A rioter leaned back in the chair of the speaker of the House Representatives and brought a brown boot down on the papers left strewn on her desk.
Elsewhere in the Capitol building, a lectern bearing the gold seal of Congress was ripped away and framed documents were torn from the walls, as Trump banners and Confederate flags were paraded through abandoned hallways.
It was Wednesday afternoon, 6 January, when Donald Trump’s four-year assault on US democracy reached its inescapable destination, an orgy of violence aimed at the heart of the republic.
Staffers in some offices barricaded their doors and hid under their desks like one of the active shooter lockdowns the country’s schoolchildren practised when they still went to school. “Where the fuck are the Capitol police?” a staffer texted to a journalist friend. The police were overwhelmed, and the massed ranks of national guard and federal agents who had crushed peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in the summer were nowhere to be seen until evening fell.
In the corridors outside, Trumpist rioters were able to roam freely, as they looked for members of Congress they saw as enemies. They found their way into the Senate chamber where minutes earlier the election results were being certified. A rioter stepped on to the dais and, according to a reporter on the scene, yelled: “Trump won that election.”
Police fired teargas as the rioters pushed inside the gleaming white edifice of the Capitol. One woman was shot by the US Capitol police and later died of her injuries, according to the Washington police. Three others died in “medical emergencies” throughout the day, authorities said. . Rioters attacked TV crews outside the building. Several police officers were also injured. Authorities found pipe bombs outside the offices of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, as well as a cooler with a long gun and molotov cocktail on the Capitol grounds.
When the defeated president was first sworn into office almost four years ago, he raised the spectre of “American carnage”. He portrayed it as something that had gone before, but it very soon became clear it was what was still to come.
As Trump has made clear for months, he has been prepared to wreak carnage on the political system that elevated him to the most powerful office, if it ever threatened to spit him out.
The party who enabled his rise and then grew terrified of him has been left broken, so divided that the Republicans lost both Senate seats in the southern bastion of Georgia, results confirmed on Wednesday.
At the moment the Trumpist mob stormed the Capitol, the Republicans had split into duelling factions. A dozen senators and over a hundred representatives were prepared to follow him across the Rubicon and vote against certifying the confirmed results of November’s presidential election.
The vice-president, Mike Pence, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell and most Republican senators wanted to jump off the Trump train before it reached its last stop, and tried to put an end to the president’s fevered delusion that the presidency would be handed back to him after electoral defeat.
It was the declaration from Pence – who had hitherto been assiduously loyal to the leader – that he would follow the constitution and read out the election result, rather than try to change it, that apparently triggered Trump’s wrath, and set in motion the events that led to the storming of the Capitol.
As senators were being hustled to safety, a leading member of the latter faction, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, is reported to have told a leader of the loyalists, Ted Cruz, “This is what you’ve gotten” – a clumsy, desperate epitaph for the party the Republicans thought they were.
The orange genie, who had been out of the bottle for four years granting the Republicans’ every wish, was not going back in without tearing down the palace walls, turning the party’s own supporters against it.
Less than an hour before the Capitol was breached, Trump had told his supporters: “We want to be so respectful of everybody – bad people. And we are going to have to fight much harder.”
He told them to march from the White House along the National Mall to the Capitol to “save our democracy”. He even said he would go with them, but it was just another promise he had no intention of keeping, taking his motorcade instead the hundred yards back to the White House.
Go to the Congress “peacefully and patriotically” he told them, but a matter of minutes later, the barricades outside the Capitol were down and the mob was charging. They had been told, again and again, their nation was at stake, child-trafficking Chinese-run socialists were taking over, and they had to fight harder.
Those Republicans who failed to overturn the election were “weak” and “pathetic”, allowing Democrats to destroy the country. Trump singled out his formerly loyal deputy. “Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country,” Trump yelled from a stage that had been set up a block from the White House, for a crowd that had gathered on the grassy Ellipse below the national monument.
As the president was speaking, Pence had, however, jumped ship. For the first time, with two weeks of the presidency to run, he did the opposite of what he was being told by his boss.
Hours after his supporters had stormed the Capitol, Trump released a video telling them: “Go home, we love you, you’re very special.” But he also used the video to repeat his baseless claims about the “fraudulent” vote which he lost.
As night fell over the capital he tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
The seeds of violence were disguised inside the husk of the old order. Wednesday itself had appeared to begin like any other American political carnival, with bright flags, exuberant costumes and vendors selling T-shirts and hotdogs. It was only with a closer look, that something far more dystopian was at hand, with a seething potential for violence.
“Fuck Your Feelings, Trump 2020,” was the message on the fastest-selling T-shirt. Some of the flags declared: “Fuck Biden”. The crowd that sprawled across the Ellipse was a mix of families and the elderly, men and women, young and old. Only about one in 10 was wearing camouflage gear, though that was more than the percentage wearing masks.
A young couple, Kasey and Mike, were sitting under one of the ornamental cherry trees near the monument, having traveled down from Rhode Island. They spoke with the dreamy smiles of two people in love, sharing a moment in history, but their message was one of looming conflict.
“People here are mad. They’ve watched so many people destroy our country like that. I don’t think they’re just gonna sit back any more,” Kasey said.
“I think Trump’s only option he really has left is to call military action into it because he has the right to do that.”
As Trump finished his speech, the crowd dispersed, thousands streaming along the mall to the Capitol. On a side street some distance from the crowd, a small group of young bearded men in military fatigues and hats lounged patiently, in readiness for what they knew would come later, when the sun set.
It was unknowable, as the glass was being swept up in the Capitol and the police began to eject the jubilant rioters, whether they were the embodiment of a last spasm of a spent force, or the true face of America’s future.
• This article was amended on 7 January 2021 to remove an inaccurate term to describe the rioters. More
