Yesterday morning, on my own website, I wrote a blog that began, “Today is a good day for America.”
It didn’t turn out that way.
My point in that piece, written a few hours before a Trump-incited mob looted our national Capitol building, was that Democrats had just won the two Georgia Senate seats assuring that Joe Biden would get his judicial appointments approved and opening possibilities to address infrastructure, health care, climate change and more. I also felt that Trump’s role in his party’s defeat would substantially weaken him as a political force after he left office.
Finally, I thought that, while the challenges to the electoral college vote counts were outrageous, they also represented the low point of the Trump years and we would start healing once Biden was finally and officially declared our next president.
Then the bottom fell out. On a peaceful drive north to our cabin I was listening to a book about the building of the Panama Canal, of all things. My mind was on Teddy Roosevelt, who had just become president after the assassination of William McKinley. North of Rhinelander my wife, who was checking news on her phone, said, “you might want to give that a pause and turn on the radio.”
For the last 18 hours or so, I, like most Americans, have been riveted to the story. I alternate between outrage at the rioters and the politicians and right-wing media types who egged them on and heartsickness at what’s become of my country. I alternate between admiration for what appear to be heartfelt statesman-like statements by the likes of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham and Mike Pence and outrage at how they enabled Trump until it all went beyond too far.
Our own Sen. Ron Johnson had the good sense to back off from his support for the objections to the results of the election, but he can’t be forgiven for spending the last four years as one of Trump’s most ardent apologists. His actions in recent weeks, when he convened his committee to give attention to bizarre conspiracy theories about both the election and the pandemic, make him unfit for office. Let’s hope he doesn’t run again when his term comes up in 2022. But if he does, he must be defeated and defeated resoundingly. He is a national embarrassment to Wisconsin.
Today you can expect local Republicans to start reacting. Yesterday, Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke wasted no time in making the inevitable comparison between what happened in Washington yesterday and what happened in 2011 when protesters took over the Wisconsin Capitol in a reaction to what became Act 10. But the Act 10 protesters weren’t trying to overthrow a legally elected government, they weren’t trying to overturn a free and fair election. In short, they weren’t committing insurrection.
And they weren’t violent. In fact, they chanted “thank you” to the law enforcement officers who were in and around the building, while yesterday’s rioters injured several Capitol police. The Act 10 protesters used painter’s tape to affix their signs to the marble walls so that they would leave no residue. Yesterday’s thugs broke windows, tossed around desks and chairs and generally defiled a sacred building. And, of course, no one died in the weeks of Act 10 protest. Four people lost their lives yesterday in Washington.
In contrast to the peacefulness of the Act 10 protesters, I was outraged over what happened on our state Capitol grounds and on State Street in June. I’m still outraged by it. I’m happy to see the diligence of law enforcement as they methodically track down those — mostly white people, by the way — who looted businesses and tore down statues of Civil War hero Hans Christian Heg and Forward. The same thing needs to happen now in Washington. There’s ample video evidence of who did what. These people need to be found and vigorously prosecuted. There’s no excuse for violence no matter what your cause.
As for the fate of Trump, it’s a little bit of an irony that Merrick Garland will now be in charge of the Justice Department that will have to decide what to do about all of his tangled wrongdoings. Trump tried, and succeeded to some extent, to get the department to pursue vendettas against his enemies. We can bet that Biden and Garland will rebuild the wall between the White House and the department and that Garland will follow the law, not his or Biden’s personal wishes. We’ll see what happens, but Trump may end up benefiting from the very institutional norms he tried to destroy.
There’s no way for thoughtful people to be anything but angry and sick about yesterday’s events. But in the last analysis, everything that was in place at lunchtime yesterday is still there today. Joe Biden will be president in less than two weeks and if there is anyone who can serve as a better antidote to Trump I don’t know who it is. When he takes office he will now have a Congress he can work with. Mitch McConnell will no longer run the Senate.
And if Trump was weakened by his role in his party’s loss of Senate control, he will be weakened much further by the thugs who broke into and busted up our most sacred public building at his behest. You could almost see the political calculations going on in the minds of the Republican senators as they spoke last night. Trump had crossed the line between noxious political heavyweight who they must suck up to and pariah.
If that happens, if Trump becomes toxic even within his own party, then maybe yesterday’s horrors will contribute to the rebuilding of our nation.
