemed unimaginable: that a threat to Congress could be emanating from the president himself.Despite the department’s own dire prediction of an extremist attack on the Capitol, the leaders of the force were lulled into a false sense of security because they had handled two postelection rallies of Trump supporters with little incident, and because federal intelligence agencies weren’t ringing alarm bells. The Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. never issued an elevated or imminent alert, and the Capitol Police’s final intelligence report before Jan. 6 stated that the probability of civil disobedience was “remote” to “improbable.”Yogananda D. Pittman, the agency’s chief of protective and intelligence operations at the time, apologized to Congress for the failures, but Sund, the former chief, has blamed the F.B.I. and other agencies for missing the threats, arguing that the Capitol Police Department is mostly a “consumer” of information provided by the intelligence community and that the “entire intelligence community seems to have missed it.” There has been more blame to go around: Sund has faulted Congress’s two sergeants-at-arms for not more quickly heeding his calls to send in the National Guard, as well as lower-ranking intelligence officers who did not alert supervisors to warnings of threats.“The department expected and planned for violence from some protesters with ties to domestic terrorist organizations,” Chief J. Thomas Manger said in a statement, “but nobody in the law-enforcement or intelligence communities imagined, on top of that threat, Americans who were not affiliated with those groups would cause the mayhem to metastasize to a volume uncontrollable for any single law-enforcement agency.”It is widely known that about 150 officers from the Capitol and Metropolitan Police Departments and local agencies were injured during the violence, more than 80 from the Capitol Police alone. Less understood is how long-lasting the damage, physical and psychological, to the Capitol Police force has been, damage that informs many officers’ outrage about what they perceive as a lack of accountability for those responsible. Interviews over many months with more than two dozen officers and their families (some of whom requested not to use their full names to speak frankly without permission from the department or to protect future employment prospects in the federal government), as well as a review of internal documents, congressional testimony and medical records, reveal a department that is still hobbled and in many ways dysfunctional. Among those still on the force and those who have left, many significant injuries and psychological disorders remain, including serious traumatic brain injuries and neurological impairment, orthopedic injuries requiring surgery and rehabilitation, post-traumatic stress disorder and heightened anxiety.Riot shields at the Capitol.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesDeep frustrations remain with the leadership of the force. Most of the commanders widely viewed as failing the rank and file remain in positions of authority, including Pittman, who served as acting chief before Manger was hired in July. “Officers are still in disbelief that Assistant Chief Pittman is still in her role, where she failed miserably on Jan. 6,” says Gus Papathanasiou, chairman of the Capitol Police union. “I’ve heard from officers and supervisors who’ve retired; they didn’t want to work under her.” Tim Barber, a Capitol Police spokesman, said in a statement that “Chief Manger has expressed confidence in the department’s leadership team that remained” after the high-level departures in the wake of Jan. 6.In the year since the siege on the Capitol, about 135 officers on a force of about 1,800 have quit or retired, an increase of 69 percent over the year before. (One officer quit after enduring a string of tragedies: He suffered a stroke shortly after the assault on the Capitol and then contracted the coronavirus twice because of what he viewed as the department’s lax enforcement of mask-wearing protocols.) More may soon join them: Papathanasiou, the union chairman, warns that more than 500 additional officers will be eligible for retirement in the next five years.Officers we interviewed about their decision to leave said the failures of Jan. 6 were the most egregious of a series of management crises and errors. If Jan. 6 was a national tragedy, it was also one that the officers who served at the Capitol that day experienced cruelly and intimately in their own bodies, compounding the psychic fallout that has been especially profound in people who believed that their daily work reflected the country’s highest ideals: to protect members of Congress, regardless of party, in order to protect democracy itself.It was not unusual, the first week back at the Capitol after Jan. 6, for officers walking by a bathroom or one of the many small, hidden rooms in the building to overhear the sound of weeping. Anton thought his colleagues’ eyes looked vacant, and he was pretty sure they would have said the same of him. Officers were fearful and on high alert as bomb threats were called in every few days. Some officers, certain they’d never be given the equipment they needed, went out and bought their own helmets and Kevlar. On the morning of the 6th, members of the midnight shift had been sent home; now the Capitol Police called on officers to work long hours of overtime, even as they were surrounded by thousands of National Guard members, whose numbers dwarfed that of the force.Reports of possible security risks that would most likely have once been dismissed by leadership were now triggers for riot-control officers to throw on what they called their turtle gear — helmets and shields and full tactical gear — and go running to position for threats that never materialized. “We were chasing ghosts,” Anton says. The sergeant who watched Edwards go down on Jan. 6 (he has since retired) worried that he was sending officers to work crowd control who were in no condition to be there. “This is bullshit,” one officer started screaming as her unit geared up, just days after the 6th, to patrol a Black Lives Matter protest near the Capitol.Before the midnight shift on Jan. 7, officers received grim news: Brian Sicknick was in critical condition and not likely to survive (the Washington chief medical examiner would later report that he had succumbed to two strokes). At roll call for the riot squad, Capt. Ben Smith acknowledged widespread critiques of the force, reminding officers that they weren’t in it for public praise. No one needed a pat on the back, he told them, his affect flat, as three officers recalled; this was what they had signed up for. The room fell silent, stunned. For Anton, Smith’s comments confirmed that the Capitol Police leadership would handle the aftermath of the 6th as badly as they handled the run-up to it. Anton knew what he had signed up for, he thought as Smith spoke. But he had not signed up to serve a force so incompetent that it ignored all obvious signs of trouble ahead, and he had not signed up to fight an army of terrorizing Americans.Anton’s desire to serve his country was born on Sept. 11, 2001, when he and other students crowded around a television at his high school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and watched the south tower of the World Trade Center crumble to the ground. His mother worked on the 10th floor of that building. He waited with dread for hours in his apartment, convinced that she was never coming home. Even after his mother walked through the door late that night, safe but shaken, his protective impulse remained.“I just wanted to help,” Anton said many months after the assault on the Capitol, after his disillusionment with the force had swelled and spilled over into so many aspects of his life that he barely recognized himself. “In the Navy, I was always the damage-control man, which is essentially like a firefighter-slash-emergency manager. So I was always in a job where I wanted to help protect people, to prevent bad things from happening. That’s who I am at the core of my life.” All he wanted to do, in those days leading up to the 6th, was help ensure that this federal agency would fiercely protect its leaders and citizens; by the time the captain was addressing him and his peers at roll call on the 7th, the damage was done.Morale took another blow on Jan. 9 with the death of Officer Howard Liebengood, who was on duty during the attack and took his life three days later. His wife, Serena Liebengood, wrote in an open letter to her Virginia congresswoman, Jennifer Wexton, that her husband had been called on to work “practically around the clock” after the 6th and was severely sleep-deprived.The entire force had been thrust into similarly punishing overtime shifts, exhausting officers whose nervous systems were already jarred. Mental-health resources were so insufficient that the sergeant who since retired received permission to ask for help from his hometown pastor, who arrived at the Capitol with two other pastors to offer immediate counseling.On the job, officers traded information about the ones who were missing. Gowdy, a baby-faced officer who clearly found great satisfaction in the authority his uniform lent him, was back home in Pennsylvania Dutch country, recovering from a concussion. Edwards had scabs under her eyes from the chemical burns, as well as a concussion; for the first few days after the attack, she could barely speak or walk. Her husband was also an officer who was in the fray that day, but he was uninjured and felt he was needed at the Capitol, so Edwards flew down to Atlanta, where her mother could help her recover.Devan Gowdy, one of several officers who suffered a concussion in the attack.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesGonell, Anton’s sergeant, tried going to work after the 6th, even though he was clearly in pain. An immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Gonell was proud to be a sergeant; he sometimes wondered whether he might have gone even further if his accent were less strong, his English a little better. Now he wanted to be there for his officers, but his supervisor, noticing that Gonell was limping, told him not to come back until he’d seen a doctor. Even after that appointment, he continued going to work until the pain was so overwhelming that he could barely drive. M.R.I.s revealed that he would need a bone fusion in his foot and surgery to repair his shoulder. Gonell reluctantly put in paperwork for an extended leave.Tricoche spent the first two days after the 6th taking care of a hand so black and blue, so swollen, that his thumb could not meet his forefinger. The gashes all over both shins from his fall on the steps would leave scars, but he was more worried about his state of mind. He was working 12- and 16-hour shifts with few days off. He was also in a perpetual state of disgust: The orders coming down, as officers worked cheek by jowl with thousands of National Guard members on the premises, seemed chaotic. Even after what they’d all just lived through, could no one fix what was so clearly broken in management?In the days after the attack, Dunn, usually an extrovert, felt himself grow depressed. Someone known on the force for speaking his mind (to some, more often than warranted), he instead started isolating himself from his colleagues, eating lunch alone in his car. On social media and sometimes in the press, critics were suggesting that the officers were riot sympathizers who looked the other way; Dunn desperately wanted to offer the contrary facts (which an internal investigation by the Capitol Police and federal prosecutors would eventually confirm): Officers were overwhelmed — and, in a few cases, had shown poor judgment in an effort to assuage the crowd — but they generally had acted heroically and were not complicit. (In the aftermath, six officers would face internal discipline for their actions on Jan. 6, and one would be charged criminally for obstructing justice afterward.)Just days after the 6th, Dunn gave an anonymous interview to BuzzFeed News, in which he recounted his anguished cry in the Rotunda: “Is this America?” During Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and the lead impeachment manager, quoted those very words in his concluding statements. Dunn, moved to see how his words were used, received clearance from the force to speak more widely to the press, giving interviews to ABC News, CNN, The New York Times. He shared some of the most personal aspects of the day for him — like being called the N-word for the first time in uniform.Not everyone on the force, which is mostly white (as opposed to the Metropolitan Police Department, which is 50 percent Black), was thrilled that Dunn was the single voice self-designated to speak for all of them. To some, when Dunn talked about the racism he endured on Jan. 6, he made it sound as if it was “all about race,” as one officer put it, especially given that the two Capitol Police officers who died soon after the attack were white. Dunn, aware of that criticism, felt that his critics were focusing on only one aspect of what he discussed on-air: He was also trying to defend the bravery of the force as a whole.Dunn knew that the Capitol Police Department was depleted, emotionally and numerically: Many were out recovering from their injuries, or they were out sick with Covid, or they were out because they had quit, which put more pressure on the officers still on the force. Still expected to provide security for long and unpredictable sessions of Congress, officers say they were typically receiving only one or two days off per month. Those who served on Jan. 6 were granted only two eight-hour shifts of administrative leave, but many officers felt they were unable to take that leave, much less ask for more. Officers feared that if they went on leave for their mental health, they would only burden their colleagues or jeopardize their job prospects. “I would not be surprised if down the road the department gets sued — big time — for their lack of action after Jan. 6,” one officer said, referring to the mental-health effects of such long hours after the attack.Tricoche had started to feel he was not entirely himself even before the 6th, exhausted and distressed after working at protests throughout 2020. He was called an Uncle Tom at a Black Lives Matter rally, then called the N-word at the first big MAGA rally, and felt, particularly at the MAGA event, a sense that the Capitol Police officers were little more than costumed props, instructed to simply walk alongside large mobs, with no viable plan for what they were supposed to do if protesters easily overwhelmed the few officers between them and the building.Dominick Tricoche at his childhood home in Levittown, Pa.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesAlthough Tricoche was close to his unit — they worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. — he felt increasingly alienated from the force itself, where the divisiveness of the outside world inevitably filtered in. On election night, he and Anton watched the returns in a small room where other officers occasionally passed through. Officers kept tossing out predictions about how things would go down if Joe Biden lost — Man, Black Lives Matter was going to get crazy, they said; the protesters were going to get out of hand; it would be a nightmare at the Capitol. Tricoche waited until they were alone in the room and then turned to Anton. The real question, he said, is what happens if Trump loses and doesn’t leave. The two of them went back and forth, playing out the scenarios. Did they trust certain colleagues not to let Trump walk right into the Capitol after Biden was supposed to take office? Did they even trust those colleagues not to turn their guns on Anton or Tricoche if they tried to stand in Trump’s way? The answer, they both thought, might be no.Tricoche’s colleagues knew him as an officer who had a fierce sense of duty but was otherwise an unusual figure on the force. In quiet moments on midnights, he worked his way through F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Bukowski, poets like Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot. He received a full R.O.T.C. scholarship to Penn State but dropped out when he suffered an episode of deep depression. Now 29, he’d become one of Gonell’s most reliable underlings, someone Gonell described as “an excellent officer — always willing to step up and do the job, very responsible.”At work, Tricoche continued to be the leader Gonell knew — taking charge of the unit with Anton in Gonell’s absence — but at home, he was suffering from insomnia, still jacked on adrenaline and anxiety. He couldn’t rest, and he couldn’t plan, because they were often slammed with an extra shift at the last moment. As he crumbled under the stress of the previous weeks, a relationship important to him started falling apart, and now he counted that among the other failures that tormented him. He kept going over the events of the 6th — surely he could have done something more in the face of all that madness. He felt himself spiraling downward, writing in his journal, “I dream of a darkness darker than black.” Nicole, the wife of the officer who tumbled down the stone stairs under the scaffolding for the inaugural stage, was watching Fox News when she first learned something was amiss at the Capitol. Soon after that, she got a call from the wife of a fellow officer, telling Nicole that her husband was receiving medical care. When he finally came home early on the morning of the 7th, he was dazed, quiet and drained. A doctor he saw that night in the emergency room told him he probably had a concussion and could not return to work until he had been cleared by his primary-care physician. Nicole (who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her family’s privacy) wasn’t too worried. They’d see how he felt tomorrow; she went to bed disturbed but not particularly alarmed about her husband’s health.The next day, her husband was supposed to rest and stay quiet, but his phone was blowing up with texts from his best friends, a group of men who were known as the North Barricade Crew after the spot where they were usually stationed. Irreverent, tight-knit, they brought a certain insult-comic humor to roll call (after one member mooned a sergeant near his post, another sergeant started calling them the Motley Crew). If they were rowdy, it was a privilege that came with more than a decade of experience for each, and friendships just as long. The group texts that day, however, were somber, as they tried to piece together who had been where, how it all went down. Even those who were not there that day were suffering. Billy Evans, a good friend of her husband’s, was off duty watching his kids when the events unfolded. Now he was stricken that he had not been there to support his colleagues.Her husband couldn’t stay away from the news, online and on television, even though it only fueled his anger. He was angry at the rioters, angry that some of them had dared to say they were on the officers’ side. His memories of the day were impressionistic, dreamlike, spotty, scenes from a zombie movie he never wanted to star in; it was days before he learned from a friend that he had been knocked unconscious and was out for three minutes. When he walked on his right foot, he felt as if he were stepping on gravel, and he felt dazed, with bouts of grief and rage searing through the fog. Now on leave himself, he worried that another attack would happen while he was sitting at home. “I just know something bad’s going to happen, and I won’t be there to help,” he often said to Nicole. He could imagine little worse.By the 9th, Nicole and her husband were starting to have more serious concerns about his symptoms. Sometimes when he stood up, he tilted backward, on the verge of falling. All three of their children had names that started with the same letter, and several times he tried to address one of them only to stutter on that first consonant, unable to get out a simple sentence. His friends corresponded mostly by text, and one was shocked when they finally did speak by phone. “He can’t even get his words out,” he texted the others.Nicole, an organized person who had worked in operations for a small business for decades, always believed there were few crises that could not be managed by the effective deployment of checklists. So she started making them: Find neurologist, find paperwork for neurologist appointment, schedule appointment with orthopedist, file paperwork for disability leave. She took out a bright yellow folder and neatly labeled it: “January 6.”The bronze door near the Rotunda still had a huge spider crack in its pane, a sight that made Anton feel a splinter in his own heart. Windows where the sun had shone through on countless elected officials were now boarded up, so that the whole building looked as if it were about to go into foreclosure.On March 4, Anton and Tricoche showed up to their midnight shift and discovered that instead of serving on riot control, they would be assigned elsewhere. Senator Tammy Duckworth had requested an escort. Duckworth, an Army veteran and the only senator who uses a wheelchair, had a harrowing experience on the 6th, coming within minutes of crossing paths with the mob. There was no specific cause for concern that night, but in case of something unexpected, she wanted officers waiting at the Senate chamber to help her get out of the building.Anton and Tricoche considered protecting a member of Congress to be the highest honor of their roles as Capitol Police officers. They had the official training to use long guns, so they retrieved M4s and magazines from the armory and escorted the senator to the chamber, as she thanked them profusely. But while she was in the bathroom, someone else — they later learned it was the acting Senate sergeant-at-arms — approached them, agitated, and demanded to know what they were doing there. At that moment, Duckworth exited the bathroom and said she had specifically asked for them to be there for her. (Ben Garmisa, a spokesman for Duckworth, declined to comment.) But as soon as she disappeared into the Senate gallery, Anton’s phone rang: Their acting sergeant told them to return those weapons immediately. They later learned that either a senator or a staff member had told the acting sergeant-at-arms that the body armor and weapons made them uncomfortable.Anton had sworn to protect the lives of those senators with his own body, if it came down to it, and now he felt he was being chastised for providing safety to one of them. Both he and Tricoche appreciated that Congress had always operated free of military guard. But they felt the overwhelming sense that those in charge of the Capitol did not grasp the new reality in which they were operating — or the country’s new reality, for that matter.Tricoche’s frustration was rising, his mental health declining. Exhausted from work, emotionally strung out, he was feeling a kind of slippage, especially when he was alone. On March 8, he felt so utterly bereft that it overwhelmed him, and he called in to say he would be missing work. Over the next days, he remained home but couldn’t summon the energy even to call in or to respond to the worried texts he was receiving. “You here tonight?” Anton wrote. “Yo yo yo man you hanging in?” Ten days ticked on, with Tricoche ignoring text after text, from two sergeants who he knew cared about him, and from Anton. “Hey bro I don’t know what’s going on but everyone is looking for you and they are going to request a welfare check on you and send people to your place,” Anton wrote on March 13. He’d driven to Tricoche’s apartment with a sergeant, pounded on the door, heard nothing. “I hope you are at home doing well,” he texted later that night. “Miss ya man.”Tricoche was off duty on Jan 6. He drove to the Capitol after learning that something serious was underway there.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesTricoche knew enough to seek help from a doctor, who told him his hours were doing him harm and prescribed anti-anxiety medication and sleep aids. And yet, at some point that week, consumed by a feeling of failure, convinced that he was only adding to others’ suffering, he swallowed a large amount of over-the-counter medication. He woke up, unsure how many hours later, in a pool of vomit with aching liver pain.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

It’s Election Day 2024. President Biden and former President Donald Trump have been locked in battle for months, with Mr. Biden holding a stable, sizable lead in the popular vote but much narrower leads in key swing states like Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. Turnout has been exceptionally high, nearly matching 2020 levels.The outcome will clearly come down to those three key states — all with Republican legislative majorities that put in place laws making them the final arbiters of electoral disputes. As the counting in the three proceeds, Democratic Party representatives raise a hue and cry that it is proceeding unfairly, with significant numbers of valid ballots being rejected without proper cause. State election officials (mostly pro-Trump Republicans) declare that there is no substance to these objections. All three conclude that Mr. Trump won their states’ electors, and with them the presidency.Is it likely that Democratic voters would accept this result without protest and a constitutional crisis (and perhaps even violent protest)?I think the answer is no, and I suspect most Democrats reading this would agree with me. And that’s why, notwithstanding all the good arguments for reforming our electoral system, there is no legislative solution to the deepest problem threatening American democracy: the profound lack of trust in the legitimacy of the opposition.The scenario I described above is precisely what multiple observers have been warning about in the year since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Republican legislatures in several states have revised their election statutes to give themselves more authority over the conduct of elections in their states, reducing the authorities of state secretaries of state, governors and county election officials in the process. From the perspective of anyone who isn’t a Republican, those moves look like preparation to commit fraud and to do so with legal impunity.Many of those legislators, however, will say that their moves are intended to shore up confidence in the electoral system — that they are, in fact, a response to those same terrible events of Jan. 6. Their voters believe — wrongly, as at least a few of those same Republican officials will admit — that the 2020 election was decided unfairly, on the basis of fraudulent votes. At a minimum, more and more mainstream Republicans are arguing, voting procedures were capriciously changed by biased election officials and judges using the pandemic as an excuse in a way that unfairly advantaged Democrats. Therefore, they need to take these kinds of steps to convince their voters that the election will be conducted fairly.Perhaps they are right that this is what it would take to convince their voters. If they are, though, they will succeed only by undermining the confidence of the other party in those same election results. The same, sadly, is likely true of proposed Democratic attempts to shore up confidence in the electoral system.It seems to have been largely forgotten, but in 2020, despite extraordinary strain, the system worked. As independent observers have attested, no meaningful fraud marred the election. Turnout was extremely high for both parties despite pandemic conditions, attesting to the lack of effective voter suppression as well. Republican officeholders at all levels of government were pressed to find fraud that didn’t exist, to decertify valid results and otherwise to undermine the integrity of the election. They overwhelmingly resisted that pressure. The same is true of the judicial branch, which rejected out of hand the Trump campaign’s spurious legal challenges.None of that, however, was sufficient to persuade tens of millions of Trump voters that their candidate actually lost. On the contrary: When forced to choose between President Trump’s baseless assertions and the conclusions of those Republicans duly charged with overseeing the election, these voters chose Mr. Trump over members of their own party who acted with integrity. The rioters on Jan. 6 turned to violence because they believed that the election was stolen, and they believed that despite all the authorities, Democrats and Republicans, actually responsible for running it saying otherwise.That’s not a problem that can be solved by tinkering with the mechanics of elections oversight. It’s entirely possible that worthwhile reforms to limit political grandstanding could fuel distrust by Democrats in the legitimacy of elections.Take the Electoral Count Act, a particular focus of concern because of John Eastman’s memo suggesting, absurdly, that it granted Vice President Mike Pence the authority to unilaterally set aside certified electoral votes. The act was originally passed to prevent a repeat of the disputed election of 1876, during which Congress — previously responsible for resolving such disputes — deadlocked over which electors to approve from three states that submitted dueling slates. The act reduced Congress’s role and aimed to provide clear rules for how and when states must approve their slates to avoid disputes.Those provisions can — and should — be clarified, to eliminate the possibility that a future vice president might do what Mike Pence refused to, or that future representatives and senators could baselessly undermine popular confidence in election integrity as numerous Republicans have done in the wake of the last election.But what any such reform would do is push more authority back down to the state level or over to the judicial branch. What happens if those actors behave in a corruptly partisan manner? With key state legislatures in Republican hands and with the Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees inclined to give latitude to those same state legislatures in setting electoral rules, it’s not hard to imagine many Democrats in 2024 concluding that by reforming the act they had disarmed themselves.Some Democrats, therefore, have called for federalizing America’s unusually decentralized national elections, to override the possibility of partisan state legislature interference in either the conduct of the election or the vote count and certification of the winners. Because the constitution vests a great deal of authority at the state level, some of these proposals might well face constitutional challenges — but even if they passed muster, what would they achieve? They would invest more power in Congress, which might well be in Republican hands. How confident would Democrats be in an election in 2024 ultimately overseen by Kevin McCarthy in the House and Mitch McConnell in the Senate?Nor would investing that power in another state-level authority be assured to fare better. After the 2020 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, was a hero for refusing to compromise his integrity. But in the 2000 election, the independent authority responsible for running the election in Florida was Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican who was widely distrusted by Democrats for what they saw as favoritism to George W. Bush. This distrust was a mirror of Republicans’ own distrust of the recount process as conducted in a number of Democratically controlled counties in South Florida. It was distrust all the way up and all the way down. It ended only because Al Gore accepted the authority of the Supreme Court.There are potential reforms that could significantly improve the democratic accountability of our system and reduce the scope for either party to skew the process. Taking redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures and entrusting it to nonpartisan bodies is an obvious example. Breaking up the largest states, or creating multimember congressional districts, are more profound reforms that could empower currently underrepresented political minorities from both camps. There are likely deals to strike on voting rights that could provide better security against both fraud and suppression.Such reforms, however, will never be trusted if they are enacted on a purely partisan basis to plainly partisan ends. Even if they are responding to real distortions, and are formally neutral, they will be perceived and opposed as illegitimate partisan grabs if they aren’t undertaken cooperatively. They won’t break the cycle of distrust or prevent a recurrence of Jan. 6 any more than widespread agreement among nonpartisan observers that the 2020 election was fair did so.The problem is not that America is incapable of conducting an election with integrity. We just did, under some of the most difficult conditions.The problem is that too many Americans — predominantly Republicans today, but perhaps Democrats tomorrow — do not believe or accept the results, and that their leaders — again, predominantly Republicans today, but perhaps Democrats tomorrow — are willing and eager to cater to that mistaken conviction.That’s a problem that can’t be legislated away. It can be resolved only by the parties themselves committing that demagogy will stop at the election’s edge. Until that happens, American democracy will be in crisis, no matter what laws we pass to protect it.Noah Millman is a political columnist at The Week and the film and theater critic at Modern Age.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The decision by the pastor and civil rights activist added to a wave of Democrats deciding not to run for re-election in a difficult midterm cycle.WASHINGTON — Representative Bobby L. Rush, the most senior Illinois House lawmaker, said on Monday that he planned to retire at the end of the year, adding to a wave of Democrats who have decided against seeking re-election in what is expected to be a tough midterm cycle for the party.Mr. Rush, 75, a pastor and former Black Panther who built himself into an electoral powerhouse in his district on the South Side of Chicago, said in an announcement video obtained by The New York Times that he wanted to focus on his ministerial work and his family.“I’m not retiring — I’m returning home,” Mr. Rush said in the video, in which he reflected on nearly three decades of service in Congress and earlier battles with a rare cancer. “I’m returning to my church. I’m returning to my family.”“Being a member of Congress — although it’s powerful — it can be very limited,” he added, saying he would be broadening his horizons. “I think I’ll be more effective because I have the gift of a 75-year-old, and that’s wisdom.”In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, where he disclosed his plans, Mr. Rush said his decision came after a conversation with his 19-year-old grandson, Jonathan, saying that he did not want his grandchildren “to know me from a television news clip or something they read in a newspaper.”Two dozen House Democrats have now announced their plans to either retire or seek a different political office before the November election, when many Democrats fear they will lose control of the House. With the departure of several senior lawmakers, Democrats face a loss of institutional knowledge and experience.Although Mr. Rush’s district is heavily Democratic and unlikely to switch parties, the House Republican campaign arm gloated over what Mike Berg, a spokesman, described as evidence that “Democrats are abandoning ship as fast as possible because they know their majority is doomed.”Mr. Rush is set to hold a news conference at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago on Tuesday. The funeral of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black teenager whose murder by two white men helped shape the civil rights movement, was held at the church in 1955.Before winning the seat in 1992, Mr. Rush enlisted in the Army, helped found the Illinois Black Panther Party and served as a Chicago alderman. As he climbed in Democratic electoral politics, he faced criticism from some other Black activists that he had become too mainstream, but he defeated multiple bids to oust him, including a primary challenge by former President Barack Obama, then a state senator. He was set to face another primary this year.In the 16-minute video, Mr. Rush reflected on the critical funding he had funneled toward his district and the legislation he had shepherded into law. He has long fought against gun violence and continued his civil rights activism in the House, breaching chamber rules on dress in 2012 when he wore a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses to honor Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager killed in Florida.The speech, he said in the video, was a chance to “let the whole world see that although I’m a member of Congress, I’m still a Black man in America who’s fighting for justice and equality.”He vowed to continue pushing for bills to be passed before his retirement, including the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which would explicitly make lynching a federal crime.“I’m going to get this bill passed,” he pledged. More

The official, Bill Gardner, a Democrat, has served as secretary of state in New Hampshire for more than four decades.Bill Gardner, who for decades as secretary of state has fiercely defended New Hampshire’s right to hold the country’s first presidential primaries, said on Monday that he would step down after 45 years.Mr. Gardner, a Democrat first elected in 1976, had largely enjoyed bipartisan support, even as the job of secretary of state — each state’s top elections administrator — has become more political, a national trend accelerated by former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of widespread voting fraud.Mr. Gardner, 73, said political reasons did not force his decision, nor was his health a factor, though he reflected during a news conference in the Statehouse in Concord on being the longest-serving secretary of state in the country — one of only four New Hampshirites to hold the job since 1929.“The two previous secretaries of state died in office,’’ he said. “I thought about that. Was I going to be one like that?”Asked about the future of New Hampshire’s presidential primaries, which every four years bring a wave of national attention, money and visitors, Mr. Gardner predicted other states might try to jump the line, but said the Granite State would continue to be first.“There will be challenges,’’ he said. “They’ll find new ways to attempt it. But it should be OK.”Among some Democrats, in particular, there is a desire to dethrone New Hampshire from its prime electoral spot, as well as Iowa with its earlier caucuses, because both states are whiter, older and more rural than the country as a whole.An enduring obstacle is New Hampshire state law, which requires its primary to be held before any similar contest. Mr. Gardner, who held the sole power to set the primary date, had said that if another state tried to get ahead, he would simply move up New Hampshire’s date into December or even November.Mr. Gardner escaped Mr. Trump’s campaign of personal insults and pressure in 2020, aimed at other election officials in battleground states that President Biden won, likely because the race in New Hampshire was not especially close.However, after Mr. Trump made the baseless claim in 2016 that “millions” of illegal votes had been cast by noncitizens across the country, Mr. Gardner agreed to join a commission that Mr. Trump set up to investigate. His decision to join the commission, even after Mr. Trump falsely claimed that he had won New Hampshire, was sharply criticized by some of his fellow Democrats. The commission disbanded after numerous states refused to cooperate with what they considered to be intrusive requests for voters’ information.Mr. Gardner defended the commission at the time, and his role on it, saying he had hoped the “facts would end up speaking for themselves” about the lack of fraud. On Monday, he reiterated his belief that the commission was meant to restore Americans’ eroding trust in election results.But at the time, Democrats’ disappointment over his role led to the most serious challenge that he faced for re-election, in 2018, when another Democrat, Colin Van Ostern, nearly unseated Mr. Gardner.New Hampshire’s secretary of state is elected every two years by the membership of the state legislature. Mr. Gardner’s current deputy, David Scanlan, will take over this week until the legislature holds its next election.On Monday, praise for Mr. Gardner came from leaders of both parties.“Secretary Gardner has fiercely defended our primary over the years, ensuring that Granite Staters play a critical role in our country’s political elections,’’ Donna Soucy, the Democratic leader of the State Senate, said in a statement.Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, said that New Hampshirites “owe a tremendous debt of gratitude” to Mr. Gardner’s administration of elections that were “always open, fair, accessible and accurate.” More

The official, Bill Gardner, a Democrat, has served as secretary of state in New Hampshire for more than four decades.Bill Gardner, who for decades as secretary of state has fiercely defended New Hampshire’s right to hold the country’s first presidential primaries, said on Monday that he would step down after 45 years.Mr. Gardner, a Democrat first elected in 1976, had largely enjoyed bipartisan support, even as the job of secretary of state — each state’s top elections administrator — has become more political, a national trend accelerated by former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of widespread voting fraud.Mr. Gardner, 73, said political reasons did not force his decision, nor was his health a factor, though he reflected during a news conference in the Statehouse in Concord on being the longest-serving secretary of state in the country — one of only four New Hampshirites to hold the job since 1929.“The two previous secretaries of state died in office,’’ he said. “I thought about that. Was I going to be one like that?”Asked about the future of New Hampshire’s presidential primaries, which every four years bring a wave of national attention, money and visitors, Mr. Gardner predicted other states might try to jump the line, but said the Granite State would continue to be first.“There will be challenges,’’ he said. “They’ll find new ways to attempt it. But it should be OK.”Among some Democrats, in particular, there is a desire to dethrone New Hampshire from its prime electoral spot, as well as Iowa with its earlier caucuses, because both states are whiter, older and more rural than the country as a whole.An enduring obstacle is New Hampshire state law, which requires its primary to be held before any similar contest. Mr. Gardner, who held the sole power to set the primary date, had said that if another state tried to get ahead, he would simply move up New Hampshire’s date into December or even November.Mr. Gardner escaped Mr. Trump’s campaign of personal insults and pressure in 2020, aimed at other election officials in battleground states that President Biden won, likely because the race in New Hampshire was not especially close.However, after Mr. Trump made the baseless claim in 2016 that “millions” of illegal votes had been cast by noncitizens across the country, Mr. Gardner agreed to join a commission that Mr. Trump set up to investigate. His decision to join the commission, even after Mr. Trump falsely claimed that he had won New Hampshire, was sharply criticized by some of his fellow Democrats. The commission disbanded after numerous states refused to cooperate with what they considered to be intrusive requests for voters’ information.Mr. Gardner defended the commission at the time, and his role on it, saying he had hoped the “facts would end up speaking for themselves” about the lack of fraud. On Monday, he reiterated his belief that the commission was meant to restore Americans’ eroding trust in election results.But at the time, Democrats’ disappointment over his role led to the most serious challenge that he faced for re-election, in 2018, when another Democrat, Colin Van Ostern, nearly unseated Mr. Gardner.New Hampshire’s secretary of state is elected every two years by the membership of the state legislature. Mr. Gardner’s current deputy, David Scanlan, will take over this week until the legislature holds its next election.On Monday, praise for Mr. Gardner came from leaders of both parties.“Secretary Gardner has fiercely defended our primary over the years, ensuring that Granite Staters play a critical role in our country’s political elections,’’ Donna Soucy, the Democratic leader of the State Senate, said in a statement.Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, said that New Hampshirites “owe a tremendous debt of gratitude” to Mr. Gardner’s administration of elections that were “always open, fair, accessible and accurate.” More