Mr. President, our Constitution is calling
His name is Harry Dunn, and he is an officer in the Capitol Police who was on guard on Jan. 6, 2021, and he knows how to talk about who he is, what he believes, and what happened on that day. He was on NPR’s Morning Edition today to counter the narrative Donald Trump and his supporters have pushed about the attack on the Capitol. He described the Trump narrative this way:
“I wanted to combat it with what actually happened. What was being told in that narrative wasn't what happened -- like it being a tour visit, like we were opening the doors for them, that it was a protest that got out of hand -- because individuals told us they were there because Donald Trump sent them there.”
He wrote a memoir, “Standing My Ground,” to tell us what it was like to guard the Capitol that day. “I've always viewed the Capitol building - I've always revered it. Sixteen years in my job, and every day I get the opportunity, I walked through end to end inside, and I stare at the rotunda, and I'm just in awe of it, what it represents,” Dunn told NPR. “The people that built it were slaves, and having the honor to protect that building, not just in an ancestral way for my ancestors, but to represent the democracy, this country, and to be able to protect democracy -- I view myself as a defender of democracy -- and to see it in the way that it was that day afterwards, it just broke my heart. It just broke my heart that this is where we are. And I - this may sound so cliche or even - you know, some people go whatever, but my heart broke for this country. My heart broke for the country 'cause I love this country. I love it.”
This is the reason I am posting Officer Dunn’s statement on NPR about how he felt on the day Donand Trump sent a mob of his followers to attack the Capitol: we have allowed what happened on that day to become a controversy. Unbelievably, we have permitted Trump and his supporters to tell us lies about what we all saw with our own eyes.
Now we are being told by Donald Trump’s campaign spokesman that he did not say last Saturday what he told his rally in New Hampshire, and later posted on his social media site, supposedly in celebration of Veterans Day. Trump described his political opponents as “vermin” and promised to “root them out,” using language taken directly from Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, the man who established and ran the concentration camps the Nazis used to “exterminate” Jews and intellectuals and the homeless and members of opposing political parties.
This is the way Trump has always done it: he says something to rile up his base, or he does something like inspire a crowd to “fight like hell” for him and take that fight to the Capitol, and then he, or his spokesmen and defenders, contend he didn’t say that at all, and what happened did not happen. He has begun his campaign for the presidency doing exactly what he did in 2016 and 2020. He told us what he was going to do, and not enough of us listened and took him seriously. He said he wouldn’t accept the results of the election in both 2016 and 2020 unless he won, and when he lost in 2020, he didn’t. He called the press “enemies of the people,” and he treated them like that. He called people who didn’t agree with him “traitors” and he vowed to “go after” Joe Biden and William Barr and Mark Milley and John Kelly if and when he is elected, and he will do exactly what he said he will do.
There is a way to combat Donald Trump’s slurs and lies and the plans he is laying out there for all of us to see. We need to describe accurately the meaning of what he says and what he is. The New York Times and the Washington Post and all the networks and other major newspapers called out Trump for his speech last Saturday and compared his words to those of Hitler, and so did I. But four days later, it feels somehow inadequate. We need our president to speak the way Officer Harry Dunn spoke to NPR this morning: plainly, directly, strongly, and from the heart about Trump and his lies.
What we need is for President Joe Biden to stand up and go before the American people and give them a lesson in what a good man looks like and sounds like when he tells the truth. Biden should give a major speech, and yes, it can be a campaign speech, because Joe Biden is all we have between us and Donald Trump. Biden should use visual aids to illustrate what he says. When he describes the terrible things that happened on January 6, he should show footage of officers like Harry Dunn being beaten by Trump supporters that day, and he should say exactly that: these are supporters of Donald Trump beating cops and attacking our seat of government. Biden should show Trump’s speech in New Hampshire about how he is going to root out “vermin,” and then Biden should describe Trump’s vermin as who they are: you and me; loyal American veterans like Mark Milley and John Kelly and other members of Trump’s own government like William Barr and former Defense Secretaries James Mattis and Mark Esper, respectively a United States Marine and a graduate of West Point.
We need President Biden to contrast himself starkly from Donald Trump using plain language anyone who loves this country can understand. American democracy is at stake.
Joe Biden is our defender of democracy. Mr. President, our Constitution is calling.
Yesterday, the Speaker of the house said he is 100% behind Defendant trump. This is after the defendant said he would remove “vermin”. I don’t think i saw any pushback against this obvious support for a fascist. It’s pass time to give this anti democratic people a mulligan. They tell us what they are and believe in, we need to continue to expose them.
By coincidence I just finished re-reading William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," and the parallels between P1135809 and Hitler are many and distressing. I was particularly interested in P1135809's application to have his federal trial in DC televised. In 1923, Hitler staged an attempted coup in Munich. Wielding a pistol himself, Adolph shot up the ceiling of a beer hall, held high-ranking Army officers hostage and staged a march on military bases. The Munich police put an end to it by standing up to him. Hitler was tried for that bit of treason. The judge -- a right-winger (hello, Judge Cannon!) gave him great leeway in the trial, including permitting him to make a four-hour opening statement. That speech, covered extensively by the German media, turned Hitler from a local Bavarian radical into a national figure. He received a slap-on-the-wrist sentence (while in prison he wrote "Mein Kampf") and emerged and nine years later his Nazi party won enough seats in the parliament for him to become chancellor. P1135809 doubtless wants the Washington trial televised so he can do what his role model, Hitler, did in 1924 -- use a turn on the witness stand to propagandize.