On the one-year anniversary of the Insurrection

It's been twelve months since Donald Trump and his supporters tried to violently overthrow our government. And I fear we are still fiddling while our democracy is burning.

January 6 is the one-year anniversary of the Insurrection at the US Capitol building, where Trump supporters, sent and urged on by Donald Trump himself, tried to violently overthrow our government in order to illegally reinstall him as president.

To honor this solemn date, the Republican party of Georgia is holding a party to “celebrate” the Insurrection, and honor the “patriots” who committed treason that day.

2022 is going to be a pivotal year in our democracy. It’s when we find out whether Democrats (and a few good Republicans, like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) are willing to hold Trump, his aides, and Republican members of Congress accountable for the Insurrection, AND what they plan to do to ensure our future elections are safe rather than stolen.

So far, it ain’t looking good.

We admittedly don’t know what Merrick Garland is or isn’t investigating, but a lot of the DOJ experts on TV are saying that it doesn’t appear he’s doing anything with regards to Trump and the Insurrection. And from what we know of Garland, that makes sense. In America, we don’t investigate our former presidents because it has the ring of a banana republic (though France has charged former President Minister Sarkozy). That’s why Nixon was pardoned by Ford, and it’s likely why the Obama DOJ refused to go after Bush. There’s a lot of justifiable historical baggage against setting such a precedent, lest it lead to a never-ending cycle of politically-motivated investigations of former presidents.

But, in this case, the previous guy sent a mob to violently overthrow the government, and then, as he watched his flying monkeys hunt down the Vice President in flagrante delicto, he didn’t lift a finger to stop them, either by calling them off or sending in the troops. And all that against a backdrop, we now know, of Trump meticulously planning for months to steal the election.

January 6 photo by Tyler Merbler.

Trump’s behavior, and now the behavior of far too many of his henchmen in Congress and across the country, is unprecedented in recent American politics. We don’t know how to deal with it, the media doesn’t know how to deal with it, Democrats in Washington don’t know how to deal with it, because haven’t faced a similar threat to our democracy in our lifetime, or possibly even since the Civil War. That makes this situation so completely foreign as to be both terrifying and paralyzing. How do you fight back against something you’ve never experienced, nor even fathomed?