The attack on democracy in the United States of America on Wednesday was two-pronged. The first thrust was spearheaded by Donald Trump and a disheveled band of his most agitated supporters, united beyond all appearances by a roving and self-righteous discontent. Trump, a businessman and television star without creed or scruple, has corralled and cajoled this mass of anger which on Wednesday finally burst the gates.

The second lick came hours later on the floors of Congress. Eight senators and more than one hundred representatives, after fleeing armed with gas masks to hole up in hideaways and safe rooms, returned to their respective chambers to put their career prospects above the integrity of the nation, as they continued to advance groundless objections to November’s election results.

Those men and women of Congress had just been shown in the starkest manner the consequences of their actions. Whether echoing the baseless claims of fraud touted by the president or cloaking their ambitions in procedural terms, the effect had been to incite a mob who stormed the Capitol, the seat of American democracy, for the first time since the Burning of Washington at the hands of the British during the invasion of 1814.

Windows were smashed and offices ransacked as some of the rioters posed for photographs under the rotunda while others stalked hallways clad with weapons and zip ties, calling out congressional leaders and daubing messages in excrement over the walls. Scores of police officers were injured in the rioting, one officer subsequently died from his injuries, and one of the rioters was shot among five total deaths. Pipe bombs were planted at Democratic and Republican headquarters in Washington. Following the events which have variously been described as an attempted coup or an act of insurrection, for the next thirty days, the Capitol will be surrounded by a seven-foot fence.

The day was meant to revolve around a routine act of Congress: the final count and confirmation, held every four years on 6 January, of the already certified Electoral College votes. As the president of the Senate, it fell to Mike Pence to formally announce Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the next President and Vice President of the United States. That process had already stalled prior to the breach of the Capitol building, as Republican senators and representatives raised objections to the count in Arizona, the first of several contested states.

When the Capitol had been cleared of protesters and Congress returned late in the evening, it was Pence who led the speeches, saying ‘To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win‘. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney managed to be self-deprecating even as he excoriated Trump and his supporters, encouraging his fellow Republicans to withdraw their objections as he lamented an ‘insurrection’ spurred on by a ‘selfish man’s injured pride’. Playing the lounge lizard, even Lindsay Graham, hitherto one of Trump’s keenest supporters, drawled ‘enough is enough’ and ‘count me out’.

Among Democratic senators, Ed Markey was the most pointed, calling out the ‘anti-democratic, treasonous fiction‘ of the election challenges in language echoed by Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons. Over in the House of Representatives, a heated debate commenced around the merits of the vote in Pennsylvania, culminating in howls of protest as Conor Lamb called the attack on the Capitol a product of Republican deceit.

Still perhaps the most astute speech of the day came from the puckered lips of Mitch McConnell, who even before the storming of the Capitol broke decisively with President Trump to make plain the stakes. McConnell defended the right of the president to pursue legal challenges, but said ‘Nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale that would have tipped the entire election’, warning ‘If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again’.

McConnell of course as the longstanding Republican leader of the Senate stands accused of exacerbating political divisiveness. Those allegations came to a head in the waning days of the Obama administration, as for nine months McConnell blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. On Wednesday morning as the Democrats began to celebrate another election victory in Georgia, news emerged pointing to Garland as the next Attorney General. Some aspects of the political cycle remained in full swing even as Congress braced for an untimely assault.

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Contested elections are nothing new in America. Every four years Democrats are liable to charge voter suppression, while Republicans lament election security as their perennial retort. Instances of gerrymandering are well documented, and allegations of voter fraud are hardly uncommon, though they tend to operate from the margins, rarely emanating from the mouth of the President of the United States.

In the 1850s a pro-slavery faction presided over elections in the Midwest by fraud and force, part of a series of violent confrontations which became known as Bleeding Kansas. Competing claims of victory in 1876 produced what remains the most contentious presidential election on record to date.

A close race between the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes and his Democratic opponent Samuel J. Tilden concluded with the infamous Compromise of 1877. Devised by members of Congress, the compromise handed the presidency to Hayes despite a smaller share of the popular vote, in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. The Democrats gained hegemony over southern state legislatures, effectively ending the era of Reconstruction.

Civil rights were on the docket during the presidential election of 1960. Legislation signed in May had sought to address the issue of voter discrimination, still rife owing to Jim Crow laws across the South, but the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was limited in scope while referees appointed to administer voting rights could take years to reap benefits. More substantial reform would have to wait until 1965, but in the meantime Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy still vied for the growing black vote, which would prove pivotal come the November election.

In the days and weeks after Kennedy was declared the winner, Republican operatives began to allege fraud in the states of Illinois and Texas, respectively home to the Democratic mayor of Chicago Richard J. Daley and to Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s running mate. Challenges were mounted in eleven states, and as the recounts and legal battles stretched into the new year, on 6 January 1961 when Richard Nixon stood before Congress to confirm his defeat, the status of Hawaii remained uncertain.

Presented with conflicting documents for Hawaii, Nixon awarded its three electoral votes to Kennedy on the basis of the latest count. The Republican candidate and sitting vice president had been quick to distance himself from any public pronouncement of wrongdoing, leaving legal matters in the hands of Leonard Hall, one of his campaign managers, and Thruston Morton, the Republican National Committee chair.

Nixon maintained long-term political ambitions and did not want to seem like a bad loser. Prospects for overturning the election seemed slim, with a large margin of votes in Texas, which had already confirmed Kennedy as the victor, while suggestions of fraud were not supported by President Eisenhower or his Attorney General William Rogers. In court the Republican Party suffered defeats in Illinois, and their legal challenges petered out.

In 2000 the President of the United States was determined by the Supreme Court, as the decision in Bush v. Gore to call off a recount in Florida handed the state as well as the presidency to George Bush and the Republican Party. Although the Democratic candidate Al Gore was on course to win the popular vote nationwide, Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court argued that a recount in Florida would cast ‘a needless and unjustified cloud’ over Bush’s legitimacy. Ultimately the court decided that Florida would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if it sought to complete a recount by the electoral deadline of 12 December.

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If legal challenges and partisan chicanery prior to the meeting of the Electoral College have been commonplace, objections to certified votes on the floors of Congress are a more recent phenomenon. In 1969 as North Carolina switched from blue to red after forty years, an objection was raised in response to the vote of a faithless elector. Demurring from his state’s choice of Richard Nixon for the next President of the United States, the elector had instead cast his vote for the former Democrat George Wallace, who was running as a segregationist on the American Independent Party ticket.

Wallace held little hope of winning the presidency. But the fiery Alabamian considered that a combination of carried states and faithless electors might hand him the balance of power, with the ability to extract concessions in the midst of a contested election result. Representative James O’Hara of Michigan and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine hoped to dissuade the practice of faithless electors. But their objection was rejected 58-33 in the Senate and 228-170 in the House.

The next challenge to force a recess, curtailing the counting of votes and prompting Congress to split for debate, came in 2005 owing to alleged irregularities in the state of Ohio. In another close election, this time between the incumbent George Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry, Ohio proved the tipping point. The state with its twenty electoral votes secured victory for Bush, whereas if the margin had shifted by little more than one percent, John Kerry would have taken both the state and the presidency.

The counting of votes in Ohio stretched beyond election day into the afternoon of 3 November 2004, and when the Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell announced that there were insufficient provisional ballots to overturn the Republican lead in the state, John Kerry called Bush to concede the election.

Blackwell was a prominent Republican and a noted supporter of the Bush campaign. A flurry of court cases before and after election day accused him of election improprieties, chiefly in the form of an attempt to disenfranchise minority voters through the wrongful withholding of provisional ballots. Kerry refrained from challenging the vote in Ohio, but the Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik obtained a recount which would result in two convictions, when in 2007 it was shown that election officials in Ohio had manipulated aspects of the process, preselecting ballots to avoid a more thorough review.

In the meantime thirty-seven Ohio voters headed by Cliff Arnebeck of the Alliance for Democracy filed a lawsuit challenging the certification of Ohio’s votes, in the case Moss v. Bush which would be heard by the Supreme Court of Ohio. On 6 January 2005 when Congress met to confirm the votes of the Electoral College, controversy over the results in Ohio prompted an objection signed by the Democratic representative from Ohio Stephanie Tubbs Jones and the Democratic senator from California Barbara Boxer.

An objection from both chambers forced Congress to reconvene for debate. House Democrats, who had pressed for support from the Senate, said that they wished to emphasise the need for election reform, while Boxer said that she was not challenging the election result but merely wanted ‘to cast the light of truth on a flawed system’. The objection was dismissed as ‘partisan politics’ by the White House, while Kerry said ‘Our legal teams on the ground have found no evidence that would change the outcome of the election’.

When Congress came to a vote, the objection to the count in Ohio was rejected by 74-1 in the Senate and 267-31 in the House. George Bush was confirmed and would remain president. Moss v. Bush was subsequently dismissed on 12 January at the request of the plaintiffs.

There were other quiddities concerning the presidential election of 2004, with numerous discrepancies reported around touch-screen voting. In Minnesota one elector cast a ballot for ‘John Ewards’ as the next President of the United States. A misspelling of John Edwards, who was John Kerry’s running mate, this marked the first time in American history that an elector had cast the same vote for president and vice president.

Objections to the counting of Electoral College votes were raised by House Democrats following the elections of 2000 and 2016, but they went unsupported by members of the Senate. They were therefore dismissed by the sitting vice presidents of the time, a crestfallen Al Gore and a fresh-faced future prospect by the name of Joe Biden.

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The objections levied in Congress on Wednesday were different, not only in scale but because they have emerged and been sustained through uniquely troubled circumstances. Nixon, Gore, and Kerry were not sitting presidents and they swiftly embraced their respective defeats, with Nixon later writing that he feared a loss of American prestige if there was even a suggestion ‘that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box’. Instead President Trump not only refused to concede, but launched incendiary attacks on the validity of the result even prior to the conclusion of the 2020 election.

Trump and his allies spent the summer and fall ramping up the innuendo around voter fraud, reserving their disdain for mail voting even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. In July, Trump issued a warning via the medium of Fox News, telling viewers ‘I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election’ while refusing to commit to a peaceful transition. A few weeks later on the White House lawn, he again said of the election ‘It’ll be fixed, it’ll be rigged’, suggesting Russia and China would forge paper ballots and exclaiming ‘This is going to be the greatest election disaster in history’.

In August the president told supporters in Wisconsin ‘The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged’, cautioning ‘we have to be very careful’ as his complaints roped in fellow cranks like the Attorney General William Barr. Trump even floated the idea of delaying or redoing the election.

This was all in spite of frequent pushback from the intelligence community and even Trump-appointed election commissioners. In fact where election improprieties are concerned, the weight of evidence tends not towards mail fraud but to purged voter rolls and discarded ballots at the behest of Republican politicians and state legislatures.

The expansion of mail voting amid the unprecedented complications of coronavirus brought vigorous legal challenges across the United States. Texas became a hotbed of claim and counter-claim, as Republicans sought to block drive-through voting and the provision of mail ballot applications in Harris County. Finally the validity of drive-through voting was upheld hours before election day, after a Republican-led effort to disenfranchise more than 120,000 voters. But the state maintained tight restrictions around mail ballots, including a controversial order by Governor Greg Abbott which limited each county to one drop-off location.

In the run-up to the first presidential debate at the end of September, Trump again refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power, while his son Donald Trump Jr. called for ‘every able-bodied man and woman’ to join an ‘army’ in the form of a pro-Trump election security operation. During the debate, the president declined to denounce white supremacists, in an echo of his remarks when members of the far-right marched in his name, brandishing swastikas and shouting antisemitic slogans in Charlottesville.

Trump told the neo-fascist Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’, which the group took as something akin to marching orders. Already elections in the United States, the lifeblood of democracy, were under threat. Trump had made it clear that he could not countenance defeat, and was prepared whatever the cost to seek at least some semblance of victory.

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Given an incumbent intent on stoking allegations months in advance, the presidential election of 2020 proved remarkable for its lack of fraud and other overt instances of malpractice. Election officials working under the Department of Homeland Security said, ‘There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised’, calling the election ‘the most secure in American history’.

Despite the outcry over Dominion Voting Systems, ballot dumps, dead voters, and debarred poll watchers, Trump and his lawyers proved utterly incapable and often unwilling when it came to the business of substantiating their claims in court. In the opening remarks to a federal case in Pennsylvania, Rudy Giuliani claimed ‘widespread, nationwide voter fraud’ but swiftly retracted when questioned by the presiding judge, admitting ‘this is not a fraud case’. Similar reservations were expressed in Arizona and Nevada, where court cases instead revolved around technicalities, often challenging too few votes to significantly alter the outcome.

At the beginning of December even the Attorney General William Barr admitted ‘we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election’. After two months of tepid legal challenges, Trump and his lawyers suffered more than fifty defeats in court, as their claims were rejected or tossed owing to a lack of standing or shoddy evidence. Those cases were denied by at least eighty-six different judges, including thirty-eight appointed by Republicans. Meanwhile recounts in Wisconsin and Georgia and audits in Georgia and Arizona found no evidence of widespread fraud and did nothing to tip the balance of the election in Trump’s favour.

President Trump resorted to threats, warning the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger that he could face prosecution in the name of a ‘criminal offence’ if he did not help Trump ‘find’ the 11,780 votes which might swing the election. Georgia alone of course would have been insufficient to hand Trump victory nationwide.

When Ted Cruz led a group of senators who intended to object to the certification of votes before Congress, the statement they issued offered no evidence of fraud or any other improper behaviour. Instead Cruz and his fellow senators summoned a presidential echo chamber, citing only ‘the unprecedented allegations of voter fraud’ which were being circulated and swallowed by Trump and his supporters. Disregarding dozens of court cases and the recounts and audits which had already taken place, Cruz and the senators demanded a ten-day audit in the disputed states, which would have postponed the confirmation of Joe Biden’s impending presidency.

On Wednesday, the first objection in Congress was raised by Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Paul Gosar to the confirmation of election results in Arizona. Mo Brooks, the Alabama Republican, made the baseless assertion that Joe Biden owed his victory in Arizona to voting by illegal immigrants. The debate was interrupted by the swarming of the Capitol, and when both chambers returned to put the matter to a vote, the objection was defeated by 93-6 in the Senate and 303-121 in the House.

Talk as police officers retook the Capitol building, aided by the FBI and members of the National Guard, soon turned towards the prospect of further objections. House Republicans objected to the count in Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada but received no backing from the Senate. Their objections were therefore dismissed by Mike Pence, to rounds of applause before Congress.

There was some hope that the storming of the Capitol, the apparent threat to the safety of Congress, and the filtering news of the death of one protester might have resulted in a clearing of heads. Some senators and representatives believed that the confirmation of Electoral College votes would now proceed without further interruption.

Instead the upstart Josh Hawley, senator for the state of Missouri, supported an objection to the count in Pennsylvania, one of the prime sites of controversy both before and after the election. Again eschewing widespread but unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, the debate which followed dwelt on procedural concerns.

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At the heart of the debate was Act 77, which the Republican-led state legislature in Pennsylvania passed in the fall of 2019. The act allowed no-excuse voting by mail, affording residents of Pennsylvania the right to cast their ballots by mail regardless of circumstances. The act became increasingly relevant in the wake of coronavirus.

Act 77 required constitutional challenges to be brought within 180 days. Instead state Republicans, who had previously supported the act, began to question mail voting provisions in the weeks prior to election day. When the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled that mail ballots could be counted as long as they were postmarked by election day and received within three days of the election, Republicans took the matter to the Supreme Court of the United States, which tied 4-4, allowing the state decision to stand. At the same time the state legislature moved to prevent counties from opening early ballots before election day, making a late result in Pennsylvania inevitable.

As all of the votes were tallied across Pennsylvania and Joe Biden steadily surpassed Donald Trump in the count, Republicans began to attack Act 77 and mail voting with added fervour. A lawsuit brought by Representative Mike Kelly and fellow Republicans sought to halt the certification of Pennsylvania’s votes, and to invalidate all 2.5 million mail ballots cast in Pennsylvania. Their alternative was even more extreme: the appointment of presidential electors directly by the Republican-controlled state legislature, which would have disenfranchised all of the state’s 6.9 million voters.

At the end of November the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania dismissed with prejudice the Republican suit, on the basis that the petitioners had failed to act with due diligence. Justice David Wecht, a Democrat, wrote ‘It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters’, while Chief Justice Thomas Saylor, a Republican, added ‘There has been too much good-faith reliance, by the electorate, on the no-excuse mail-in voting regime created by Act 77’.

Wecht added that Kelly and his fellow Republicans had ‘failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted’. When the Republicans took their case to the Supreme Court of the United States, their appeal was dismissed in one sentence.

Hawley and like-minded Republicans in the House sought on Wednesday to challenge the constitutionality of Act 77, arguing variously that the act violated aspects of the state constitution, or that guidance issued by the state secretary and supreme court stood contrary to the principle that election rules are the province of state legislatures. Their complaints had already been rejected by the courts, and Congress anyway is the wrong platform for matters of state constitutionality.

The last time Congress threw out all of a state’s votes was in 1873. In the lingering aftermath of the Civil War, Congress rejected the electoral votes from Arkansas and Louisiana amid allegations of fraud and suggestions that the two states no longer possessed functioning governments. A portion of the electoral votes from the state of Georgia were also rejected, as they were cast for Horace Greeley, the recently deceased Democratic candidate.

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In attempting to resurrect claims already summarily dismissed by the courts, or resorting to conjecture around undocumented migrants and dead voters, Republican objectors on Wednesday were hardly acting in good faith. Instead all of their griping and groping was a final show of fealty to Trump. At the behest of their own partisan interests, they continued to cast broad aspersions on the election result, aiding and abetting the work of the president.

If the confirmation of Electoral College votes proves inopportune for a wider debate around the structure and integrity of American elections, a more fulsome review at a later date would no doubt win the support of many congressional Democrats. Then the longstanding issues of gerrymandering and voter suppression could be discussed on an equal footing with Republican complaints around election security. Ambiguities between Congress and the states could be settled by law, and there would be the opportunity to address some longstanding concerns regarding the nature and functions of the Electoral College.

Wednesday offered something more bleak: a last-ditch effort to invalidate millions of votes, while hundreds of Americans stormed the Capitol in a deluded attempt to safeguard their own vestigial sense of America. The America of equal rights and every vote counts was under attack. Mitch McConnell was too soft with his analysis, for as a result of duplicitous allegations from the losing side, a group of Americans had not only refused to accept the election result but were willing to disrupt the transfer of power by sowing chaos and violence.

Amid the shifting sands of fierce partisanship and social inequity – thrown into the wind by a bullying president and a derogated press in a perilously post-truth media landscape – the storming of the Capitol is the sort of sudden movement which can all too easily start a death spiral. Rather than allow the grains to settle, some members of Congress remained intent on stirring things up.

Joe Biden in an immediate response to events on Wednesday said that democracy was under ‘unprecedented assault’, calling the attack an act of ‘insurrection’ which ‘borders on sedition’. At the same time he evoked the ‘common good’ and gestured towards a shared notion of the ‘true America’, blaming events on a ‘small number of extremists dedicated to lawlessness’.

As a congressional figure Joe Biden reached across the aisle as a matter of idealism and experience. It remains an idealism no less noble and no more fanciful than that expressed by more liberal advocates of universal health care or wealth redistribution by way of tax reform, policies which advocates believe would benefit the majority of Americans but which remain the subject of fierce divisions. And it is the product of five decades of political experience which has cultivated the belief that compromise and moderation is the way to get things done.

When though are calls for moderation insufficient in the face of coercive action? And as Lindsey Graham put on a show while House minority leader Kevin McCarthy littered his unity speech with sanctimonious digs at the Democrats, when do calls for reconciliation and understanding ring hollow, or descend to mawkishness and self-pity?

In the cold light of day once Donald Trump leaves office or in the crisp morn of an economic recovery post-coronavirus, perhaps many of the former president’s supporters will fall by the wayside. But can the true believers or most adamant conspiracy theorists be reached, or is the best hope that for the time being they simply fall through the cracks?

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On Wednesday morning as Congress convened, before the protests and rioting, Donald Trump told thousands of his supporters gathered at the Ellipse in front of the White House ‘We will never give up, we will never concede’ because ‘You don’t concede when there’s theft involved’. He claimed to have won the election by a ‘landslide’, and prompted chants of agreement when he described the official results as ‘bullshit’.

Calling for a redo of the election, Trump warned his supporters that under a Biden presidency ‘our country will be destroyed’, adding ‘we’re not going to stand for that’. Compelling them to ‘fight like hell’, he advised the crowd to walk down to the Capitol, saying ‘I’ll be there with you’ and ‘you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong’.

Trump ran through his usual litany of election complaints, citing unmatched signatures, the late reception of ballots, ballot stuffing, and dead voters among other assorted accusations of fraud. Lumping in ‘weak Republicans’ with the Democrats who ‘tore down our nation’, he said ‘We’re going to see whether or not we have great and courageous leaders or whether or not we have leaders that should be ashamed of themselves throughout history, throughout eternity’.

The tenor of his remarks had been foreshadowed by the earlier speakers at the ‘Save America Rally’ on Wednesday, which had been advertised for weeks by the president, who promised a ‘wild’ ride. They included his son, Donald Trump Jr., who in a profanity-laden speech saved particular ire for the spectre of transgender athletes, and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who suggested that controversy over the election results could be settled by ‘trial by combat’.

Donald Trump cannot boast a string of major policy achievements. Beyond his signature tax breaks – which nearly doubled the standard deduction for low-income earners even while their legacy lopsidedly favours corporate America and the well-off – the president frittered away political capital on some reinforced fencing at the southern border, and did well to keep some of his longtime allies out of long-term lockup. Trump and the Republican Party singularly failed to provide an alternative to Obamacare, instead merely tinkering around the edges.

Despite all of the hot air over China and international trade, withdrawing from the contentious Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreements did nothing to curb the growing influence of the People’s Republic and the CCP, while under Trump the trade deficit has grown to record levels.

Some of Trump’s most celebrated and criticised policy gestures drew heavily, even in ways unintended, on the efforts of prior administrations, whether that meant tougher measures on immigration or the passage of prison reform as a social justice initiative which the Republican Party had hitherto blocked. Ill-planning from the opposition plus a hefty dose of good fortune allowed Trump to stack the courts, but this was done at the behest of traditional conservatives, who over the past four years have ridden the presidential coattails, whether to secure cherished policy goals or in a desperate attempt to cultivate his audience.

Drifting in and out of focus, the Trump administration meanwhile gutted environmental policy and the State Department, cutting a swathe through tribal land, damaging international relations, and breathing fresh life into the mouths of some of the slimiest denizens of the swamp. Furthering Obama-era advances against the Islamic State, under President Trump the United States continued to contribute to the devastation in Yemen, while drone strikes across the Middle East lost accountability even as they increased in number.

In the absence of substantive policy measures, as part of an all-out onslaught against truth and accountability and the legitimacy of the press, Trump fills the space with inflationary rhetoric. When allies and critics alike hope for the president to scale things back, he instead invariably becomes more strident as he boldly appeals to the worst instincts of his base.

The extent to which Trump explicitly shaped events on Wednesday is therefore beside the point. As an attempt to save face beyond any long-term strategy – though his rhetorical flourishes share much with the language of other strongmen and despots – Trump wanted an unspecified and amorphous show of force. He hoped that the anger of his supporters would boil over in a way that would disrupt the transfer of power and cast a pall over American politics.

Trump of course did not accompany his followers to the Capitol, instead retreating to watch events unfold from the White House. Some of his closest associates as well as anxious congressional figures from both sides pleaded with him to intervene as Congress was besieged by fanatics. When Trump broke his silence, it was to coddle his supporters, as he told them ‘You’re very special’ and encouraged them to ‘Remember this day forever’. The day will go down in history for all of the wrong reasons, while under a cloud of darkness scores of congressional Republicans hoped for its legacy to live on.

Cover image: The Capitol building at dusk. (Credit: Martin Falbisoner/CC BY-SA 3.0)