{"id":6130,"date":"2021-01-07T08:58:49","date_gmt":"2021-01-07T08:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=147088"},"modified":"2021-01-07T08:58:49","modified_gmt":"2021-01-07T08:58:49","slug":"pro-trump-insurrectionists-seize-capitol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/07\/pro-trump-insurrectionists-seize-capitol\/","title":{"rendered":"Pro-Trump Insurrectionists Seize Capitol"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph Source: Anthony Crider \u2013 CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Extremist Republican congressional conservatives began debating the electoral votes that secured President-elect Joe Biden\u2019s victory as a Donald Trump-incited mob unleashed real \u201cAmerican carnage\u201d by storming the Capitol building to protest his lost election.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of demonstrators swarmed past a ring of police and pushed into the Capitol, busting through doors and windows, ransacking offices. Someone fired a shot in unknown circumstances that hit a woman. She died at a hospital.<\/p>\n

The ballot counting was suspended, the Senate locked down and the House closed its doors in what possibly marked one of the worst breaches of the hallowed building in history. The Washington, D.C., National Guard was activated. The building later was evacuated.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur democracy is under unprecedented assault in modern times,\u201d Biden said on national TV from Wilmington, Del.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a protest,\u201d he said at another point. \u201cThis is an insurrection.\u201d It sure was, thanks to Trump.<\/p>\n

To digress briefly, I\u2019m delighted that the two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, won the Georgia runoff election Tuesday. It means Democrats will have a majority in the Senate, giving them both houses of Congress as well as the White House, securing passage of Biden\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

Washington authorities appeared unprepared for the chaotic onslaught of the rioters because police easily were overwhelmed. Trump reportedly had encouraged the demonstratrors in a fiery speech delivered 1.5 miles from the Capitol to march on Congress to protest an election that he said was stolen from him.<\/p>\n

This was the president who at his inauguration four very long years ago served notice to us that our society was living an \u201cAmerican carnage\u201d and he would fix it. Yet it has been Trump who has wrought the carnage, perhaps the worst of it at the Capitol Wednesday.<\/p>\n

He had been urging his followers like Proud Boys for days to go to Washington to protest what he repeatedly referred to without evidence as a fraudulent election that he won in a \u201clandslide.\u201d Yet it had been described by a top official as the \u201cmost secure in American history.\u201d Trump fired him for making a \u201chighly inaccurate\u201d statement. But it was accurate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was an election that was stolen from us,\u201d he said in a later video shown on social media during the Capitol melee. \u201cIt was a landslide and everybody knows it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook later took down the video and Twitter locked his account for 12 hours and warned he could get banned from it permanently. That certainly would help shut him up.<\/p>\n

A visibly angry Biden felt an obvious need to address the protesters on TV, saying, \u201cI urge this mob to pull back and allow the work of democracy to go forward.\u201d He also called on Trump to \u201cstep up\u201d and tell the rioters to go home.<\/p>\n

Trump followed through, surprisingly. \u201cIt\u2019s time to go home. Go home in peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

About 140 Republican House members and 13 senators reportedly planned to object to the electoral votes. They were following a corrupt, soulless would-be autocrat Trump into a constitutional brick wall in trying to erase the votes of millions of Americans. Fully 81.2 million votes went to Biden, 74.2 million to Trump.<\/p>\n

The bid by the Trump allies was an attempted \u201ccongressional coup,\u201d top Republican lawyer Charles Cooper told The Washington Post <\/em>before Congress gathered in a joint session Wednesday to count the 306 to 232 electoral votes by which Biden won the White House.<\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is about to lose his job, warned the congressional upstarts against trying to subvert the election.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe states have all spoken,\u201d he said on the Senate floor before Congress counted the electoral votes. \u201cIf we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We\u2019d never see the whole nation accept an election again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s latest failure to steal the election came after about 50 unsuccessful attempts to declare the balloting fraudulent through the courts and an astonishing, possibly unlawful effort to persuade Georgia\u2019s secretary of state to change the vote totals in his favor.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the record,\u201d The New York Times<\/em> said in an editorial Tuesday, \u201cfalsifying vote totals, or soliciting someone else to do so, is a crime under federal and state law. It is without question an impeachable offense.<\/p>\n

Even though the president has less than two weeks left in office, \u201c. . . there is a strong argument that Mr. Trump \u2013 perhaps the most lawless and least qualified chief executive in the nation\u2019s history \u2013 should not only be impeached for a second time but also convicted and disqualified from ever again holding public office,\u201d the Times wrote.<\/p>\n

If the immediate goal in this fraudulent campaign of lies was to keep Trump as president, the longer-range objective appears to be for far-right Republicans marching under a Trumpian banner to propel a takeover of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. The potential goal: an America run by an autocrat, democracy be damned.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good bet we won\u2019t have heard the last of Trump once he leaves the White House.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photograph Source: Anthony Crider \u2013 CC BY 2.0 Extremist Republican congressional conservatives began debating the electoral votes that secured President-elect Joe Biden\u2019s victory as a Donald Trump-incited mob\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6131,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6130\/revisions\/6131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}