For the last few weeks, January 6 has loomed as a final deadline in Donald Trump’s quest to deny the inevitable arrival of the Joe Biden administration. For decades, the vote certifying the Electoral College results has been a perfunctory action, but a haphazard legal and media strategy turned it into MAGA’s last stand. This morning, Trump led a rally near the White House, where he gave a speech decrying the 2020 election. Eventually the remnants of that protesting crowd breached the Capitol building with woefully inadequate pushback from Capitol Police. Politicians and their staff members were evacuated, and eventually there were reports of gunfire. Hours later, NBC News reported that a woman who was shot inside the building had died.
Despite the dangerous conditions, journalists remained inside—some trapped, of course—and documented happenings that were previously unimaginable. (And that was the prevailing sentiment on social media and in direct messages: I cannot believe what I am seeing.) Almost immediately, scenes of bedlam trickled onto algorithmic feeds and cable television. A fur-clad man in horns, known to the very online as the “QAnon shaman,” presiding over a nearly empty Senate chamber. A man in a plaid jacket putting his boots up on the desk of Nancy Pelosi. (Pelosi, third in the order of succession, is currently in an undisclosed location.) A redhead in a Trump beanie happily carrying out a podium bearing the seal of the Speaker of the House. A festival-sized crowd bearing Trump flags filling the risers meant to seat inauguration guests in two weeks, a chilly Coachella for a new lost cause.
The most uncanny aspects of the images might be how much they differ from previous scenes of protest at the Capitol building or elsewhere in Washington. In 2018, disability-rights activists peacefully occupied a congressional office hallway to protest proposed cuts to Medicaid, and officers arrested and forcibly removed them. Over the summer, when a group of racial-justice protesters gathered across the street from the White House, they were cleared violently so Trump could stage a photo-op. We’ve been conditioned to expect that the security theater on Capitol Hill can be activated at any moment, for any reason. On Wednesday, it was hours before the cavalry arrived.
Despite the fumes and gas masks, the invaders often appeared pedestrian. Many looked like they were having the times of their lives. When British soldiers breached the president’s residence during the war of 1812, they wore hand-sewn woolen garments with stiff, high collars. Some of the people who stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday also wore tactical gear, but their synthetic fabrics are more familiar, available at sporting-goods stores nationwide and on Amazon Prime. They accessorized with hats from the Trump campaign website. Call it a Dick’s Sporting Goods putsch. (Or maybe just the Dick’s Putsch, if you will.)
The Trump era began in 2015 with his absurd journey via gilded escalator to deliver one of the most succinct statements of public racism we had seen in years. (“They’re rapists” still chills me, even after all these years.) Two years later, we had Charlottesville and his “very fine people on both sides” comment. Before Trump, we weren’t accustomed to consuming images or processing experiences that combine stupidity and real threat in such rapid succession. We still aren’t great at it now, but at least we’ve gotten some experience in the unsettling and banal side of violence—and how little it matters whether or not you call it a “coup.”
As the Trump era comes to an end, at least on paper, the defining image of its close may well be the shit-eating grin of a middle-aged white man with his feet on the desk as if he owned the place. While his workwear lent him an ordinary air, the president knew better. He was, in the words of Trump, one of the “very special.”
— Inside the Always Online, All-Consuming World of Twin Flames Universe
— Rudy Giuliani’s Daughter, Caroline, on How to Accept That Trump Lost
— Carl Lentz, Ranin Karim, and Hillsong’s Unfurling Scandal
— Billie Eilish Shares How She Spent the Pandemic in Latest Time Capsule
— The Queen Says Goodbye to Her Beloved Dorgi, Vulcan
— Barack Obama on His Book, the Election, and What Actually Makes America Great
— How We Unmasked the Hollywood Con Queen Suspect
— From the Archive: Her Most Loyal Subjects, a History of the Queen’s Kennels
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.
