Shocking riot in DC leads to fear, frustration and questions about the future in NC
Inside his barbershop off of U.S. 70, Joey Jackson had the big flat screen on the back wall tuned into Fox News, and throughout Thursday afternoon all the TV talking heads were discussing what happened the day before. The images of the violent mob storming the U.S. Capitol played over on a loop.
Here, like everywhere, people were trying to process the moment. In this pro-Trump corner of Wake County, which turned more blue, overall, during the 2020 election, the scenes at the Capitol were difficult for some to digest. Dale Earnhardt memorabilia covered the walls and, in the chairs, some of the customers traded conspiracy theories.
One argued it wasn’t supporters of President Donald Trump behind the insurrection, but instead members of Antifa in disguise “to make Trump look bad.” Others repeated one of the talking points from one of the personalities on Fox News: What about the Black Lives Matter protests that devolved into looting in some cities over the summer? One referenced Trump’s social media.
“I heard they shut down the president’s Tweeter — whatever that is,” Martin Kratus, 75, said while his barber went to work. Kratus said he heard it’d been shut down “for an hour or so.”
“Twelve hours,” said another customer in a chair across the way. By Friday, Twitter had shut down Trump’s account for good.
The scene Thursday was one afternoon in one barbershop in one American town, not even 24 hours after a moment unlike any in modern American history. Rioters had swarmed into the U.S. Capitol, toppling barricades and pushing past police and breaking windows and barging through doors and, at times, looting and stealing and posing for pictures, proud of what they’d done.
Five people had died. Images emerged of a Capitol building strewn with debris. There was one widely circulated photograph of a man carrying a Confederate flag through the rotunda where Abraham Lincoln had once lain in state, having died in part because of his will to defeat the Confederacy.
‘People are frustrated’
Many of the rioters on Wednesday had worn Trump hats and carried Trump flags. The president himself had encouraged them to march on the Capitol in the name of his baseless, false claim that the election had been stolen.
What happened has been widely condemned, both on the left and the right. And yet inside Jackson’s Forest Hills Barbershop, the most obvious reaction did not necessarily come easily to those who’ve spent years supporting the president.
“People are frustrated,” Kratus said outside the barbershop, next to the red, white and blue-swirled pole hanging off a brick wall. “They don’t know what to do. Seventy-two million people voted for a man who they thought was going to be president.
“Didn’t come out their way. They got frustrated. Well, look at what happened four years ago. The other side got frustrated. What did they do? They made sure the president had a miserable time being president.”
Inside the minds of some here, the two things were equivalent: a mob storming the Capitol, a police officer and others being killed in the process, and the challenging of a president who routinely misled his supporters with debunked claims about everything from the birthplace of former President Barack Obama to the results of the Iowa Caucus in 2016.
But now, some who’d supported Trump seemed to be awakening to what had been unleashed.
“I’ve been very happy with a lot of things he’s done,” Tim Bailey said on the way out of the barbershop.
Bailey served more than two decades in the Marines, and he said his service had taken him around the world and given him a special appreciation for America. He has been a Trump supporter.
“Unfortunately (Wednesday) I was very disappointed in what he did. And he’s one of those guys that shoots off his mouth, and I know he probably didn’t intend for that to happen.”
It had happened, though, and immediately some of the moments captured had become indelible, the kind that will be included in history textbooks and remembered for decades if not centuries to come. Capitol police with guns drawn protecting the House chamber. The wide-angle shot of the throng of Trumpists covering the steps and balconies outside. The man with the Confederate flag, holding a symbol of insurrection from another time.
‘Shocking ... but not surprising’
As everything unfolded on Wednesday, Steven Greene, a political science professor at N.C. State, tried to absorb what he was watching. Two days later the only word he could think of was “shocking.”
“But not surprising,” he said during a phone interview on Friday morning.
For decades Greene has been a student of American politics, and part of that study is understanding the mechanisms of various uprisings and movements. What happened Wednesday, Greene said, “was in the tea leaves” for a while, though he didn’t necessarily believe it had been inevitable. At least not until Trump goaded supporters to Washington under the guise that the election had been stolen, or until the speech he gave commanding action.
“The authoritarian nature of the cult of Trump, the increasing divorce from reality of the president and his supporters and right-wing media that supports that led us to a moment where we had, I think it’s fair to call it, violent insurrectionists storming the Capitol,” Greene said. “And that’s, again, absolutely shocking and terrifying and upsetting.”
Now the question is what happens next, and where do Republicans and those who’ve supported the president go. It is a question that Greene is especially interested in following, and one that Republican officials, both nationally and locally, are confronting.
Mark Edwards is among them. He is the chairman of the Nash County Republican Party and, in an interview conducted over email on Friday, he described the insurrection at the Capitol as “a tragedy for our nation, regardless of party.” How the events there might affect the support of local Republican candidates, or those across the state, is but one question in the aftermath.
“I think everyone knows at some level the vast majority of the protesters in DC this week were peaceful and played no part in the storming of the Capitol,” Edwards wrote. “Unfortunately, the entire Republican Party will be tainted unless we effectively separate ourselves from that faction who were allowed to tag along the Trump movement in the party.
“The Republican Party now has the opportunity to chart our future without the contamination of these folks if we act decisively and publicly.”
Greene, the political science professor, sounded less optimistic that could happen. He wondered how the “cult of Trump,” as he described it, could be separated from the Republican Party, or whether the majority of people who have voted Republican in the past two presidential elections even favored that sort of separation at all.
He thought of some members of his own family, people he described as “classic, country club Republicans” who had supported the president in recent years.
“Doctor, well off — certainly not Republicans because of any white ethno-nationalism,” Greene said. “They’re not xenophobic. ... I don’t think they’re hanging on every word of Tucker Carlson. But they also are like, ‘Oh, I don’t know — I can’t vote for Joe Biden and the socialists.’
“So where people like them end up I think is very much an open question, right? I don’t know that we’ll know for a while. And I think you can paint a reasonably plausible scenario of significant enough defections from the Republican party that they say, ‘OK, man, this whole Trump direction thing was wrong, and we’ve got to shift.”
‘That is a depressing outcome’
It was more likely, Greene said, that Trump supporters would try to rationalize what happened at the Capitol as the result of a “violent fringe” of people that’s not representative of the larger majority of Republicans. And that those rationalizing what happened will, in some ways, defend it as necessary in the cause to “stand up” to the “socialists, and look at whatever horrible thing Joe Biden just did.”
“And I feel like nothing will change, essentially,” Greene said. “And I feel like that’s the most likely outcome. And that is a depressing outcome.”
Back in the barbershop in Garner, the sounds of Fox News programming rose above the din of hair clippers and small talk. A talking head compared Trump’s lack of immediate condemnation of the attack on the nation’s Capitol to President-Elect Joe Biden’s delay in responding to some of the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the spring and summer, as if these things could be compared.
“Where was he when we had the riots in Seattle and Portland and New York and Chicago?” the commentator said. “He remained silent for weeks.”
Around the same time, photos were circulating on social media of the fence that was going up around the Capitol, one day too late. One of the customers, sitting in the chair, questioned the perspective of Fox News, and announced to no one in particular that Newsmax, which for months has broadcast misleading information about the election, has won his viewership.
“I tell you what, they gave probably the most, I want to say, comprehensive, honest reporting that I’ve seen in a long time,” the man said.
Bailey, the man who’d served in the Marines for 24 years, said he could have foreseen the kind of attack on the Capitol that unfolded on Wednesday, given the turmoil and divisiveness these days in America. He just “didn’t expect to see it from the conservative side,” he said.
Jackson, the barber, said it’d been about “50-50” among his customers on Thursday between those that arrived impassioned and wanting to talk about what happened and those who wanted to avoid politics altogether. And yet even for them, the ripples of what transpired were unavoidable and inescapable. There were less than two weeks remaining in Trump’s presidency, and now there was no telling how it might end or what might happen next.
And there was no telling what the long-term fallout of an attempted coup would be.
“It’s one of those things where, like, the next election is really important,” Greene said. “Like does this now become the thing where Republicans just absolutely refuse to accept the legitimacy of elections they lost? Which they have done this time.”
By Friday morning, Greene had decided that “you’ve just got to stand up and call things like they are.”
“And people need to understand that it’s not partisan to say that your president has been lying to you,” he said. “It’s unfortunate as hell, is what it is.”
This story was originally published January 8, 2021 at 7:27 PM.
