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      US Capitol attack: Trump impeachment looms as Republican support wavers

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      [embedded content]
      Efforts to remove Donald Trump from the White House gathered pace on Saturday, as Democrats announced that at least 180 members of Congress would co-sponsor an article of impeachment they intend to introduce in the House of Representatives on Monday.
      The show of force by the president’s opponents comes amid continuing revulsion at Trump’s incitement of Wednesday’s deadly US Capitol riot and his attempts to overturn electoral defeat by Joe Biden.
      One of the authors of the impeachment resolution, the California congressman Ted Lieu, repeated demands for Trump to resign or face the ignominy of being the first president to be impeached twice.
      On Twitter, Lieu announced that the vast majority of the 222 Democratic House members were onboard for impeachment, and revealed a letter to the New York state bar demanding the disbarment of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who advocated “trial by combat” at a rally preceding the violent invasion of the US Capitol building by a mob of Trump supporters.
      “We will hold responsible everyone involved with the attempted coup,” Lieu wrote.
      Trump’s grip on the presidency appeared increasingly tenuous as impeachment plans advanced, allies continued to abandon him and Twitter banned him, removing his most powerful way to spread lies and incite violence.
      On Friday night one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, called for the president’s removal.
      “I want him to resign,” she said. “I want him out. He has caused enough damage.”
      Five people died around the chaos at the Capitol, including a police officer who confronted rioters and a rioter shot by law enforcement. Multiple arrests have been made, among them a Florida resident photographed walking off with the lectern of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Also arrested was a man from Arizona who styles himself as the QAnon shaman and who sat in the Vice-President’s chair in the Senate, dressed in horns and animal skins.
      Amid reports the FBI was investigating whether some rioters intended to take lawmakers hostage, the Washington US attorney said a 70-year-old Alabama man was charged after his truck was discovered packed with homemade bombs and guns. Another man was alleged to have threatened to kill Pelosi and to have been heavily armed.
      The article of impeachment, which charges Trump with inciting an insurrection and having “gravely endangered the security of the United States” and its institutions, prompted a flurry of legal activity at the White House, according to Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter. She tweeted that a defence team was beginning to take shape, including Giuliani and possibly Alan Dershowitz, a celebrity lawyer who has defended Trump before.

      Significantly, current White House counsel, including Jay Sekulow, Marty and Jane Raskins, Pat Cipollone and Pat Philbin, were reportedly unlikely to be involved in any Senate trial, which according to indications from Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is almost certain to take place after Trump leaves office on 20 January.
      The impeachment move is part of a multi-pronged approach by Democrats pressing for Trump’s removal ahead of Biden’s inauguration. Pelosi, who spoke to the leader of the US military, seeking to ensure Trump cannot launch a nuclear attack, has also called for Trump’s removal via the 25th amendment, which provides for the ejection of a president deemed unable to fulfil his duties.
      The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, was reportedly among officials to discuss such a course but it seems unlikely, particularly as cabinet members who might participate have resigned.
      White House sources have asserted Trump will not resign or turn over power to Vice-President Mike Pence in order to seek a pardon, so a second and high-speed impeachment looms. In his first impeachment, over approaches to Ukraine for dirt on political rivals, Trump was acquitted by a Republican-held Senate.
      This time, more Republican senators are indicating support. Murkowski became the first in the open, telling the Anchorage Daily News: “I think he should leave.
      “He’s not going to appear at the inauguration. He hasn’t been focused on what is going on with Covid. He’s either been golfing or he’s been inside the Oval Office fuming and throwing every single person who has been loyal and faithful to him under the bus, starting with the vice-president. More

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      Trump's Maga insurrectionists were perverse US civil war re-enactors | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Donald Trump tweeted on December 19, a week after his would-be Brown Shirt followers rioted in the streets of Washington to protest the “stolen” election. When Der Tag – the climactic day of battle arrived – Trump assembled his true believers on the South Ellipse at the White House for a “Save America” rally, waving them up Pennsylvania Avenue as his army to nullify the congressional certification of electoral college votes in the presidential election.Near the steps of the Capitol, as Trump’s shock troops prepared themselves for the assault on the citadel, they built a bare but dramatic monument to their revenge fantasy: wooden gallows with steps leading up to a swinging noose. Smashing their way through the windows and doors of the Capitol, they rampaged in a mad dash, breaking furniture, slashing paintings and looting offices. One of the invaders roamed through the corridors carrying a large Confederate flag, the first and only time that emblem of the Slave Power has ever appeared inside the Capitol.Just two weeks earlier, on 21 December, at the request of the commonwealth of Virginia, the statue of Robert E Lee that the state had given as a gift to the Congress in 1909 to represent it in Statuary Hall was replaced with one of Barbara Rose Johns Powell, who as a teenager had integrated Virginia’s public schools. Trump’s rabble had first rioted in 2017 in defense of another statue of Lee, in Charlottesville, Virginia, after the city council had voted to remove it.“Jews will not replace us!” they chanted, and a young woman was murdered by a neo-Nazi. Trump praised them as “very fine people,” and tweeted, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”The rioter parading through the Capitol with a Confederate flag, as though he had reached the high-water mark of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, was captured in a photo between two portraits on the Senate side, one of Senator John C Calhoun, the proslavery ideologue and nullifier from South Carolina, and the other of Senator Charles Sumner, the abolitionist from Massachusetts. The neo-Confederate rioter appeared indifferent to the images, even as he flaunted the symbol of the Lost Cause for Trump’s lost cause in a new civil war.In a valentine to the vandals of the Capitol, Trump proclaimed, “We love you,” and, “You’re special.” The rabble was a mélange of true believers in conspiracy theories, paranoid delusions and twisted history. For the QAnon followers, their presence at the Capitol was the moment when the storm of the rapture would bring about the revelation of Trump’s final plan and his restoration to perpetual power. It was the culmination of Trump’s promise for apocalyptic change. For neo-Nazis, carrying flags with abstract versions of broken swastikas, and tattooed latter-day Klansmen, it was a stand for racial supremacy. Charging the gates of the Capitol was storming the gates of heaven. Or, alternatively, it was a heroic last-ditch defense of Trump’s bunker from the onslaught of hordes of impure infidels led by Joe Biden.As William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But the warped history that the Trump mob thinks it is enacting, reenacting or conjuring is a costume drama of militant ignorance. The true history sheds more light on their feeble attempted coup than their fervid visions of pedophile liberal celebrities acting in concert with the deep state and the Illuminati.When senators scrambled for cover from violent assailants, it recalled the nearly fatal attack on Charles Sumner. In 1856, after delivering a stem-winding speech against the effort to turn the Kansas territory into a slave state, “The Crime Against Kansas,” Sumner sat at his desk on the floor of the Senate writing letters. Representative Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, taking umbrage at his remarks, clubbed him with a gold-handled cane until he was almost dead. Blood ran across the floor of the Senate. The caning of Sumner was a precipitating outrage that helped bring on the civil war.President Lincoln was determined that Washington would never fall to the Confederacy. He ringed the city with forts. Tens of thousands of troops were stationed there. In August 1864, when a Confederate army came within sight of the Capitol, Lincoln himself rushed to Fort Stevens to participate in the battle, and was shot at. A young officer, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, later the supreme court justice, shouted at him, “Get down, you fool!”Lincoln directed the rebuilding of the Capitol dome, originally a wooden structure that had rotted, as a symbol of confidence in the ultimate victory of democracy. The dome was completed in December 1863, a month after Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address proclaiming “a new birth of freedom”.The Trump diehard brandishing the Confederate flag in the Capitol mocks the constitutional democracy that Lincoln died forLincoln’s second inaugural took place at the newly restored Capitol. He ordered that units of Black soldiers, who had been recruited as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation, be present in force. In the Rotunda, where Trump’s rioters so recently frolicked, there was a disturbance as Lincoln passed through. A man rushing forward was restrained, later identified as John Wilkes Booth. The famed actor had become a Confederate secret service agent stalking Lincoln. Booth edged himself onto the Capitol Portico to observe Lincoln while he spoke. One hundred and fifty-six years later, Trump’s mob climbed over the spot where Booth had stood.“Right makes might,” Lincoln had stated in his Cooper Union address of 1860, which launched him on his campaign for the presidency. Six months later, on 11 July 1860, Charles Sumner came to Cooper Union to support Lincoln’s candidacy by speaking on the subject of The Republican Party: Its Origins, Necessity, and Permanence. He defined the new liberal party as the antithesis of John C Calhoun, “chief in all the pretensions of slavery and slave-masters,” who attacked “the self-evident truths of the declaration of independence as ‘absurd,’ and then to proclaim that human beings are ‘property’ under the constitution.”“All that the Republican party now opposes,” said Sumner, “may be found in John C Calhoun.”But now, it should be apparent in the last days of Trump, as he invokes the spirit of Calhoun’s nullification, that original Republican party has ceased to exist. The Trump diehard brandishing the Confederate flag in the Capitol mocks the constitutional democracy that Lincoln died for. Not since the intrusion of John Wilkes Booth has there been such a traitorous presence. More

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      Derrick Evans, lawmaker who filmed himself during US Capitol riot, faces charges – video

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      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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      See how they run: did Trump's former allies get out in time?

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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

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      Senior Republicans should recoil in horror at Trump. But too many still fear him | Jonathan Freedland

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      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

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      A return to civility will not begin to quell the threat of fascism in the US | Richard Seymour

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      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

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      With the Capitol riot the Trumpists have become a de facto third party | Mike Davis

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      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

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      From Charlottesville to the Capitol: how rightwing impunity fueled the pro-Trump mob

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