Trump and his GOP enablers fueled a Capitol coup attempt

Shortly after supporters of President Donald Trump breached the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, an alarmed Donald Trump Jr. took to Twitter to urge his father’s backers to stop.

He tweeted: “This is wrong and not who we are.”

No, Donald Jr., this exactly who you are. The disgraceful invasion of the People’s House to deny the people’s will is an ugly last step in a march toward autocracy that the president has led and his followers have happily joined. The president has shattered norms and possibly broken the law in his refusal to concede to President-elect Joe Biden and in his efforts to overturn the election’s results without a shred of evidence that widespread fraud was involved. Republicans, including members of Congress from North Carolina, have either joined him or meekly declined to correct him.

Donald Jr. laid out the template for Wednesday’s actions even before the election. In a tweet, he called for “every able-bodied man and woman” to stand up against any outcome that did not favor his father: “Trump is going to win. Don’t let them steal it. Their plan to add millions of fraudulent ballots....We can’t let that happen.”

On Wednesday, a mob of Trump backers responded. They overwhelmed Capitol police, climbed through broken windows, prowled the halls in military gear and entered the floor of the Senate.

All this outrage about a fiction. And all this after Trump and his supporters railed against the summer protests by people upset by very real and deadly police brutality.

The mob invasion was hardly brought about only by zealous members of the Trump cult, or even by the increasingly unstable president. This was brought about by many of the same lawmakers who scurried for cover inside the breached Capitol.

More than 100 Republican House members and a dozen Republican Senators were committed to opposing the Electoral College votes certifying Biden’s win. What was to be a formality following an election turned into an assault on democracy itself. North Carolina’s Republican members of Congress – including Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis – were silent about the tensions being built up by Trump’s weeks-long assault on the election. Now they should call for the president to concede.

The challengers knew their objection to the Electoral College votes couldn’t prevail. The House is controlled by Democrats who support Biden, and many Republican senators also opposed the challenge, albeit quietly or at the last minute. But the congressional renegades thought objecting would be good theater, a show to appease the president and win support from his fervent base.

The credibility of a presidential election isn’t something that members of Congress should toy with on the national stage. Some will believe it’s real, that the election was stolen by Democrats who added “millions of fraudulent votes.” And if they believe that, if they’ve been told that by the president and urged by him to come to Washington to protest, then chaos is all but inevitable.

It’s a bitter but significant coincidence that a mob invasion of the Capitol and the suspension of the final step of confirming the presidential election came hours after news broke that Biden will nominate Merrick Garland as his his attorney general.

In a brazen rejection of democracy, Republican senators led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even consider Garland as President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Is there a difference between storming the Capitol and a radical takeover the Supreme Court? Both are fruit of the same tree, the products of a reckless disregard for the norms, traditions and mutual respect that sustain this experiment in democracy.

The Constitution has and will endure the Trump era and the convulsions of his last days in office. But those who defied it in favor of strongman rule should be punished either in the courts or at the polls.

This story was originally published January 6, 2021 at 6:01 PM.