The Insurrection, Six Months Later

What I've been reading

Hi there.

Yesterday marked six months since supporters of Donald Trump, enraged by the result of the 2020 presidential election results, stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow democracy. The effects of that day have certainly not faded. As CNN and the New York Times show, Capitol Police are undergoing a massive restructuring, including establishing field offices across the country. Their model, it seems, is the Secret Service’s Protective Mission. That reflects the increased threat Capitol Police face. Meanwhile, Vice News reports that many of the journalists who were present at the Capitol on January 6 are still struggling to cope with the trauma of what they witnessed.

At the same time, some post-1/6 security measures are fading away. The National Guard presence around the Capitol is now nonexistent, and the steel barricades that have surrounded it are on their way out, as well. But the threat is far from gone. According to Business Insider, Mike Lindell, one of Trump’s chief conspiracy theorists, is now telling his followers that the disgraced former President will be “reinstated” on August 13. It’s hard to imagine this conspiracy doesn’t constitute a significant security threat, either at the Capitol or at the White House.

That said, the rioters are far from democracy’s biggest threat. Rather, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the call is coming from inside the house.

I often think back to something I wrote regarding the insurrection back in early February, as Trump’s second impeachment trial began:

On January 6, and in the days and weeks that followed, I thought often of a line from James Baldwin: “God gave Noah the rainbow. No more water, the fire next time!” The point of that line, in the Judeo-Christian tradition; in the African-American spiritual Baldwin borrowed from; and in Baldwin’s own book, is that if we do not learn from our own sins and self-correct, the next catastrophe will be worse.

With all due respect to the brave Capitol Police officers who protected our Congress on January 6, they were not the primary defenders of democracy on that day. That honor goes to the voters who delivered Democrats a net gain of forty seats in the House of Representatives in 2018, wresting control of the House away from Republicans. Had that not happened, Republicans would have held complete control of Congress on January 6, and in such a scenario, there’s plenty of reason to believe that Congress would have overturned the 2020 election results and handed Donald Trump an unearned second term of mayhem.

Which brings us to the gravity of the 2022 midterms. Republicans are widely expected to regain control of the House, and control of the Senate is seen as something of a coin toss. If Republicans win, it hardly matters who their 2024 presidential nominee turns out to be; can you imagine them not stepping in if the nominee loses in November?

That’s the central thesis of a recent New York Magazine piece by Jonathan Chait: for the sake of democracy, Democrats have to remain in the driver’s seat despite a significant handicap in Senate elections; part of the solution must be DC statehood.

No argument here.

And speaking of the horrors of Donald Trump, a new book reveals that Trump once remarked to his chief of staff, “Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to The Guardian.

In other news, the Associated Press points out that Joe Manchin isn’t the only Senate Democrat with leverage in infrastructure talks; all fifty of them have it. The AP also reports that the American Federation of Teachers is poised to defend critical race theory lessons. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on Donald Trump’s bizarre campaign to get former football star Herschel Walker, who lives in Texas, to run against Raphael Warnock for a US Senate seat in Georgia. And the Pentagon has cancelled a cloud computing project that had become a point of intense competition between Amazon and Microsoft, according to CNBC.

Lastly, Wired explores how startup investing has taken over the social audio platform Clubhouse. Cheers to that.

Thank you for caring enough to read.

Be safe. Drink water. You are loved.

Talk to you tomorrow.