The lawmakers lacked the authority to overturn the election, but Trump and his allies had concocted a fantastical alternative: Pence, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could single-handedly nullify votes from states that Biden had won. Fourteen Republican senators, led by Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, had joined the effort. In December, a hundred and forty Republican representatives-two-thirds of the caucus-had said that they would formally object to the certification of several swing states. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.”Ībout a mile and a half away, at the east end of the Mall, Vice-President Pence and both houses of Congress had convened to certify the Electoral College votes that had made Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the next President and Vice-President of the United States. We’re going to have to fight much harder. “We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. He had a thin mustache and hugged a life-size mannequin with duct tape over its eyes, “ traitor” scrawled on its chest, and a noose around its neck. In front of me, a middle-aged man wearing a Trump flag as a cape told a young man standing beside him, “There’s gonna be a war.” His tone was resigned, as if he were at last embracing a truth that he had long resisted.

The profanity signalled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms had survived the past four years. It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half gleeful excitement at being licensed to act on it. Then he summarized the supposed crimes, simply, as “bullshit.” His voice, however, projected clearly through powerful speakers as he rehashed the debunked allegations of massive fraud which he’d been propagating for months.

From where I stood, at the foot of the Washington Monument, you had to strain to see his image on a jumbotron that had been set up on Constitution Avenue. Thousands of them had assembled on the Mall, in Washington, D.C., on the morning of January 6th, to hear Trump address them from a stage outside the White House. By the end of President Donald Trump’s crusade against American democracy-after a relentless deployment of propaganda, demagoguery, intimidation, and fearmongering aimed at persuading as many Americans as possible to repudiate their country’s foundational principles-a single word sufficed to nudge his most fanatical supporters into open insurrection.

The power of fives az