White supremacy is a wounded animal

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I’m starting to think that Trump’s mob of costumed looters and racist miscreants that assaulted the Capitol was pathetic.  Bear with me here, but if you stand back and look at what happened, it was a big fat dud.  Let’s get some perspective:

It wasn’t a huge crowd.  There are no official estimates of the mob that assaulted the Capitol.  The best one I could find was from a guy named Stephen Doig, a professor of journalism at Arizona State University who specializes in “data journalism.”  In an interview he did with Yahoo News, Doig said that he couldn’t give a “good estimate” of the size of the crowd at the Capitol, but “no matter what anybody is claiming, it will be much larger than the actual crowd.” 

He explained that it’s difficult to estimate crowd size in Washington because the whole city is a no-fly zone, thus you can’t get the aerial shots of crowds that would yield the best estimate.  But from looking at the footage of the riot, Doig estimated the crowd density at one person per five square feet. They were packed together, but the visuals are misleading.  For example, one person per square foot would be a “stampede” according to Doig, and people at the Capitol were not that close together.  The best he could do was estimate that the crowd amounted to “several thousand,” which sounds (and looked) about right to me.

That is what Trump could turn out for his insurrection?  The march on Washington in 1963 turned out more than 250,000.  The Moratorium against the war in Vietnam had a crowd of 500,000, and the women’s march in 2017 after Trump’s inauguration put more than a million protesters on the Washington Mall.  Looked at with those figures in mind, Trump’s crowd of losers was pathetic.

Trump’s insurrection didn’t last long. The first barriers around the Capitol were breached between 12:53 and 1:03 p.m, according to a timeline published by the New York Times.  Rioters broke into the Capitol building at various points between around 2:11 p.m. Senators were still on the floor of the Senate debating the issue of certifying the Arizona ballots at 2:13. By 2:15, rioters were outside the doors of the Senate, and Senators began moving off the floor.  According to the Times, five minutes after the rioters broke into the Capitol, the House went into recess, and representatives rushed from the chamber.

So let’s say Trump’s crowd of lunatics broke into the Capitol around 2:00 p.m. According to the New York Times, the last of the rioters had been driven from the building three hours later, and the Sergeant of Arms declared the building “secure” around 5:00 p.m.

That is how long Trump’s white supremacist mob lasted.  Three hours.  Pathetic.

They went to the insurrection in costume and didn’t know what they were doing.  Even though five people died and dozens of Capitol police were injured, if you watch the videos from inside the Capitol building, what you see is a mess. Despite the fact that at least some of the terrorists had researched the tunnel system under the Capitol and some had been given “tours” by sympathetic right-wing Republican members of Congress, it’s obvious from the videos that they didn’t know where they were going, and they didn’t know what to do when they got there, other than loot some offices and carry away some laptops and broken nameplates and the Speaker’s podium.  If it’s accurate that some of the maniacs were looking to kidnap Pence and Pelosi, or kill them as some have reported, they didn’t succeed.  The damage they did to the Capitol building was minor and most of it has already been repaired.  Pathetic.

Their aim was to stop the certification of ballots and overturn the election.   Congress completed its certification of Electoral College ballots sometime after 3:00 a.m. and had declared Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the winners of the election by 4:00 a.m.  Trump’s mob of white supremacist radicals failed in their mission.  Pathetic.

Today, the Capitol is surrounded by razor wire and guarded by more than 20,000 National Guard troops.  If Trump’s overall aim was to disrupt the inauguration of his rival, he accomplished that much.  Joe Biden’s inauguration will take place behind barriers with attendance that will be limited to about 2,000 invited guests.  For the first time in history, the Mall will be closed and no crowd of citizens will be allowed to gather to witness the swearing in of their new president. 

But Trump wanted more than that.  He wanted to overturn the election, and he failed.  Joe Biden will be inaugurated 46th president of the United States next Wednesday, exactly two weeks after Trump and his mob of maniac insurrectionists tried to stop it. 

The mob that assaulted the Capitol was white, virtually all of them.  The only black faces that can be seen in the footage of the riot are those of Capitol policemen.  Trump and the Republican Party believe the election was stolen from him by Black voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, the states that they accuse of “fraud” with absolutely no evidence. 

This country of ours now has a white political party, the Republican Party.  It’s less a party than it is a white supremacist mob.  But that mob tried to stop the democratic process of electing and certifying a new president on January 6, and they failed.  The white supremacist mob that is the Republican Party has been defeated this time.  They are wounded, and the assault on the Capitol that Trump incited amounted to the pained throes of a wounded animal.

But wounded animals, especially when they are backed into a corner they cannot escape from like the Republicans, are dangerous.  I’m afraid we’re going to be living with the threat of their violence and insurrection for some time to come.  It’s wrong, and it’s unfair, but it’s up to us to stand guard over our democracy, because Trump’s wounded animal is bound to revive and lash  out again.