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This Wasn’t Trump’s Reichstag Fire. It Was His Beer Hall Putsch.
How the Biden administration handles the aftermath of the January 6 attempted coup will determine the future of fascism in America
A few days after an insurrectionist mob incited by Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, the picture of what truly happened is starting to take shape. Among the crowd of QAnon believers and Trump-cult followers were alt-right white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys and trained veterans. They brought zip ties, Molotov cocktails laced with styrofoam (homemade napalm), bombs, guns. The crowd erected a gallow, complete with its noose, in front of the building and stormed the halls chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”
The Vice-President wasn’t the only target. The equipment seen on video footage (the handcuffs/zip ties, most prominently) indicates that the terrorists were ready to take hostages and forcibly restrain them. It is frightening to imagine what these lunatics thought they would do to Pence, Pelosi, Schumer, AOC, Omar, and the rest of Congress had they been able to take hold of them.
The Capitol Police’s complicit behaviour towards the mob has raised questions about where their real loyalties lie. The absence of the National Guard and its deployment delays start to outline a plot that, far from a spontaneous spurt of anger and crowd frenzy, looks more and more like an incompetently organised coup involving the administration at the highest level. This brilliant Twitter thread by Seth Abramson analyses the propaganda rhetoric of the speech Trump gave earlier on Wednesday, and that started it all. In it, Abramson finds no doubt about Trump’s intentions; more importantly, Trump counted on the Army and LEO to join in the coup, inviting them to “come up with us” to the Capitol.
Let’s not beat around the bush and call it what it was: a coup. As Umair Haque points out in his essay, America is already trying to rationalise what has happened and minimise the importance that this event will have in the weeks, months, and years to come. Many in the media, trying to put words on the most shocking event to take place on American soil since 9/11, have compared the storming of the Capitol to the Reichstag Fire of 1933.
