A Very Dark Day

January 6th and the failure of American Democracy

[Apologies for the late post. It has been a challenging day.]

If things had gone differently, if things had gone as they should have, the anniversary of January 6th would be a time for reflection: How did we come so close to losing American democracy at the hands of a man who brought this country to its knees during his four years in office, and betrayed his oath to the Constitution by inciting a riot against his own government? What must we do, as American citizens, to strengthen a democracy that has proven to be much more fragile than most of us imagined it to be?

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and the years that followed, we spoke of a “failed” insurrection, but I always said that we did not yet in fact know if the insurrection failed or not. On November 5, 2024, we finally learned that Donald’s self coup succeeded.

It wasn’t until today that I felt the full import of what happened on January 6th, 2021—because, obviously, we failed to learn to the lessons of that day. And here we are, certifying the election of the insurrectionist who was allowed to run for the Republican nomination, who was allowed to be a candidate for the highest office in the land, who is, in two weeks, going to be president of the United States of America.

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Four years ago today I was on Cape Cod. It was overcast and I didn’t have much planned other than a couple of interviews—which had nothing to do with the certification of the election. Up until that then, most Americans had no idea that Congress met on January 6th for the purpose of making the electoral college votes official. It was a procedural, mundane process that was the hallmark of our history of the peaceful transfer of power.

I paid no attention to the speeches on the Ellipse: Donald had lost the election and, his bluster, lies, and grievance aside, we no longer had to pay attention to anything he had to say. He had proven himself to be the sorest of losers—the less energy we spent on him the better.

Then news about the mobs attacking the Capitol started breaking. Katie Couric asked if I could join her for an Instagram Live. At the time we spoke, the mob had been cleared from the Capitol but it was not yet clear if there would be a peaceful transfer of power.

This is an excerpt from our conversation, which, I confess, I find both prescient and unnerving:

KATIE: I wondered if you could just give us some insights into what you think may be going through [Donald’s] head right now and why he cannot, why he continues to cling to this narrative that the election was rigged and that he won in a landslide and on and on and on?

MARY: I think the biggest problem right now is that this is being allowed to happen. [Republicans] should have accepted that Joe Biden was the legitimately elected president of the United States. And yes, Donald would have continued to incite his base, but it wouldn't have gone anywhere because nobody else in power would've been giving it any energy. Instead, we have twelve sitting senators who are perfectly willing to commit sedition to overturn the result of a legitimate election as well as over 140 congresspeople. So we're in extraordinarily dangerous territory.

For Donald, the idea of losing is anathema to him. As far as my grandfather was concerned, the worst thing you could be was a loser. And whenever Donald talks about how great he is, he's talking to his audience of one, which is my grandfather. His father looms very large for Donald, and everything he does is out of fear of him. Throughout the course of his life, Donald has actually never won anything legitimately, including the last election. But he's always been able to buy, cheat or steal his way to the win because it doesn't matter how you win, it just matters that you win, even if it's a win with an asterisk next to it.

He couldn’t do that this time around. And he tried—we need to be really clear about that. Donald has been trying to steal this election since the summer by claiming that if Biden won, it was rigged, and by telling people not to trust the post office or mail-in ballots during a pandemic. And he still lost, which is one of the reasons he's freaking out because he tried so hard. He also knows what's facing him once he loses the power and the protection of the Oval Office.

One of the greatest tragedies for me is that this was totally avoidable. Donald never should have been empowered to create the kind of chaos he’s created and to sow the kind of division he's sown in the last two months What happened today should absolutely never have been allowed to happen. And one of the things that I find so worrisome about what happened today is, first of all, Donald feels even more empowered because he has all of these people in Congress basically saying, “We've got your back. Do whatever you want to do.”

KATIE: Mary, how do you see your uncle getting out of this? How do you see him saving faith? How do you see him accepting the fact that he will no longer inhabit 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and that for now anyway, if not permanently, the party's over or at least his party's over?

MARY: He’s never going to accept it. We saw that today. He was called upon to calm things down, to defuse the situation, and instead he continued lying; he continued making outrageous claims that are an assault on our democracy. And because of him, for the first time in our entire history, including during the Civil War, there was not a peaceful transfer of power in the United States. One woman was killed, several other people were injured. And it's all because, when Donald had the opportunity to tone things down, he stoked the resentments of these people who felt perfectly comfortable smashing their way into our capital and desecrating it in the name of Donald John Trump.

KATIE: Do you believe this is going to change the minds of some of those people who have announced that they will object and Prince did call in the National Guard? That's accurate. Do you think that some of the people who were going to object to the certification given what transpired today, we'll have second thoughts?

MARY: No, no. I think they're going to do what Donald doe: they’ll double down, they’ll quadruple down in the face of overwhelming evidence that contradicts everything they believe—and they will become more dangerous. It's all well and good for Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence finally to toe the line; however, they're directly responsible for all of this. They've been enabling this for four years now, and we cannot forget that. In the meantime, the very least they can do is make sure that this election gets certified tonight, so this doesn't play out any longer than it needs to. And they need to think long and hard about how they're going to handle the members of their party who were perfectly comfortable and willing to attack our democracy.

KATIE: What do you think Donald’s frame of mind is?

MARY: He’s probably more desperate than he's ever been in his life, and I'm sorry to say this, but short of the Congress stepping in, impeaching and removing him, the next two weeks are going to be among the most dangerous in our country's history. And after today, that's actually really saying something.

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On that day, 138 officers, 73 Capitol Police and 65 Metropolitan Police, were injured, some of them seriously. Fifteen were hospitalized.

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, four officers committed suicide: Gunther Hashida, Kyle DeFreytag, Jeffrey Smith, and Howard Liebengood. On January 7th, Officer Brian Sicknick died after suffering a stroke which was result of injuries he sustained the day before.

In the ensuing months, the Department of Justice charged more than 1,400 people with federal crimes related to the attack. More than 900 of them have been convicted.

Six members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were found guilty of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to long prison sentences. These included the following:

Kelly Meggs was sentenced to 12 years; Zachary Real was sentenced to 15 years; Joseph Biggs was sentenced to 15 years; Ethan Norman and Stewart Rhodes were sentenced to 18 years; and Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years.

Donald Trump, the man who incited them to commit these crimes against the United States of America will, in two weeks, be sworn in as president of the country he has already betrayed. He will put his hand on the Bible and pledge the following: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Every single word he utters will be a lie.