On January 6, I watched from my living room as a crowd of angry Americans stormed the Capitol. I did not know then that one of them was someone I knew.
Footage released by the FBI confirmed that the young man who sat across from me in a class called Democracy and Education had ditched his signature suit and bowtie for a black hooded puffer and Trump hat and led a mob of Donald Trump supporters in a heave-ho effort to raid the US Capitol, cheering as an officer was pepper sprayed and brutally beaten in front of him.
After pleading guilty to a felony, he would be sentenced to two months in prison, of which he served only seven weeks. In one of the first acts of the Trump administration last February, he was pardoned alongside some 1,500 other rioters.
More important than the clemency granted to those who smashed windows, beat police officers, and wandered the halls taking selfies was what the government’s response left untouched: Trump and the political elites who summoned the crowd, fed it lies about a stolen election, delayed intervention as violence unfolded, and then rebranded the assault as overheated protest or political theater.
Those who could have stopped January 6 have not only escaped punishment; many were rewarded with renewed political power. And with Trump’s return to office, the machinery of the state has turned not against those who attacked democratic institutions but against those who defended them, as career prosecutors who brought cases were harassed, fired, demoted, or placed under internal investigation, their work reframed as partisan abuse. Trump — who did more than anyone to ignite the violence — is today arguably stronger than ever.
In retrospect, the American response would prove to be only one of several possible paths. Another democracy confronted with a comparable test chose a different one. About four thousand miles south, Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, one of Trump’s allies, sits in a ten-by-ten-meter concrete…
Auteur: Alex MacArthur
