26 United States The Economist January 8th 2022
The insurrection,oneyear on
D
awn bancroft, a 59yearold gym owner from Pennsylvania,
travelled to the national capital a year ago this week to hear
Donald Trump speak, not to commit terrorism. Yet as she marched
up Constitution Avenue, with the former president’s instruction
to “fight like hell” ringing in her ears, Ms Bancroft apparently mis
laid her moral compass.
Forcing a way through the mob outside the Capitol building,
she and her friend Diana came to a shattered window and clam
bered through it. “We got inside, we did our part,” Ms Bancroft lat
er explained in a video message to her children. “We were looking
for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin’ brain. But we didn’t find her.”
After hearing the women plead guilty to a misdemeanour last
September, Judge Emmet Sullivan wondered “how good people
who never got into trouble with the law morphed into terrorists”.
Court documents suggest that describes most of the 700odd peo
ple so far charged over the insurrection—including around 225 ac
cused of assaulting or impeding the police. Few had previous con
victions or links to farright groups. Most were the same unre
markable white people, in high spirits and wearing Trump mer
chandise, who swell the former president’s rallies. They are
smallbusiness owners, teachers, estate agents and retired folk.
Contrary to the implication of Judge Sullivan’s question, this is
not mystifying but selfexplanatory. If you believed the election
had been stolen, as tens of millions of Republican voters did even
before the results were out, why wouldn’t you take the desperate
measures Mr Trump demanded? Ms Bancroft and the rest thought
they were doing their patriotic duty.
Most made no effort to hide their identities. A Texan estate
agent plugged her company while livestreaming the attack; an
Ohioan kicked in a window of the Capitol wearing a jacket bearing
the name and phone number of his decorating firm. The riot, as
the biggest prosecutorial effort in American history has already
made clear, was the logical expression of Mr Trump’s big lie,
proudly carried out by 2,000 of his devoted supporters. To repudi
ate the violence, Republicans had no alternative but to repudiate
the lie. Having failed to do so, they are instead normalising it.
That process began hours after the riot, when most Republican
congressmen and women formally disputed the election result.Thisendedanyserious prospect of them breaking with Mr Trump,
who has duly rewritten the reality of the violence he caused. He
has claimed the rioters were “innocent” people “persecuted” by
the police; that the real “insurrection took place” on election day.
And yet if some of his supporters overstepped the mark, what of
that? Mr Trump has also suggested it was “common sense” for
them to chant “Hang Mike Pence” during the riot, given his depu
ty’s reluctance to steal the election. This is classic Trumpian disin
formation: a smorgasbord of inconsistent cognitive dissonances
for his supporters to select from. He celebrates their violence even
as he denies it took place and blames it on the other side.
Having reaffirmed their fealty to Mr Trump, most Republican
lawmakers felt compelled to prevent investigation of the insurrec
tion. They blocked a highlevel bipartisan inquiry into the vio
lence and, when the Democrats proposed a weaker House select
committee investigation instead, lambasted it as a partisan stunt.
With the participation of two principled Republicans, Liz Cheney
and Adam Kinzinger, that committee has since interviewed hun
dreds of witnesses. But its main targets, Mr Trump and his senior
lieutenants, are obstructing it, apparently in the hope that the Re
publicans will retake the House in November and scrap it.
Both scenarios appear likely, in part because most Republican
voters aren’t interested in litigating the violence either. A year
after the rampage, which claimed five lives and injured more than
100 police officers, most Republicans say it was either peaceful or
“somewhat” violent; and that Mr Trump bears little or no respon
sibility for it. Democrats say the opposite. They also doubt their
opponents’ motives. To downplay the violence is to rationalise it,
which in the current fraught environment, many Democrats be
lieve, is tantamount to a promise of a repeat performance.
There is no prospect of this week’s commemoration of the in
surrection bringing a modicum of national unity. Americans dis
agree wildly on what is even being commemorated. And this latest
severe disagreement, unsurprisingly, has made them more divid
ed generally. Partisan relations on the Hill, which were hardly rosy
before the riot, are abysmal. “The insurrection was a moment that
changed Congress,” says Representative Cheri Bustos, a moderate
Democrat from Illinois. “There’s a lack of trust, a lack of respect.”
Some Democrats still refuse to cooperate with any Republican
who voted to decertify the election. Many Democrats and the
handful of Republican holdouts against Mr Trump have received
death threats from his supporters. The animated video that Paul
Gosar of Arizona tweeted last November, which depicted him kill
ing a Democratic congresswoman, Alexandria OcasioCortez, was
one of the subtler examples. Ms Cheney and Mr Kinzinger were
the only Republicans to back a Democratic motion to censure Mr
Gosar, which caused a further deterioration in partisan relations.Shaman you
Outside politics, there is more hope. The evenhanded processing
of so many hundreds of insurrectionist cases is a credit to the jus
tice system. The police chiefs responsible for the Capitol’s inade
quate defences have been held accountable, and the building’s se
curity significantly beefed up. But, alas, that is a mixed blessing to
those, like Ms Bustos, who ran for office to govern, not to fight.
She is one of 25 Democratic House members quitting politics, a
decision she ascribes partly to the riot. “My husband’s been in law
enforcement for four decades and, you know, hesaidit’s not going
to get better out there,” she says. “We talked itoverwith my three
sons. None of them thought I should run again.”nLexington
The Republican Party has rewritten the history of the violence its leader caused