Democracy KILLED on Trumped-up allegations, Followers attack Capitol

NEW YORK: These were scenes that one could only have seen in Hollywood flicks. How real life imitates reel life was put on a surreal, blood-curdling display. The blood-thirsty rioters that ambushed the US Capitol on Wednesday emerged like djinns from the cauldron of negativity, that President Donald Trump has shaken , stirred and brewed all along. It was the outrage upon allegedly the World’s greatest democracy, and the unbridled ascent of ‘DEMON’cracy that is the hallmark of self-styled autocrats. Hopefully, this assault should end his yearning for a blatant unconstitutional coup, unless more of his faithful decide to heed his call to deflower the system.

The chaotic scenes of rioters shoving through barricades, breaking in to occupy the cherished symbol of America’s democracy, was one that Americans are accustomed to watching in distant lands with authoritarian regimes.

The violence, which included gunshots fired in the Capitol, one death, and an armed occupation of the Senate floor, was the call for insurrection by the very person man who swore an oath to protect democratic traditions that he wants undone now.

The rioters chose to storm the Capitol, a building symbolic as a citadel of democracy and stirred horrors of the Civil War era’s blood and rage.

Only this time it was instigated by a duly elected president unwilling to honour the foundational creed of a peaceful transfer of power.

“This is an attempted coup détat incited by the (ex)President of the United States,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

“We are in an unprecedented moment when a president who is willing to conspire with mobs to bring down his government. This is totally against the idea of democracy for which the nation has stood for over two centuries.”

The certification of the Electoral College votes that formalize Joe Biden’s victory, a display of American democracy’s robustness, was by Trump’s call to his white brigade, as he goaded them to “fight” to stop the “steal” of the election and march on the Capitol.

“After this, were going to walk down and I’ll be there with you were going to walk down, were going to walk down to the Capitol,” Trump said, “and were going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and were probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.”

As his presidency enters its final days, Trump’s speech was a valedictory that seethed with anger and roused those who took it as a call to insurrection.

Rioters overran and overmatched Capitol security forces, breaking windows, stealing mementos and mocking the institution with photos showing them in seats of power.

One in the mob seized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s dais, another her office.

A sea of red “Make America Great Again” hats stormed through Statuary Hall, a part of the Capitol familiar to tourists.

One man carried a Confederate flag under the same rotunda where Abraham Lincoln, and, just last year, the congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis, had laid in state.

A noose was seen not far from the Capitol’s west front.

And the inauguration stand where Biden will put his hand on a Bible in two weeks was used by US Capitol Police to fire pepper spray into the violent crowd.

Few escaped Trump’s rage, not even his most loyal lieutenant, Vice President Mike Pence. For once, Pence had said that he could not honour the President’s wishes that he overturn the electoral vote count because there was no legal authority for him to do so.

At his rally on the Ellipse, Trump said he would be “very disappointed” in his vice president, who a short time later had to be whisked to safety by Secret Service when the Capitols barriers were breached.

But the groundwork for the violence was laid far before the rally, which also included a call from the presidents’ personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, for a “trial by combat” to settle accusations of election fraud.

Trump, who has long shied away from committing to a peaceful transfer of power, spent the better part of 2020 declaring that the election was “rigged” while making baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud that numerous federal courts and his former attorney general said did not exist.

The President was enabled by dozens of his fellow Republicans, who said they were willing to object to the count, a maneuver they knew would delay but not change the outcome.

Even when it became clear he had lost the election, Trump refused to acknowledge reality, insisting repeatedly that he had won in a landslide.

He lost to Biden by seven million voters.

But his supporters were more than willing to accept his effort to subvert the verdict of voters.

Just weeks ago, he tweeted “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” And even after the siege began, and members of his own party, including some trapped in the Capitol and hiding for their lives, begged him to forcibly condemn the act of domestic terrorism, Trump refused.

Authored by :  KP Singh