US Politics

Donald Trump announced on Friday that he would not attend the inauguration of Joe Biden on 20 January, after a violent mob of the president’s loyalists stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the result of the November election in an attack that left five people dead.His decision came as little surprise, but nevertheless breaks with a longstanding tradition of presidents attending their successors inauguration ceremonies in a symbolic demonstration of the peaceful transfer of power between administrations.“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” Trump wrote on Twitter.It remains uncertain if the vice-president, Mike Pence, will attend Biden’s swearing-in, which will take place on the steps of the Capitol under heightened security after the building was breached and vandalized on Wednesday.The presidential inauguration committee had already asked supporters not to travel to Washington to attend the ceremony due to the coronavirus pandemic.While refusing to give up his baseless claims that the election was stolen from him, Trump on Thursday recognized his defeat for the first time in a two-and-a-half-minute video posted on Twitter.“A new administration will be inaugurated on January 20,” he said, breaking a day of silence after the riots. “My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation.”The circumstances around Trump’s departure from the White House at noon on 20 January are also unclear, though he is widely expected to return to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Before the Christmas holiday, Trump had reportedly discussed plans for holding an event to announce his plans to run for president in 2024 instead of attending Biden’s inauguration.Before his election in 2016 and again in 2020, Trump refused to explicitly commit to a peaceful transfer of power.After his loss to Biden, Trump insisted with any evidence that the election had been stolen and refused to accept his defeat. Instead he whipped up his supporters with wild claims of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against him, culminating in a rally in Washington on Wednesday when he urged them to “walk down to the Capitol” and register their discontent over the election. He added that “you will never take back our country with weakness”.Shortly thereafter, rioters loyal to the president overwhelmed police and stormed the capitol, where they shattered windows, vandalized congressional offices and stole property. The mob, who Trump later told “I love you” as he appealed for calm, disrupted the process of certifying the electoral college, the last step in affirming Biden’s victory.Members of Congress returned late in the evening on Wednesday to complete the process. Biden would be the next president of the United States, in a vote of 306 to 232.In the aftermath of the assault on the Capitol, several White House officials and at least two cabinet secretaries have resigned while calls are growing for Trump to be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or by impeachment. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has said the House is prepared to bring articles of impeachment against the president for a second time if the cabinet does not act to remove him.On Friday, she told lawmakers she discussed with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, “available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike”.Throughout American history, there have only been a handful of presidents who did not attend the swearing-in of his successor, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Johnson, the first US president to be impeached. After his resignation, Richard Nixon did not attend the inauguration of Gerald Ford.After losing to Trump in 2016, Hillary Clinton attended his inauguration in her capacity as the former first lady. At the time she said: “I’m here today to honor our democracy & its enduring values. I will never stop believing in our country & its future.” And in 1993, George HW Bush attended the inauguration of Clinton after losing his campaign for re-election.With the exception of Trump and Jimmy Carter, who is 96 and has suffered a series of health issues in recent years, all other former living presidents are expected to attend Biden’s inauguration. More

Derrick Evans, a newly-elected lawmaker in West Virginia house of delegates, filmed himself during the pro-Trump riot on the US Capitol on Wednesday that left five people dead.
On Friday, the justice department announced he had been charged with entering a restricted area. 
Evans, a Republican and Trump supporter, was seen on a Facebook Live video in which he was heard shouting “We’re in! We’re in baby!” while moving among a crowd of rioters as he walked through a doorway of the Capitol Rotunda. 
The video has since been deleted. John H Bryan, a civil rights lawyer who is representing Evans, said the delegate traveled to Washington DC to “engage in peaceful protest, activism and amateur journalism” and that he engaged in “no illegal behavior”. In a statement released Thursday, Bryan added: “Given the sheer size of the group walking in, Mr Evans had no choice but to enter …”. The lawyer added that Evans has no plans to resign.
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In the 16th century, mice and rats were credited with knowing when a rotten house was on the verge of collapse.
This evolved into the idiom about fleeing a sinking ship, but the original version suggested more prescience, an ability to anticipate oblivion and get out ahead of time.
The question hovering over the officials quitting the White House is whether they have left it too late, whether they will carry the Donald Trump stain no matter how fast they run.
The education secretary, Betsy DeVos, the transport secretary, Elaine Chao, and the deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottinger, are among at least a dozen officials and aides who have resigned since a mob of the president’s supporters stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday, leading to five deaths, including that of a police officer.
Other former loyalists without a formal position in the administration have joined the scramble for cover by publicly renouncing Trump.
“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” DeVos said in her letter quitting the cabinet. The mayhem in the Capitol was “unconscionable for our country”, she said.
The president’s attempt on Thursday to distance himself from the mob by saying those who “broke the law will pay” and pledging an “orderly transition” to Joe Biden on 20 January was viewed in part as an attempt to stem more White House defections.
“It shows there’s a backing away from Trump within his administration,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of Rule and Ruin: the Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party. “It’s partly about people looking at their political legacies and reputations and believing that Trump is damaged goods at this point.”
The shocking disorder in Washington DC would taint Trump and his children and greatly diminish their sway over the Republican party, said Kabaservice. As a Trump critic he welcomed the officials’ resignations. “I guess late conversion is better than no conversion at all.”
Chao, who is married to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in her resignation letter the violence “deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside”.
Mick Mulvaney, a former White House chief of staff, said Trump’s incitement of the mob compelled him to quit as special envoy to Northern Ireland. He predicted more resignations but said not all disillusioned staff would leave. “Those who choose to stay, and I have talked with some of them, are choosing to stay because they’re worried the president might put someone worse in,” Mulvaney told CNBC.
Others to leave include Tyler Goodspeed, the acting chairman of the White House council of economic advisers, Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s chief of staff, Sarah Matthews, the deputy White House press secretary, and Ryan Tully, a senior adviser on Russia.
The fate of those fleeing an administration in its twilight is unclear.
For Republicans who disdained Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on race, immigration and other issues it feels rather late. “You have to wonder why it took them so long to see what Trump is,” said John Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College political scientist and former Republican congressional aide.
“Did they not understand his character? Did they not know of the many times he winked at violence? The resignations would have had much more force if they had come months or years ago,” said Pitney, author of Un-American: the Fake Patriotism of Donald Trump.
Recently minted ex-Trumpers will occupy an awkward position in a GOP that is splitting between those who had warned of Trump’s damage to the country and party and those who still align with the president’s policies and supporters.
“Trump is more toxic than before. But he still has the support of a shockingly large fraction of Republican voters,” said Pitney. “As long as he wants to be politically active, he will be a force in the party. I don’t think he’s going away, for one simple reason: politics is his main source of income. He can continue to line his pockets by selling merchandise and otherwise monetising his status. He will need the money for the colossal legal fees he will face in the years ahead.”
Some former officials, even those who left the administration before Wednesday’s mayhem, say they have struggled to find work because of association with the president.
“People who are hiring see everything that’s happened and have to question your morals and ethics – especially in terms of what continues to happen today – on why you chose to work for that environment,” Olivia Troye, a former homeland security and White House official who left in August, told Politico.
A defence official who is seeking another job told the news site that one potential employer had compared Trump administration staff to the Hitler Youth. “That attitude is not helpful,” the official said. More

Surely this would be the moment. Surely the sight of a horde storming the US Capitol, smashing windows and breaking down doors, determined to use brute, mob strength to overturn a free and fair election, surely that would mark the red line. After five years dismissing those who warned that Donald Trump posed a clear and present danger to US democracy, branding them hysterics suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, surely this moment – when they saw the citadel of that democracy overrun by men clothed in the slogans of neo-Nazism (Six Million Wasn’t Enough, read one), waving the Confederate flag of slavery, racism and treason and carrying zip ties, apparently to bind the wrists and ankles of any hostages – would, at long last, make Republicans recoil from the man who had led them to this horror.After all, the link between Trump and the sacking of the halls of Congress was direct and unhidden. Short of carrying the battering ram himself, he could hardly have done more to lead the mob. “Let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he told the “Save America” rally that preceded the attack, guiding them towards the House and Senate as lawmakers prepared to certify Joe Biden’s election victory. No need to bother with the “strong ones”, he said, referring to those Republicans who were already on side. The crowd was directed to focus instead on “the weak ones”: “We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” The thousands who had gathered, who revere Trump and call him Daddy, did not need to be told twice.Hours into the attempted – and planned – insurrection, Trump again made plain the bonds that connect him to the men of havoc. “We love you,” he told them in a video message, gently suggesting they go home. “You’re very special.” None of that is a surprise. They were only there for him, summoned to Washington by Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen through fraud – that they had been robbed of their champion by a wicked conspiracy that took in everyone from the Chinese Communist party to his own vice-president.The back of the Republican camel has proved remarkably durable in the Trump era, but surely the president’s role in inciting an attempted putsch would be the straw to finally break it. There are some signs of that, as several star enablers of the Trump era apparently discover their consciences at two minutes to midnight. There have been a couple of cabinet resignations, along with the departure of some White House staff. Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, condemned Trump’s orchestration of the mob as “a betrayal of his office and supporters”. Senator Lindsey Graham declared, “Enough is enough.”Mike Pence refused to indulge Trump’s delusion that as the ceremonial opener of the envelopes containing the 2020 results, Pence could overturn them. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, stood against the effort of several colleagues to challenge those results and seven of them abandoned that effort once the rioters were cleared off the premises. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, a longtime Trump cheerleader, now urges the president to resign or be removed from office.If this were a genuine shift by the bulk of the Republican party, it would be welcome – even if it would be several days late and many dollars short. It would attract deserved mockery for the absurdity of claiming to be shocked by Trump’s true nature now, less than a fortnight before the expiry of his term. How laughable to desert Trump for lighting the match this week, when you stood by and applauded as he built up the bonfire and drenched it in gasoline every day since the November election and for the previous four years.Elaine Chao resigned as commerce secretary, saying she was “deeply troubled” by Wednesday’s events. Yet she was perfectly happy to stand at Trump’s side – literally – as he praised the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people”.Pence did not speak out when, less than a week ago, a tape recording showed his boss putting the squeeze, Sopranos-style, on Georgia election officials, urging them to “find” the votes that would thwart the democratic will of that state’s citizens and anoint Trump the winner, rather than Biden.Above all, Pence, McConnell and the rest kept their mouths shut as Trump spun his big lie that the election had been stolen – the lie that would poison the minds of his followers so deeply, they eventually sought to seize America’s representative bodies by force.This would be the deserved response if Republicans were now collectively recoiling at the monster they had created, and on whose back they have been happy to ride until today. But there has been no such collective recoil, still less a deep reckoning with, or even recognition of, the fact that Republicanism has allowed the toxic far right to enter its bloodstream.Note that eight Republican senators and 139 members of the House of Representatives still voted to reject the outcome of the November election, even after the storming of Congress. McConnell may have taken a stand, but his counterpart in the House remains loyal to Trump. Pence seems uninterested in leading a cabinet revolt that would remove Trump under the 25th amendment of the constitution, and there’s little sign he’d have the votes around that table of nodding dogs anyway. The White House resignations that have come thus far have not carried much heft: they include the social secretary and the chief of staff to the first lady. Only a single Republican in the House has called for Trump’s removal.Why such inaction in the face of indisputable evidence that Trump poses a danger every hour he remains in the Oval Office? One YouGov poll provides a clue. Asked whether they support the assault on the Capitol, most Americans say a firm no. But among Republicans, more support the rioters than oppose them, 45% to 43%. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that less than half of all Republicans believe Biden won the election.Ambitious Republicans – those such as Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, eyeing 2024 – are aware of that constituency and they are frightened of it. For four years they have not dared offend it. And now the Republican party faces a choice, one that does not disappear with Trump’s scripted hostage video promising to behave nicely – doubtless prompted by fear of removal or of future legal action for incitement – but still refusing to admit he lost. Nor will it recede when Trump finally leaves on 20 January, especially if his most devoted supporters make good on their threat of more violence on, or ahead of, inauguration day.That choice is stark. Do Republicans continue to take the path laid by Trump, the path of lies and contempt for democracy? Or do they declare that, much as they hate Democrats, they are, in the end, democrats. In a two-party system such as America’s, it’s no exaggeration to say that the fate of the republic depends on their answer. More

What was this desperado putsch supposed to achieve? The mob of face-painted LARPers, QAnon conspiracists, militiamen, neo-Nazis, Christian supremacists and endtimes preppers who invaded the Capitol building in Washington DC were never going to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.And yet they are far from a few isolated cranks. This crowd, whose actions are supported by 45% of Republican voters, had been called to the capital by Donald Trump. Their “protest” had been incited from the podium by both Trump and Rudi Giuliani, ramming home their betrayal myth that the election was stolen. Trump’s campaign to reverse the election results and subvert constitutional law, backed by several elected Republican officials, has repeatedly inspired violence. Trump has repeatedly backed the militias, from his bellowing approval of their anti-lockdown stunts to his support for vigilante violence against Black Lives Matter protesters, to his call for militia action on election day.While Trump had been kept under control by the Republican establishment for most of his tenure, the last year – since the lockdown protests began – saw a process of radicalisation of the armed base, the administration and its white suburban supporters. The further the extra-parliamentary right went, the more violent it became, the further Trump went. Any violent exhortation was justified by a hallucinatory anti-communism. What’s more, there has emerged a set of tacit alliances between law enforcement and armed vigilantes, as seen in the Black Lives Matter protests.Reporting and inquiries will shed light on what happened in the coming weeks, but serious questions need to be asked about how an armed mob was able to “storm” the Capitol building in the first place, wandering corridors to take selfies with cops, exploring computer screens left unmanned by hastily-evacuated staff and hunting for elected officials to confront. It stretches credulity to think they could have taken over the debating chamber, even after what appears to have been a tense armed standoff, without some kind of orchestrated or de facto acquiescence. Their braying triumphalism after they were evicted, claiming victory, glossed over both this and the extraordinarily delayed arrival of the National Guard.This is all indicative of an incipient fascism, laying the cultural and political groundwork for a violent, extra-parliamentary mass movement of the right. It is a mistake to assume that fascism must take the form of dictatorship. Far-right movements today are shaped by the same factors: the decomposition of parliamentary legitimacy and their inherited organisational weaknesses. In that context, wielding the power of office is a pedagogical, formative experience. It allows movements with thin civic roots to project influence at a national level and try things out.Fascism does not arrive on the scene with full uniform and programme. The Jewish socialist Arthur Rosenberg traced the origins of fascism as a mass movement to the period before the first world war, when millions were already infected by volkisch, racial-nationalist ideology, and by contempt for democratic government. It consolidates through experimentation, learning the ropes through episodes that, at first, appear amateurish and thuggish, from the beer hall (Munich) putsch to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. First as farce, then as tragedy.There has been, for some time, accumulating data suggestive of a political rupture on the right. The growing number of people, particularly among the rich, who favour some form of authoritarian government, is one sign. The string of popularly elected, and often re-elected, rightist governments militantly challenging liberal legal norms and institutions is another. The rise of lone-wolf murderers and conspiracist vigilantes is yet another. And there is the proliferation of militias and paramilitaries, often with close relationships to police and the military rank and file. As the contemporary historian Kathleen Belew’s work has demonstrated, many white-power and fascist currents were forged in the furnace of war.In the United States, the rupture has been building since before the Tea Party movement. During the 2008 election, paranoid racists brought guns and nooses to town hall meetings and called Obama a Muslim, the birth of the “birther” myth. It points to either a split in the Republican party or its complete capture by middle-class enragés. This is a grievous problem for ruthless GOP establishment operators such as Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, who spent years defending the Trump administration, using him to consolidate their electoral base, strengthen a minoritarian grip on government and take over the courts. Their traditional allies, including the National Association of Manufacturers, are not prepared to countenance a party this out of control – but they can’t simply throw away half of the Republican vote.And this is their problem. Trumpism is not an aberration, but a mass phenomenon. Trump greatly expanded his base between 2016 and 2020, adding more than 10 million votes to its total. He expanded into places and demographic constituencies thought to be closed to him. No other Republican presidential candidate could have done this. And it was achieved precisely through the same means that led to the spectacle in the Capitol. To hope that Joe Biden can defuse this by restoring civility and bipartisanship to Washington would be unforgivably complacent. The United States, and not just the United States, urgently needs an anti-fascist movement. We have not begun to see the end of this. More

Wednesday’s invasion of our “temple of democracy” constituted an “insurrection” only in the sense of dark comedy. What was essentially a flag-wrapped biker gang wielding staves stormed America’s ultimate country club, chased senators into the Capitol’s catacombs, squatted on Mike Pence’s throne, trashed Nancy Pelosi’s office, and shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home in white people’s country. Otherwise, they were clueless and when the serious cops finally arrived, filed out clutching souvenirs to show to Daddy Trump. Monty Python with four dead bodies.Meanwhile, several hundred evacuated solons sweated together in their hiding place. Some of the Republicans, steadfastly loyal to their death cult, refused the face masks offered by police. One outraged Democrat described it as a “super-spreader event”. Hours later, Representative Jake La Turner, a Trump diehard from Kansas, punctually tested positive for the virus.Predictably liberal pundits are now telling us that the far right has committed suicide, that the age of Trump has ended, and that the Democrats are free to build their shining city on the hill.In fact the riot was a deus ex machina that lifted the curse of Trump from the careers of conservative war hawks and rightwing young lions whose higher ambitions have been fettered by the presidential cult.By the White House’s Führerprinzip standards, Trump’s former praetorian guard – senators Tom Cotton, Chuck Grassley, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, Marco Rubio and Jim Lankford – are now traitors beyond the pale. Ironically this frees them to become potential presidential contenders in a still far-right but post-Trump party. Moreover their path has been eased by Ted Cruz’s stupid and self-destructive decision to pose as leader of the president’s angry mob.The resumed joint session on Wednesday night and Thursday morning was the et tu, Brute? moment as former hardcore Trumpites, including half of the “stolen election” crew, imitated Biden’s call for “a return to decency” and denounced the actions of the zombified plain folk whom they had hours earlier applauded as patriots.Let’s be clear about what happened: the monolith has cracked and the Republican party is splitting up. Preparations for this have been in progress since the election, with various conservative elites loosely but energetically conspiring to take back power from the Trump family. Big business especially has been burning its bridges to the White House in the wake of the Covid-19 disaster and Trump’s chaotic war on constitutional government.The most sensational defection involves that bedrock Republican institution, the National Association of Manufacturers. While the riot was in progress, they called upon Pence to use the 25th amendment to depose Trump. Of course, they had been happy enough during the first three years of his regime to enjoy the colossal tax cuts, comprehensive rollbacks of environmental and labor regulation, and trade sanctions on China, but the last year brought the unavoidable recognition that the White House was wildly incapable of managing major national crises or ensuring basic economic and political stability.The goal is to realign power within the party more closely with traditional capitalist power centers such as NAM and the Business Roundtable as well as with the Koch family, long uncomfortable with Trump. However, there should be no illusion that “moderate Republicans” have suddenly been raised from the grave; the emerging project will preserve the core alliance between Christian evangelicals and economic conservatives and presumably defend most of the Trump-era legislation.As Trump embalms himself in bitter revenge fantasies, reconciliation between the two camps is improbableInstitutionally, Senate Republicans, with a strong roster of talented young predators, will rule the post-Trump camp, a generational succession that will probably be cinched before their Democratic counterparts finally throw off their own octogenarian oligarchy. The internal competition will be fierce, another monster’s ball, but centrist Democrats should be wary of issuing death warrants. Liberated from Trump’s electronic fatwas some of the younger Republican senators may prove to be formidable competitors for the white college-educated suburban vote that has been the holy grail for the Democratic establishment.That’s one side of the split. The other is more dramatic: the true Trumpists have become a de facto third party, bunkered down in state legislatures and the House of Representatives. As Trump embalms himself in bitter revenge fantasies, reconciliation between the two camps is improbable.A poll on Tuesday found that 45% of Republican voters supported the storming of the Capitol. These true believers will enable Trump to terrorize Republican primaries in 2002 and ensure the preservation of a large contingent in the House as well as in red state legislatures. (Republicans in the Senate, accessing huge corporate donations, are far less vulnerable to such challenges.)Democrats may gloat at the prospect of an open civil war among Republicans, but their own divisions have been rubbed raw by Biden’s refusal to share power with progressives. The best hope for the left will be sweeping electoral reforms that roll back Republican voter restrictions and accelerate the racial and generational turnover of the electorate. But Mitch McConnell’s chief legacy, a far-right supreme court, may be an insuperable obstacle.In any event, the only future that we can reliably foresee – a continuation of extreme socio-economic turbulence – renders political crystal balls almost useless. The civil cold war in America is far from over.Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, Buda’s Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego More

The head of the US Capitol police and two other senior security officials are resigning amid mounting criticism of the bungled police response to the assault on Capitol Hill by a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters.
Steven Sund’s resignation will be effective from 16 January, and follows calls by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and other senior figures for heads to roll.
“There was a failure of leadership at the top,” Pelosi said.
Michael Stenger, the Senate sergeant-at-arms, has also resigned, along with Paul Irving, the official who holds the same position at the House of Representatives.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, had said he would fire Stenger when he became majority leader later this month if he did not stand down.
Incited by Trump, a mob descended on the Capitol on Wednesday, swiftly breaking through police barriers before smashing windows and parading through the halls, sending lawmakers into hiding.
Late on Thursday, the Capitol police service disclosed that one of its officers had died from injuries he sustained “while physically engaging with protesters” on Wednesday.
Brian D Sicknick returned to his division office and collapsed, the police said, later dying in hospital. Two law enforcement officials told Associated Press on the condition of anonymity that Sicknick had been struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during the melee.
The FBI and Washington’s police department will jointly investigate his death, which was the fifth associated with Wednesday’s violence. A female protester was shot and killed by police, and three other people died after “medical emergencies” in the grounds of the Capitol.

The announcement of Sund’s departure came as he detailed the violence for the first time, saying police were “actively attacked” with metal pipes and other weapons.
“They [the mob] were determined to enter into the Capitol building by causing great damage,” Sund said. Capitol police fired on the woman who died as “protesters were forcing their way toward the House chamber where members of Congress were sheltering in place”.
There has been mounting criticism of the serious failures of leadership by those detailed to protect Congress in the days and hours leading up to the riot.
According to reports, Capitol police declined offers from the Pentagon of additional National Guard manpower and from the Justice Department of additional FBI personnel.
Amid allegations that he had missed the well-signposted potential for violence, Sund has said he had only anticipated a display of “first amendment activities”, and not a “violent attack”.
The army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, said that as the rioting was under way, it became clear the Capitol police were being overrun.
But he said there was no contingency planning done in advance for what forces could do in case of a problem at the Capitol because US defense department help was turned down. “They’ve got to ask us, the request has to come to us,” said McCarthy.
Gus Papathanasiou, the head of the Capitol police union, said planning failures left officers exposed without backup or equipment against surging crowds of rioters.
“We were lucky that more of those who breached the Capitol did not have firearms or explosives and did not have a more malign intent,” Papathanasiou said in a statement. “Tragic as the deaths are that resulted from the attack, we are fortunate the casualty toll was not higher.” More