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      'I ended up horrified': Black organizers had barely celebrated victory when mob attacked Capitol

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      [embedded content]
      Wednesday was supposed to be a day of jubilation for organizers in Georgia.
      Early that morning, news organizations projected that the Rev Raphael Warnock, a Democrat would win an upset victory over Senator Kelly Loeffler, making him the first Black senator ever elected from the state. Jon Ossoff was on the verge of defeating David Perdue in a second runoff. It was a dual result that would give Democrats control of the US Senate, and the first Democratic win for Georgia in decades.
      After years of meticulously registering and organizing the state’s growing population of minority voters, Black voters turned out in droves and were responsible for powering Democrats to victory. It was a payoff years in the making.
      But as the day wore on, those same organizers watched with horror as a pro-Trump mob took over the US Capitol in Washington, bypassing law enforcement officers and forcing lawmakers to evacuate. By the time the Associated Press formally declared Ossoff the winner in his race by mid-afternoon, it was no longer the biggest story of the day.
      Felicia Davis, an organizer who is the convener of the Clayton county Black Women’s Roundtable, said her feelings shifted from when she woke up in the morning.
      “I woke up feeling joy, I then went into a state of anxiety, and then finally I ended up horrified,” she said.
      Deborah Scott, the executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, one of the groups that helped mobilize voters, said she and other organizers left their office on Wednesday morning on a high note, but the mood shifted just hours later. “It definitely was overshadowed,” she said. “You look at the paper today, and the election is almost an afterthought. I think that’s what they want, they want chaos.”
      Watching the images on television, Scott said she couldn’t help but think of how much more aggressive police were towards Black Lives Matter protesters.
      “Most Black people saw that and watched in horror and said it would be such a different thing if it was us,” Scott said. “It kind of took away from the feeling of ecstasy, like the people won, they chose who they wanted.”
      Warnock’s Twitter feed underscored the whiplash of the day, the New York Times noted. At 1.55pm he sent out a tweet celebrating the historic nature of his win. His next tweet, less than two hours later, quoted Martin Luther King Jr and condemned the violence in Washington.

      Senator-Elect Reverend Raphael Warnock
      (@ReverendWarnock)
      Georgia, we made history. I am forever grateful. pic.twitter.com/hQfCYKEo3q

      January 6, 2021

      Senator-Elect Reverend Raphael Warnock
      (@ReverendWarnock)
      In this moment of unrest, violence and anger, we must remember the words of Dr. King, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” Let each of us try to be a light to see our country out of this dark moment.

      January 6, 2021

      It had been a victory in Georgia that was made possible by months of methodical canvassing on display even in the final days of the race. In a final push early on Monday morning, canvassers with Georgia Stand-Up worked in pairs in a quiet suburban neighborhood, quickly placing leaflets on doors with information telling people how they could vote. Their goal was to knock on just over 6,000 doors in the final day, bringing their statewide total to 100,000.
      On Wednesday evening, after the violence at the Capitol unfolded Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate credited with leading efforts to mobilize minority voters, tweeted a reminder of that work, and the historic achievement in Georgia.

      Stacey Abrams
      (@staceyabrams)
      While today’s terrible display of terror and meanness shakes us, let’s remember: @ossoff, Jewish son of an immigrant & @ReverendWarnock, first Black Senator from Georgia, will join a Catholic POTUS & the first woman, Black + Indian VP in our nation’s capital. God bless America.

      January 7, 2021

      The attack on the Capitol also took place as Republican lawmakers, led by Donald Trump, pushed forward with their effort to undermine confidence in the results of the 2020 race. Even though courts across the country have universally rejected Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, Republicans in Congress objected on Wednesday to the counting of electoral votes from swing states Joe Biden won in November.
      Though the challenges were ultimately unsuccessful, they were still a form of voter suppression, said Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group that also helped register voters.
      “They’re trying to put doubt in our process and they’re trying to make sure that certain people don’t vote, it’s not counted,” she said. “Kind of putting water on fire, kind of dampening spirits. But we’re resilient and we’re not going to let that stop us. Because we intend to protect the right to vote.”
      Scott said her group had already received calls from people in other southern states – North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi – seeking to learn and replicate strategies in Georgia in their states.
      “By the end of [the day] it was like ‘OK, we know more work has to be done now,” she said. “It’s gonna make us stronger. I see this, particularly the Georgia win, as a tipping point for the rest of the south.” More

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      We should have been ready for it, yet the spectacle at the Capitol came as a shock | Emma Brockes

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      “Are you watching this?” I was crossing the road, five minutes late to pick up the kids, and after reading the text, paused to scroll. Whoa. Instantly, I texted someone else. “Is your TV on?” “No.” “Turn it on.” After pick-up, we ran to a doctor’s appointment, where the receptionist had the TV on behind the desk. “This is insane,” he murmured, as someone in the waiting room read a news report aloud to his teenage daughter. When we got home, a few neighbours had come out of their apartments to mill, masked, in the hallway. “The numbers of people who support this look low, but it doesn’t have to be a majority,” said one, darkly.
      The absorption into daily life of disastrous events is one the world has grown used to over the last 12 months, which isn’t to say each new disaster isn’t shocking. This is particularly true in America, where no matter how many times one is reminded that millions of Americans hold opinions that seem, to millions of others, actively insane, their public expression never gets less astounding. When the Trump-supporting mob stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, the most flabbergasting thing was less that it was happening, than that after four years of dire predictions, our imaginations had still failed to prepare us.
      This was, partly, a selectivity of memory. “It can’t happen here” is a phrase that, even as it was used in conjunction with darker warnings about Trump, betrayed a bedrock faith in American democracy that overlooks its savage foundations. The white supremacist project, still going strong as an overt tenet of even liberal government policy well into the 20th century – black Americans were largely cut out of the New Deal – should at least have raised as a possibility a white mob storming the government at the behest of a racist president. The fact that they looked, in their costumes and homemade gas masks, so utterly ridiculous wasn’t even out of keeping with precedent: that end of the extra-political spectrum has always gone in for fancy dress and flaming theatrics.
      From a processing point of view, what was stranger, on Wednesday, was that an event with the force of a foregone conclusion still broke a fundamental rule of superstition: that by anticipating the worst, we invite the universe to pleasantly surprise us. The word “coup” has been used in relation to Trump plenty of times since November. Prior to the president’s incitement of the mob, however, it was, even in sincere contexts, used if not as hyperbole, then at least with the expectation that by naming it we lessened the likelihood it would happen. You could take Trump seriously as a threat to national security, believe wholly in his efforts to corrupt the election and still not get fully behind the notion he would encourage a power grab – not just because he is lazy, chaotic and a fool, but because, as an extremely broad principle, nothing ever tends to unfold as predicted.
      The day still had to be lived through. As with 9/11 and the beginning of the pandemic, the unreality of Wednesday’s events butted up against quotidian matters to make them seem even more bizarre. It is a function of human resilience that no matter what happens, you still, as Sylvia Plath put it in The Bell Jar, have to “eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world”. Many of us ditched the job part of that observation and spent the afternoon trying to dispatch our chores while flipping incredulously between news channels; nonetheless life went on. People from other countries texted. I tried to explain what was going on to my children and didn’t get much further than, “You know how Donald Trump’s a terrible person?”
      Once again, the goalposts shifted. With each breach of moral standards, Trump has widened the range of public behaviour that can still be absorbed. His supporters smashed windows and graffitied doors and trashed congressional offices, but they were not an armed militia, which, I caught myself thinking, before turning to analyse the thought in amazement, was something to be grateful for. It could have been worse, as those streaming out of the Capitol building shouted to reporters it would be the next time.
      In the hallway outside my apartment, my neighbours and I went over how crazy it was, how we couldn’t believe it, what it all meant and where it would go. “It’s Germany 1933,” said one. And whether or not this was true, we all nodded in agreement, then went back inside our homes to make dinner.
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Democratic leaders call for Trump's removal from office

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      Democratic leaders have called for Donald Trump to be forced from office before his term ends on 20 January for his role in inciting what his successor, Joe Biden, described as “one of the darkest days” in US history.As a new 7ft fence was belatedly erected around the US Capitol on Thursday, an inquiry was launched into why the seat of US democracy was left so poorly defended against a predictable assault.But the principal political focus was on the dangers of allowing a president widely seen as being the ultimate instigator of Wednesday’s mob attack to retain power in the remaining two weeks before Biden’s inauguration.The president-elect said Wednesday’s insurrection marked “one of the darkest days in the history of our nation”, saying the attack was carried out by “domestic terrorists”. Biden accused his predecessor of unleashing an “all-out attack” on the country’s democratic institutionsChuck Schumer, who is the incoming Senate majority leader following the Democratic sweep of Georgia, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, called for Trump to be removed through the 25th amendment to the constitution, which allows for a president to be replaced by their vice-president, if they become incapable of doing their job.Failing that, they argued he should be impeached for a second time.Pelosi described Trump as “a very dangerous person who should not continue in office”.“This is urgent. This is an emergency of the highest magnitude,” Pelosi said.Several Democratic members of Congress drafted new articles of impeachment for inciting Wednesday’s violence and deliberating subverting US democracy.“What happened at the US Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against the United States, incited by President Trump. This president must not hold office one day longer. The quickest and most effective way – it can be done today – to remove this president from office would be for the Vice President to immediately invoke the 25th amendment,” Schumer said in a tweet.“If the Vice President and the Cabinet refuse to stand up, Congress must reconvene to impeach President Trump.”Charges for Trump’s second impeachment were drawn up by several Democratic congress members – Ilhan Omar, Ted Lieu, Jamie Raskin and David Cicilline – accusing him of “wilfully inciting violence against the government of the United States” and warning he remained “a threat to national security, democracy and the constitution, if allowed to remain in office”.Use of the 25th amendment, on the grounds unfitness for office is a form of incapacity, would rely on the cooperation of Republicans including the vice-president, Mike Pence, who would take over the administration in its final two weeks. That seemed unlikely on Thursday.Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent Republican critic of Trump, joined the calls for the 25th amendment to be invoked, saying in a video message: “The president must now relinquish control of the executive branch voluntarily or involuntarily.”But the GOP leadership did not appear sufficiently shocked to jettison their leader, who was reportedly warmly received on a conference call with the Republican National Committee on Thursday morning.There was a handful of resignations by second-tier officials, including the transport secretary, Elaine Chao (married to the current Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell); the deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger; the Northern Ireland envoy (and former White House chief of staff), Mick Mulvaney; and the first lady’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham. But there was no sign yet of a sweeping exodus or mutiny that would be required to force the president from office.Trump loyalists in Congress and on Fox News quickly began circulating groundless conspiracy theories that disguised members of the leftist antifa movement had provoked the insurrection.The president himself made no public statements on Thursday, and after a call with the Republican National Committee spent part of the day awarding the presidential medal of freedom to two golf players and one Olympic athlete, one of them posthumously.Facebook imposed an indefinite ban on Trump, whose campaign has long used the platform to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. The decision may also have been influenced by the Democratic success in taking control of the Senate.Former administration officials were scathing about the president’s role, most notably the recently departed attorney general, William Barr, who said Trump was guilty of “betrayal of his office and supporters” by “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress.”.The former defence secretary James Mattis said Trump “fomented” the attack, intended “to subjugate American democracy by mob rule”.But current Republican leaders were much more guarded. McConnell said the blame for the attack lay with the “unhinged criminals” who carried it out “and with those who incited them” but did not name the president.Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s top congressional allies, called on the president to accept his own role in the violence, saying that Trump “needs to understand that his actions were the problem, not the solution”.But asked about calls for Trump to be removed from office, the South Carolina senator said: “I do not believe that is appropriate at this point. I’m looking for a peaceful transfer of power.”A YouGov poll of Republicans found 45% of them supported the storming of the Capitol, 2% more than those who opposed it.At least some of Trump’s leading supporters abroad sought to distance themselves, including Boris Johnson, who said it was “completely wrong” for Trump to “encourage people to storm the Capitol” and cast doubt on the election result.In Washington, law enforcement agencies tried to respond to widespread outrage over the apparent impunity of the insurrectionists (only 14 of whom had been arrested by Thursday afternoon) and the lack of adequate defences for a vital organ of government.McConnell said it was a “massive failure” and called for a full investigation. The congressional sergeant at arms, responsible for overall security in the building, resigned on Thursday but Pelosi called for the chief of the Capitol police, Steven Sund, to step down as well.Sund issued a statement saying the storming of the legislature was “unlike any I have ever experienced in my 30 years in law enforcement here” and argued that his officers had been spread thin by having to respond to two pipe bombs found near the Capitol at the same time as the assault.Pelosi also said she had not received a satisfactory reply from the defence secretary, Christopher Miller, on why the national guard was so slow to respond, arriving in significant numbers only after the Capitol was occupied.The army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, told reporters that he had expected Wednesday’s events to be like other recent protests, adding that Pentagon officials had not imagined a breach of the Capitol in their “wildest imagination”.The head of the Washington metropolitan police department also claimed: “There was no intelligence that suggests that there would be a breach of the US Capitol.” Critics responded that those responsible had telegraphed their intentions in advance.“It was all in the open on public social media sites, not to mention in the President’s speech,” John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer, commented on Twitter. More

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      in US Politics

      Riot at the Capitol as Georgia votes blue: Politics Weekly Extra

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      Jonathan Freedland and Kenya Evelyn discuss the chaotic scenes that took place in Washington DC on Wednesday. Plus, Sam Levine on how the Democrats flipped the Senate

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      The outcome of the two Senate runoff elections in Georgia was meant to be the big news story of the week. Then, US democracy went into meltdown on Wednesday when a mob of rioters incited by President Trump stormed the Capitol building, leaving several people dead. This didn’t stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential election win, but it did ask many questions about what democracy looks like in the US. Jonathan Freedland and Kenya Evelyn dissect what happens to Trump and his supporters now. Plus, Sam Levine explains the surprising results from Georgia. Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in Elections

      The long list of Republicans who voted to reject election results

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      The Senate and the House of Representatives convened on Wednesday to perform what is traditionally seen as a purely ceremonial vote: to certify each state’s presidential election results.
      At a rally before the vote, Donald Trump continued to baselessly insist that the election results – which he lost to Democrat challenger Joe Biden – were rigged and the US president helped instigate a mob to storm the US Capitol building and halt the process.
      The attack shocked many Americans but even after the pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol, a handful of Republican senators and more than a hundred Republican representatives continued to back Trump’s false claims and objected to certifying the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
      The list of Republican lawmakers who objected to both results includes Texas senator Ted Cruz, who ran against Trump in 2016 presidential election only to have Trump suggest that Cruz’s father was involved in president John F Kennedy’s assassination. It also include Missouri senator Josh Hawley who is seen as a potential 2024 presidential candidate. And it includes the majority of Republican House members.
      Here’s the full list.
      Full list of people rejecting certification More

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      in Elections

      Pro-Trump mob chases lone Black police officer up stairs in Capitol – video

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      A journalist captured the moment a lone Black police officer was confronted by pro-Trump supporters who had stormed into the US Capitol in what some lawmakers condemned as an attempted insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the presidential election.
      A politics reporter at HuffPost, Igor Bobic, filmed the officer as he was chased up the stairs of the building by Trump loyalists who objected to the certification of Joe Biden as the next president, which was taking place in Congress during a joint session. Four people died during the violent occupation
      American carnage: how Trump’s footsoldiers ran riot in the Capitol
      Full report: Congress certifies Joe Biden as president More