When the U.S. House select committee investigating the violent attack on the Capitol building January 6, 2021 convened last week, some 540 people had already been arrested on various federal charges related to the riot. And the FBI was still searching for more than 200 others who will likely be charged with assaulting police officers.
Those of us who watched raging white crowds trample through lines of Capitol police trying to storm the inner chambers of Congress understood what we were seeing — a hate-maddened mob hell-bent on reversing the results of a legitimate presidential election, something most of us never imagined we’d see in America. It took many of us months to process this utterly shocking and abhorrent display of vigilante violence and political insanity. And all we could conclude was that we’d witnessed a botched right-wing attempt to pull off a coup, overthrow the government and terrify and kill lawmakers and members of their staffs. It was the most public and bald-faced act of domestic terrorism any of us had ever witnessed. It was as indelible as the televised beating of Rodney King.
Atlantic magazine writer Adam Serwer, in his brilliant new book, “The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America,” compared what happened on January 6 to the tragic destruction of Wilmington, North Carolina in the 1870s when it was the “most integrated city” in the South. “Thousands of armed white paramilitaries … destroyed the black area of Wilmington, killing as many as three hundred people and overthrowing its government….Echoing the plotters in Wilmington, Trump argued that Biden’s reliance on black votes for his victory rendered that victory illicit.” After telling a mob of his supporters that if they don’t “fight like hell” they’re “not going to have a country anymore,” he watched on television as his supporters stormed the Capitol. “It was a burlesque parody of Wilmington, an enraged rabble attempting to capture or kill federal lawmakers to force them to overturn an election in the name of democracy, a mob that cheered police repression of Black Lives Matter protesters assaulting cops.”
We know what we saw. But we spent most of the year watching over and over as Republicans tried every trick in the book to weasel out, discount and outright deny what we all knew was true. The rioters were not a bunch of eager tourists. They were a homicidal mob, armed and ready to commit murder and mayhem. To hear otherwise is as absurd as listening to jihadists tell us the World Trade Center towers were still standing. And yet the right-wing media spun, shucked, dodged and downplayed what was nothing short of a mass assassination attempt, incited and cheered on by the lame duck President of the United States.
But we know what we saw. And last week we heard from law enforcement officers who were beaten and battered by the mob, fearing for their lives and doing all they could – at terrible cost and risk to themselves – to keep the insurrectionists from finding Democrats, and Republicans they deemed disloyal, and killing them. We heard their tearful voices, saw their disbelieving looks and let the intimate accounts of the horrible violence and brutal intimidation they suffered sink into to our psyches. These peace officers were beaten with metal pipes, tortured with electric shocks, kicked and vilified and even threatened with lynching.
That there wasn’t a bloodbath has the feel of the miraculous.
We know what we saw. And we knew what it meant. American political culture and tradition were being violently disrespected by a mob that was trying to steal the election from 80 million voters — many of them people of color — who wanted to kick Donald Trump out of office. And the mob’s desecration of political freedom was being covered up before our eyes by right wing media who told us it never happened, even as it was.
In “The Cruelty is the Point,” Adam Serwer writes of the “specific dissonance of Trumpism — advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies were racially motivated — provide the emotional core of its appeal.” Imagine the fury and outrage at Fox News if January 6 had been a riot of “minorities,” not of white supremacists.
Serwer’s analysis holds true. “The second impeachment of Donald Trump, as a result of his incitement of the Capitol riot, was a necessary deterrent to the ambitions of future chief executives who would consider seizing power by force. But it also fell short of conviction as all prior impeachments have….The Republican party will not punish any efforts by its own supporters to subvert democracy, not even if its methods are lethal.”
Watching the testimony of abused police officers and thinking about the title of Serwer’s book, it’s hard not to think that cruelty was the point of the Capitol riot and of Trump’s years in office, the kind of cruelty that persuades by fear, that scapegoats whole races and ethnicities and genders, the cruelty that gives form to the essence of terrorism, be it the cruelty of discrimination, of punitive policies or of vigilante justice.
“We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era,” Serwer writes. “There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families….There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and ten of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified kills by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with their stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is the adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”
Cruelty is the point of domestic terrorism. That’s what we sensed when we watched on television the storming of the Capitol on January 6. What is more terrifying, and enraging, than the mockery of the cruel?
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
My God: What has become of us?