When Congressman Vicente González ran into the assailants in the Capitol tunnels a year ago, he took off his tie and identifying pin and began to walk, neither too fast nor too slowly, until they were out of sight. First he heard the outrageous screams, then the shooting began, and when he saw the police pointing pistols at the men and women trying to enter the Chamber, he thought anything was possible. He feared a bloodbath. Before long, they were evacuated and transferred to a bunker. "We were all together, Republicans and Democrats, praying together," says Gonzalez, a 54-year-old Democrat and Texan.
On January 6, 2021, a mob of followers of then-President Donald Trump marched to Congress with the purpose of preventing the confirmation of Joe Biden's electoral victory after a wave of fraud hoaxes spurred by the president himself. "We are going to walk down to the Capitol and we are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen," Trump harangued the crowd he had summoned before the White House in the morning. "Some of us are not going to encourage much because you will never recover your country with weakness, you have to show strength and be strong," he added.
A few minutes later the invasion of the House began, the most violent episode since the civil war, and the United States peered into the abyss.
Five people died, 140 policemen were injured.
Around three thirty in the morning, with Congress already turned into a fortress, senators and congressmen met again and certified the electoral result.
Jacob Anthony Chansley, during his protest inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Manuel Balce Ceneta (AP)
For Congressman González, the balance, one year later, is mixed. "We managed to ensure a peaceful transition that night, democracy worked," he says. However, “these people have had their success, we cannot pretend they don't exist. January 6 was another September 11, an internal one, of Americans attacking Americans. Now they try to minimize it and the Republicans, except for some heroes, have lacked the political courage to put limits on Trump's lies ”.
There are no barriers these days on the Capitol grounds. Yes sleds and children who riot, fall and laugh in slow motion, hampered by the snowfall. They recall the scene at idle speed from the pillow fight in the movie
Zero in Conduct
. They make it seem implausible that just a year ago, right there, blood was spilled trying to avoid confirmation of a president. Today security has been strengthened, justice has acted (for the moment, 725 accused and 71 convicted) and the system has resisted, but the next challenge to the popular will of the most powerful country in the world may not need doors and windows.
About 70% of Trump voters still believe that Joe Biden made it to the White House thanks to voter fraud; Many of the Republicans who stopped their president in 2020 have been ousted and several conservative states, such as Georgia and Arizona, have promoted electoral laws that, de facto, weigh down the vote of minorities and reinforce the role of the legislative chambers. states to nullify votes and certify the results. The terrain, in other words, is more conducive than a year ago for a crusade like the one Trump launched on the back of a hoax that has been laid down dozens of times in court. And this hoax, far from withering away, is still part of the usual menu of media such as
Newsmax
or
Infowars
and the emails that the ex-president - the favorite of the bases for 2024 - sends asking for donations.
A year after the assault on the Capitol that shocked the United States and puzzled the world, the so-called "Big Lie" has taken root in the country and has embarked on a second assault that is also fought in slow motion.
The movement is not bordered on the margins of society, but at its center, hence its shooting power.
Among the insurgents of a year ago there were members of far-right groups such as the well-known Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, but the vast majority were ordinary people, something that breaks the schemes of experts in political violence and casts worrying signals about how the repudiation of the system has gangrenous part of the general population.
Donald Trump during his rally on January 6, 2021. MANDEL NGAN (AFP)
Robert A. Pape, a renowned scholar in this field who directs the University of Chicago Threats and Security Project, has spent this year analyzing the profiles of the assailants based on the judicial documentation of the hundreds of defendants.
“What surprised me,” he explains over the phone, “is that there were a lot of people who were part of mainstream society.
This type of event used to be linked to extremist groups, but if you look at the characteristics of the people who stormed the Capitol, around half were small businessmen, qualified professionals, lawyers, architects… ”.
That profile, Pape warns, “also fits with the polls, the number of people who sympathize with this feeling of insurrection: they represent some 21 million citizens. It is much more than what could be expected from a marginal movement ”, he adds. And the average age of those indicted is 41.8 years, when the trend in violent extremists in Europe, the US and the Middle East tends to be in the 20s and 30s.
The research team, whose conclusions were first published in The Atlantic magazine, tried to find a pattern that would serve to explain the motivations, but they did not find very evident correlations: the insurgents did not come from the most Trumpist territories, the rural ones were not predominant, Neither did residents of counties where income for white workers was declining. The only clear trend was demographic: Vandals were more likely to come from territories where the white population was shrinking from minorities.
“It's the Great Replacement theory, the idea that whites are being bypassed; It used to be marginal, but 75% of those 21 million citizens think so, ”says Pape. “When you see support from society for political violence, you no longer have the typical security problem, you have a serious political and social problem and you should be concerned because the 2022 [legislative] elections are a barrel of dynamite, because you have to 21 million people who have that feeling of insurrection ”.
39-year-old behavior analyst Tiffany Polifko has a hard time believing that Biden came to the presidency cleanly. "We already know that there was fraud in many states and we were already warned that if that large number of votes by mail arrived, everything would be questionable," he says from Ashburn (Virginia). Faced with the rejection that this theory found in the courts, Polifko responds that "many simply refused to even look at the issue, it is not that they explored the matter." Shawnda Gorosieta, 54, from the same city, thinks there was not enough "oversight on the mail-in ballots and they weren't tabulated correctly." For Gorosieta, project manager in the construction sector, “it is also a matter of common sense:Why was there so much participation in this election? Where did they get all those votes for Biden? Neither [Barack] Obama achieved that many ”.
The elections of November 3, 2020 registered a 66% turnout, the highest in 120 years.
Biden became, in effect, the president who obtained the most support in absolute terms, 81.2 million votes compared to 74.2 million for Trump, who was also the second most voted candidate so far, but those Ballots are not questioned by their voters.
None of the audits carried out in territories that were critical to the final result have turned the tables, although that has not ended the misgivings.
Trump supporters participate in the Washington rally on January 6, 2021.John Minchillo (AP)
Much of the pulse on the electoral process has to do with how complex the US system is, which is indirect, and how vulnerable it makes Democrats.
Despite losing by seven million votes and 4.5 percentage points, a difference of 43,000 votes distributed between Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin could have given the Republican the presidency and that tight margin, which was seen to come, is what emboldened his crusade .
Tyrant with the masses
That crusade, judicial and political, crashed into the courts and into a handful of elected officials and officials, many of them Republicans, who simply refused to participate in the skirmish. It was a Republican lawyer named Aaron Van Langevelde, a member of the Michigan Electoral Council, who stood up to the pressure and cast the decisive vote that certified the results in that hinge territory. In Georgia, another key place in the Democratic victory was Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who did not give in to direct pressure from the president to find those “11,780 votes” that he needed to win.
The former was never re-nominated for the Council position in Michigan and the latter was censored by his party and removed from the presidency of the State Electoral Council. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman who voted to impeach Trump for inciting insurrection, was disowned by a large part of his family. He is part of the commission that investigates on January 6 in Congress, but has already advanced that he will not stand for reelection. And many of the candidates running for the November legislature, a key appointment in this whole affair, have aligned themselves with Trump.
“The consequences of the day of the assault cannot be separated from the consequences of what happened in the following months, the way in which the Republican Party did not reject Trump and his tactics. We have 70% Republicans who believe that Biden won by fraud. Confidence in the electoral process has been undermined and a lack of confidence in the results of the polls is potentially very dangerous, ”says Alex Keyssar, a Harvard election historian.
The debate on the security of the elections is not new. Republicans have always tended to ask for more restrictions, citing the ease of fraud, and Democrats have asked for more restrictions, arguing that it undermines minorities. Now, Democrats are trying to push for a nationwide law that precisely expands and favors participation in response to the approved conservative reforms. The legislative elections of 2022 have become a critical chapter of the electoral system itself. "If the Democratic party had not been in the majority of the House that day, the 2020 election would not have been certified and the United States would be a banana republic," González points out.
Discouragement has taken its toll on the staff working at the Capitol. More than a hundred policemen had resigned until last December, a figure much higher than in previous years. And threats received by members of the Chambers or their staff escalated to 9,600 in 2021, when they did not reach 4,000 in 2017, according to The Washington Post. For Rich Luchette, an adviser to Democratic Congressman David N. Cicilline for 13 years, the assault a year ago was the last straw. He was in his boss's office when the uproar started. From strangeness he passed to fear and fear, to anger. “Getting to that point is something that outraged me. A president who had been sowing distrust in the system, had ended up calling his followers to demonstrate there that day. It was a turning pointI had been thinking about changing for a long time and that made me decide to quit my job, "he says.
Like most analysts, Luchette is convinced that if Trump runs for president again, he will be the candidate, "and if he loses again, he will reject the result."
The historian Keyssar believes that Trump "has come to believe his own lie and for him to appear in 2024 is a form of redemption."
This Thursday, on the first anniversary of that fateful day, Biden will deliver a speech in which he will attribute to Trump the "sole responsibility for the chaos and carnage," according to the White House spokeswoman, Jen Psaki.
The former mogul guesses about his future in Florida and struggles to stay in the spotlight.
He had scheduled a press conference today that he decided to cancel at the last minute.
It does hold a rally in Arizona this month where it promises news.
78% of Republicans want Trump to appear in 2024, according to a survey by Quinnipiac University, a benchmark in these polls.
The Trump cult resists a year later.
The British historian James Bryce undertook a long journey to study America in the mid-1880s and wrote The American Commonwealth, where he warned of the danger of American democracy falling victim to "a tyrant," but not "a tyrant against the masses." He qualified, "but a tyrant with the masses."
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