THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 15
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D IS PATCH
MOBRULEINTHECAPITOL
T
wo hours into the siege of the U.S.
Capitol, as another puff of tear gas
wafted over the melee with police, Sha-
ron Krahn, a grandmother from Dallas,
looked on approvingly. “Our congress-
men should be shitting their pants. They
need to fear, because they’re too posh,”
she said.“Their jobs are too cush, and
their personal gain has taken priority
over their sense of duty. Maybe they all
started off with a good heart, you know,
but power corrupts. Our government is
proof positive of that.”
She wore a plaid scarf and a gray wool
hat, studded with sequins. I asked if the
violence in front of us was going too far.
“Whose house is this? This is the house
of ‘We the People.’ If you do a bad job,
your boss tells you about it,” Krahn said.
She nodded toward the Senate, where
the elected officials had already evacu-
ated to safety: “We’re not happy with the
job you’ve done.” She drew a distinction
between the scene in front of her and the
domain of enemies she called “Antifa and
B.L.M.,” who, she said, have “no true aim
except destruction and anarchy.”
The day had begun with a typical rant
from the President—a dejected, deluded
improvisation about a stolen election, at
a rally on the park south of the White
House. But then it had turned. “We’re
going to the Capitol,” he told the crowd,
a maskless confederacy of the rebellious,
the devout, the bored, and the bitter.
“We’re going to try and give our Repub-
licans ... the kind of pride and boldness
that they need to take back our coun-
try.” In other circumstances, it might have
passed as his usual taunting, but, in this
case, it was received as a call to arms.
For anyone who has been to the U.S.
Capitol, the scenes that followed were
so unhinged that they took a moment
to absorb. In the two decades since Sep-
tember 11th, much of the grounds of
Congress has been encircled by rings of
security. Now any sense of control was
gone. The mob quickly overwhelmed
the police, broke windows, and forced
open doors. A jittery throng coursed
through the Capitol, mugging with the
statues and lounging at the desks of sen-
ators and representatives. They rum-
maged through drawers and brandished
their loot for photographers. A man in
a wool Trump hat with a pompom on
it, his face in a rictus of glee, carried off
a carved wooden lectern bearing the seal
of the Speaker of the House.
A leaderless scrum of hundreds, if not
thousands, stood on the grand east stair-
case outside the Capitol, waving Trump
flags. At the top of the stairs, a bald man
in a white shirt and a Trump-style red
tie shouted into a megaphone, “Our world
is broken, our system is broken.” A man
in camouflage at the base of the steps
shouted back, “Who the hell are you?”
The man (who has not been identified)
responded cryptically, “I am a federal
employee.” An armored black SWAT-
team truck, which is often posted at the
foot of the stairs, had been left marooned
in a sea of people. They stood on the
roof and the hood and stuck a sign on
the windshield that said “Pelosi is Satan.”
Police hung back, outnumbered and
seemingly unsure how to respond. As the
hours ticked toward 6 P.M.—the start of
a curfew announced by Muriel Bowser,
the mayor of Washington, D.C.—a white
police van, led by a lone cop on a motor-
cycle, tried to part the crowd below the
east stairs, but the crowd converged on
it, banging on the metal walls of the van
until the driver abandoned the attempt.
The guy with the megaphone was still
ranting: “We will not allow a new world
order.... If you are truly innocent, you
have nothing to worry about.” Accord-
ing to police, five people died, including
a woman who had been shot inside the
Capitol and a police officer, and more
than a dozen people were injured.
I introduced myself to a hopped-up
guy walking away from the Senate side
of the Capitol, and he said, “The NewYorker? Fucking enemy of the people.
Why don’t I smash you in your fuck-
ing head?” He made an effort to draw
a crowd: “Right there in the blue mask!
Enemy of the fucking people!” But the
people had other things on their minds,
and nobody bothered to join him.
Five years after the Trump era began,
a physical assault on American democ-
racy felt both shocking and inevitable—a
culmination of everything that had been
building since 2015. What else was there
to say of him that had not already been
said? How much darker could his America
become in its final fourteen days? Would
the sight of government brought so low,
so vulnerable, break the spell—or would
it bring on another crescendo of fury?
Trump’s Presidency entered its last
weeks as a strange concatenation of
causes: those of doomsayers and Oath
Keeper-style militias, QAnon and Falun
Gong. Members of the Chinese spiri-
tual movement, banned by Beijing, are
deeply enmeshed in Trump World, and,
as rioters picked through the U.S. Cap-
itol, a caravan of cars outside displayed
signs that announced “Say no to CCP
Chinese Communist Party” and “Stop
forced organ harvesting in China.” A
couple walked past the organ-harvest-
ing sign, and the woman saw a reso-
nance in her American cause: “See, that’s
what we don’t want to get to.”
In the mob, a chant went up: U.S.A.!
U.S.A.! When I met Krahn, the grand-
mother from Dallas, I asked if she thought
Trump’s victory had been stolen. “Abso-
lutely, without a doubt,” she said. Why?
“O.K.,” she said, and started ticking things
off on her fingers. “The vote count chang-
ing on TV, the more-votes-than-voters,
boxes of blank ballots, and, honestly, prob-
ably the biggest one is the refusal to audit
the votes. Because, if this was fair, if this
was a legitimate election, then we should
be above reproach. Just like when the
I.R.S. comes in and audits my books, I
don’t worry about it.”
I asked where she got her news. “You
have to be of a mind to dig through,”
she said. “So I do not listen to main-
stream media anymore. I like C-SPAN
because I want to see it happen and then
derive my own conclusions from it. I do
subscribe to Epoch Times, and I do read
articles from The New Yorker and The
Atlantic, and I read the New York Times,
and I read the Wall Street Journal, and Imovie ‘Casino,’ where Joe Pesci plays
Crazy Nicky. If you beat him with a fist,
he’ll come back with a knife. And if you
beat him with a knife, he’ll come back
with a gun. And if you get him with a
gun, you better kill him, because he’s
going to come back and kill you. It’s
kind of like that in Washington, D.C.,
now. Things are escalating. I hate to see
what happens next.”
—Jane Mayer