The invasion of the Capitol on January 6 fused the interests of the violent mob with those of the demagogue who incited them. In my post of January 9 (“No Surprise”), analyzing the factors behind the events of the 6th, I referred to collusion between President Trump and the invaders. Now I wish to say more about that. This collusion was not only the result of Trump’s incendiary words at the rally on the Ellipse. It also involves the convergence of more general pressures from above and from below. Let’s take them one at a time.
Right wing extremist groups produce pressure from below. Many newspapers and magazines and websites cover currents within the American right wing systematically. The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Leadership Center have long tracked the activities of militias, Christian nationalists, white supremacists, QAnon believers, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and others. We’ve seen the fanatical, murderous actions in Jonestown, Oklahoma City, Waco, Pittsburgh, El Paso, and elsewhere of these and similar groups. Since the rise of social media, alert reporters can quote their exact language. The symbols on their flags and badges and tee shirts carry coded messages. Perhaps the most obvious is the Confederate flag. The rioters harbor nostalgia for the slave-holding, secessionist South and for their demagogic President who refuses to condemn that cause.
Their websites indiscriminately lump together Democrats, liberals, progressives, leftists, socialists, and communists. They also revile journalists, politicians, academics, experts, anyone they smear as elitist, and ordinary government employees of what, in their paranoia, they call the “Deep State.” The federal bureaucracy actually serves the public, but they consider its employees enemies. Then, wrongly appropriating language from the Second Amendment, they call themselves militias and proclaim themselves patriots. Fashioning themselves as “defenders of freedom,” they express their hostility to American mainstream institutions with militaristic language. Leaving aside overt references to civil war or “the Storm,” the idea of “taking back our country,” used almost universally on the right, is a military metaphor that evokes an armed troop recovering a lost vantage point by force.
President Trump exerts pressure from above. It has been clear since long before the Republican nomination debates of 2016 that Donald Trump is a vicious bully. Demands of fidelity characterize his relationship with subordinates. One might have thought that, as head of the FBI, James Comey would be autonomous. But no, he could be fired. Similarly dispensable was Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had been the first senator to endorse Trump as candidate. To Trump, everyone is expendable.
After he fired a very long list of senior officials in top agencies, the President’s appointees (often only acting secretaries) purged the ranks of their respective organizations. The Republican desire to shrink government served as a cover for this operation. In the Executive Branch, new cabinet department secretaries or agency heads retained only personnel presumed loyal to the President. Trump’s appointees have not only purged obvious organizations like the EPA that he targeted during his campaign, but also the Global Media Agency (home of the venerable Radio Free Europe), the Department of Justice, the Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security set up to improve coordination of intelligence gathering after 9/11. When Covid-19 hit, he also purged the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH to prevent advocacy of cures he did not favor or the publication of reports contrary to his own pet theories.
Trump has turned the upper echelons of our government into a hostile workplace environment where insecurity undermines its function. Fealty to the President, like a vassal’s to a lord, permeates the administration. There is a party line, and those who depart from it get forced out. One result was that just “a day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and ‘war’.” How could such intelligence be ignored?
Given the deference Trump demanded throughout the government, it is easy to see how security personnel would react to unwelcome news. Developments threatening law and order must be reported from local agents upwards. But the screening system in the Executive Branch made it imperative that no harsh facts reach the top.
How can even a responsible government official alarmed by the increasingly hostile rhetoric and numerous outbreaks of armed, threatening demonstrations of Trump’s base present the situation to a boss and his immediate associates who agree with the militants? It’s even less likely that ambitious, insecure, opportunistic personnel now in mid-level administrative posts would risk offending their superiors or blowing the whistle. Their boss has been stoking those emotions since before his election.
And what emotions? These people assume and sometimes assert that demonstrating whites, even those fearful of being “displaced” by minorities, are somehow more orderly than supporters of Black Lives Matter. They think whites who plan protests against the legal succession of presidents do not require surveillance. They are better behaved, it is assumed, by virtue of their racial superiority. This bias is manifest in the remarkable laxity of the intelligence community which failed to develop official threat assessments to warn of the true dangers in the demonstrations summoned by Trump for January 6 to protest the “theft” of his supposed electoral victory. Why did they fail? In her brilliant reporting on the subject, Dina Temple-Raston quotes R. P. Eddy, “a former U. S. counterterrorism official and diplomat who now runs Ergo, a private intelligence firm.” Eddy explains why the threat was invisible to the intelligence community. “[I]t was very hard for these decision-makers and these analysts to realize that people who look just like them could want to commit this kind of unconstitutional violence and could literally try to and want to kill them.” How could pro-Trump protesters, people who support the police and attack BLM demonstrations in defense of “law and order,” themselves turn violent? How could they have even worse goals? This blindness comes from systemic racism.
Here is an argument for diversity. A more diverse corps of intelligence gatherers and analysts would not have made the same naïve assumptions about white power marchers.
If you don’t think they’re marching for white power, consider the photo above. Its slogan, “Come and take it,” alludes ostensibly and quite legally to the Second Amendment. But it is a Confederate flag, indicating their sympathies, and an AR-15-type assault weapon, indicating their intention.
To sum up. Trump himself puts the top and the bottom in conspiratorial conjunction. That’s the essence of populism: resentment and insurrection disguised as patriotism. Watchdog groups knew where these populist, militant, apocalyptic beliefs were heading. They reported them to the FBI, which took no action. With Trump’s censorship of bad news in place, intelligence reports get buried, there is little preparation, and only an inadequate defense against the rioters. Trump and his people get their way. The Capitol is breached. Collusion collision.
Update 1. How extreme were the rightwing chatroom statements prior to the actual insurrection? This one was quoted by The Washington Post January 12, a day before I posted this essay. “As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence . . . . An online thread discussed specific calls for violence” including “Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
Update 2. March 4, 2021. Here is a very concise account of security lapses (or deliberate malfeasance) by Trump appointed officials at the Pentagon in the days leading up to the insurrection of January 6. It is by Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter of March 4.
Today’s biggest story about the previous administration . . . came from the Senate hearings about the January 6, 2021, attack, held before the committee of Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the committee on Rules and Administration. While there is still confusion about what happened when, it became clear that there were some serious lapses in the protection of the Capitol, and it appears those lapses originated with Trump appointees in the Pentagon.
Because the District of Columbia is not a state, its National Guard is under the control of the Defense Department, and it is overseen by Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. The Commander of the D.C. National Guard, Major General William Walker, told the Senate that, in response to a request from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the director of D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, Dr. Christopher Rodriguez, Walker requested approval for the mission from McCarthy on January 1.
McCarthy’s approval did not come until January 5, when the event was already upon them. And, in what Walker saw as an unusual move, McCarthy withheld approval for Walker to deploy the Quick Reaction Force, guardsmen equipped with helmets, shields, batons, and so on, to respond to civil disturbance, without the approval of the Secretary of Defense.
Then, at 1:49 pm on January 6, then Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, Steven Sund, called Walker to say that the Capitol had been breached. “Chief Sund, his voice cracking with emotion, indicated that there was a dire emergency on Capitol Hill and requested the immediate assistance of as many guardsmen as I could muster,” Walker told the Senate. Walker immediately called the Pentagon for approval to move in his troops, but officials there did not give the go-ahead for 3 hours and 19 minutes. Once allowed in, the National Guard troops deployed in 20 minutes. But by then, of course, plenty of damage had been done.
The delay in deployment stood in dramatic contrast to the approval accorded to the National Guard to deploy in June 2020. Today’s testimony suggests that the Pentagon placed unprecedented restrictions on the mobilization of the National Guard on January 6, preventing it from responding to the crisis at the Capitol in a timely fashion.
Dall’Italia e dall’Europa guardiamo pieni di speranza alla Presidenza Biden. Intanto la cerimonia dell’insegnamento ci ha commosso… [From Italy and from Europe we look forward to the Biden presidency full of hope. His inauguration ceremony also moved us greatly . . .]
Cara Giuseppina, Noi americani siamo molto consapevoli che coloro che amano la libertà, la democrazia e l’umanità sono stati allarmati dalla presidenza Trump. Grazie per esservi uniti alla nostra speranza in un futuro migliore sotto il presidente Biden e i Democratici. Auguri, Alan. [We Americans are very conscious that those who love freedom, democracy, and humanity have been alarmed by the Trump presidency. Thank you for joining us in our hope for a better future under President Biden and the Democrats. Best regards, Alan]
Alan, your post reminds me of what I’ve been reading about Germany. We have a furious Trump (the law and order President) and his mob of enraged protestors. But is there something else seeding itself throughout the agencies that are supposed to protect us and defend the Constitution.
(excerpted from New York Times, Updated Oct. 15, 2020)
(BERLIN — Germany’s security services recorded more than 1,400 cases of suspected far-right extremism among soldiers, police officers and intelligence agents in the three years ending in March, according to a government report released Tuesday.
The report, compiled by the domestic intelligence service, is a first attempt to document the extent of far-right infiltration of the security services. It comes as the number of cases of extremists found in police forces and the military has multiplied.
Dozens of police officers have been suspended for joining far-right chat groups and sharing neo-Nazi propaganda. In June, the defense minister disbanded a whole company of Germany’s special forces after explosives, a machine gun and SS memorabilia were found on the property of a sergeant major.
Horst Seehofer, the German interior minister who presented the new report flanked by intelligence and police chiefs, said Tuesday that there should be “no tolerance” for extremists and that every case was “shameful.
But Mr. Seehofer insisted that there was no “structural problem,” and said the vast majority of people in the security services were loyal to the German Constitution.
“We are dealing with a small number of cases,” he said. “The overwhelming majority of the employees at our security agencies — over 99 percent — are firmly rooted in our Constitution.”
The 98-page report, which covers a period beginning in January 2017, took a less sanguine tone. It said the real number of extremists was almost certainly higher than that reported and warned that even a relatively small number of highly trained officers who are radicalized constituted “a significant danger for the state and for society.” Identifying extremists remains a “high priority” for the security service, the report said.
For years, German politicians and security chiefs rejected any suggestion that the security services had been infiltrated by the far right, acknowledging only “individual cases.” The idea of networks was routinely dismissed, and the superiors of those identified as extremists were protected.
The “overwhelming majority” adhere to the Constitution, the interior minister said.
Police officers in Berlin last month. The “overwhelming majority” adhere to the Constitution, the interior minister said.Credit…John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
That has been changing.
Last month, the head of the military counterintelligence agency, Christof Gramm, was dismissed because the agency on his watch had repeatedly failed in its mission to monitor and detect extremism in the armed forces.
“We are getting away from ‘individual cases’ and are able to get an overview,” Thomas Haldenwang, the head of the domestic intelligence, said Tuesday. He said his agency would keep investigating “if we are facing networks of far-right extremists who are expanding their connections.”
Mr. Haldenwang, whose agency was founded after World War II and is known as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has warned that far-right extremism and terrorism constitute the biggest risk for Germany’s democracy today.
Over the past 15 months, Germany has witnessed three deadly terrorist attacks by far-right extremists. A regional politician was shot on his front porch, a synagogue was attacked and nine people of immigrant descent were shot.
Tuesday’s report compiled cases of extremism recorded by the state and federal police authorities, the intelligence services and, separately, by the armed forces.
Most cases by far — 1,069 — were reported by the military. In civilian law enforcement agencies, the report listed 377 cases.
The western state of Hesse, which was in the news after private data used in neo-Nazi death threats was traced back to a police computer, reported the biggest number of suspected extremists.
The report noted that the number of cases didn’t directly correspond to individuals, as a single individual can be involved in several cases and cases can involve several individuals. Some cases reported on Tuesday had already been dismissed after investigation or resolved, the report said.
The number of cases has continued to rise since data for the report was collected.
Last month, the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia suspended 29 police officers suspected of sharing images of Hitler and violent neo-Nazi propaganda in online chat groups. Last week, another group, this time intelligence agents responsible for monitoring far-right extremists, was found to have shared xenophobic and anti-Islamic videos.
In Berlin, the police commissioner announced that 25 officers had participated in chats in which they likened Muslims to primates.
Mr. Seehofer, the interior minister, has resisted repeated calls to order a nationwide study on the prevalence of racism in the country’s police forces.
Alan,
Your analysis of the impact of the Trump presidency is astute and insightful. However, its immediate and future repercussions go beyond the domestic and extend internationally. A mere four years ago, the United States enjoyed much respectability, unmatched worldwide credibility of leadership and deference. It all started to crumble at the start of the Trump presidency. Our adversaries could not have written a better script than what is currently unfolding. Just a couple of days ago, the Russian opposition leader returned to Russia after the Kremlin’s attempt to kill him by poison. He was immediately arrested and detained upon arrival. The United States’ protest could not be taken seriously because our moral basis is now so terribly shaken. A few days ago , the Ugandan dictator, who ruled Uganda for more than three decades, imposed himself for another five-year term through another fraudulent and sham election after he barred the US, EU, and other international democratic organizations from entering the country to observe the elections. He also shut down all internet services in the country. Not long ago, The Jimmy Carter Center’s advice and oversight was sought by all politically disadvantaged opposition political parties all over the world to assure the credibility of their elections. But now even the credibility of the Carter Center is put in doubt by Trump and his supporters.
It is my judgment that the United States won the Cold War which led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Since then Russia and China have put much political energy into reviving that tragic division. Unfortunately, I contend that not only have they succeeded in reviving the Cold War, but also the Trump presidency has put the United States at a disadvantage. I believe that the manifest attack on the capitol on January 6 is just the tip of the iceberg of the negative consequences to follow from the Trump presidency.
In response to politicians’ claims that “This is not the real America,” my African American neighbor said, “Any Black person can tell you it is.”
Amen to your stating the need for diverse members of the intelligence community whose experience would put reality into their assessments.
“A more diverse corps of intelligence gatherers and analysts would not have made the same naïve assumptions about white power marchers.”
Well said. I could not agree more.
Thanks Alan. Very clear minded. Of course…
“That’s the essence of populism: resentment and insurrection disguised as patriotism.” Such a memorable statement–pithy and so true.
Alan
Agree with all you write.
Glad to see that Twitter and Facebook etc are pulling the plug on the bastard! And corporations are “pausing” donations to Republicans.
This is new. And helpful.
Dick Danehower
It is of interest that the mob abhors government and rule making authority and Trump abhors anything that would diminish his autocratic instincts. Are these two ideologies on a collision course?
Sounds like it to me. I agree.