By: Luke Mogelson The New Yorker
In early August, after agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago,
Donald Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida, allies of the
former President were quick to villainize the F.B.I. Although the raid
had recovered more than a hundred classified documents, at least
eighteen of which were labelled “Top Secret,” Republican pundits and
politicians questioned its legitimacy and denounced the federal agency
as a “gang of dangerous criminals,” “wolves,” the “Gestapo,” “the
K.G.B.,” and “the enemy within.” Calls for retribution spread online. A
forty-two-year-old Trump supporter named Ricky Shiffer wrote, “You’re a
fool if you think there’s a nonviolent solution.” Shiffer then attempted
to enter an F.B.I. field office in Ohio, equipped with body armor, an
assault rifle, and a nail gun. After triggering an alarm, he fled the
scene in his vehicle, and a high-speed pursuit ended n a shoot-out with state troopers, during which Shiffer was killed.
Three weeks later, Trump gave a speGiven the broad support that Republicans have historically enjoyed from
law enforcement, their escalating hostility toward the F.B.I. may seem
paradoxical. Right-wing extremists, however, have always viewed state
agents as pernicious antagonists, and so the institutionalization of
that mind-set should come as no surprise as the G.O.P. embraces the
ideas and attitudes of its radical flank.ech in which he called F.B.I. agents
“vicious monsters.”In the early days of the pandemic,
as Trump supporters began mobilizing against lockdowns and other
public-health measures, much of their rage was directed at law
enforcement. On April 30, 2020, heavily armed conservatives descended on the Michigan state capitol,
in Lansing. Facing off against police outside the barred doors of the
legislature, they denounced the officers as “traitors” and “filthy
rats.” Some members of the mob belonged to the Michigan Liberty Militia,
whose founder later told me that he had created the outfit in 2015,
after “seeing what happened with the Bundys.” Cliven Bundy, an elderly rancher in Nevada, had declared war on the government when he Bureau of Land Management impounded his cattle over his refusal to
pay outstanding grazing fees. After a tense standoff in which Bundy
supporters surrounded law-enforcement agents and trained rifles on them
from nearby hilltops, the Bureau of Land Management released the
livestock and withdrew from the area.
Following the incident in Lansing, Mike Shirkey, the Republican Senate
majority leader in Michigan, condemned the protesters as “a bunch of
jackasses” who had used “intimidation and the threat of physical harm to
stir up fear and rancor.” Shirkey seems to have quickly realized,
though, that such principled nonpartisanship was no longer tenable in
American politics. A couple of weeks later, at an anti-lockdown rally in
Grand Rapids, I watched him publicly laud the Michigan Liberty Militia
and assure its members, “We need you now more than ever.”
In the weeks that followed, resentment of law enforcement intensified
sharply, with anti-lockdowners perceiving individual officers as
complicit in an oppressive, tyrannical order. “They deserve to wear the
Nazi emblem on their sleeves!” one retiree told me of the state police
who’d served a cease-and-desist order to a barber violating the
governor’s suspension of personal-care services. “People like me used to
fucking back you!” a veteran shouted at police handing out citations at
a gathering in Lansing. “But you are trash!”
Then, on May 25, 2020, a police officer murdered George Floyd,
in Minneapolis. I left Michigan to cover the ensuing demonstrations and
riots, and when I rejoined the anti-lockdowners I found that their
stance toward law enforcement had undergone a dramatic reversal. That
June, I attended a demonstration outside the capitol orchestrated by the
Michigan Liberty Militia and a right-wing organization called the
American Patriot Council. Ryan Kelley, a co-founder of the latter group,
climbed the steps and pointed to several officers who were monitoring
the scene. Not long ago, I had witnessed anti-lockdowners furiously
berate these very same men. “We say thank you for being here,” Kelley
told them now. “Thank you for standing up for our communities.”
The volte-face reflected a larger pattern of contradiction. The original
Michigan Militia was created, along with a wave of other white
paramilitary groups, in 1994, following the government’s botched attempt
to arrest the survivalist Randy Weaver at his cabin, on Ruby Ridge, in
northern Idaho. The deadly siege, less than a year later, of the Branch
Davidian compound, in Waco, Texas, and the Clinton Administration’s
subsequent ban on assault weapons reinforced a right-wing narrative that
white Christians were under attack. After Waco, the Michigan Militia
ballooned to an estimated seven thousand members. In 1995, on the second
anniversary of the Waco massacre, Timothy McVeigh, a white supremacist
who’d attended several ichigan Militia meetings, detonated an enormous truck bomb in Oklahoma
City, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people. The leaders of the
Michigan Militia decamped to Alaska, and the organization collapsed.
Over the next decade and a half, right-wing militants across the U.S.
remained largely dormant. Meanwhile, under President George W. Bush, the
federal government enacted unprecedented infringements on personal
privacy and other individual rights while the F.B.I. employed
extraordinarily invasive surveillance and investigatory techniques
against law-abiding citizens, largely on the basis of their religion.
The reason that none of this provoked anti-government extremists was
simple: the targets of the overreach were Muslims.
Similarly, after George Floyd was killed, conservatives repudiated the
national uprising that demanded police reform and accountability,
choosing instead to “back the blue.” As President Trump and his allies
portrayed demands for racial justice as the sinister work of subversives
intent on sowing chaos—much as segregationists had dismissed
civil-rights activists as Communist agitators—backing the blue became
analogous with opposing the left. After my stay in Michigan, I spent a
month covering antifascist protests in Portland,
Oregon, where demonstrations against the local police department were
punctuated by clashes with Trump supporters, including members of the
Proud Boys, who presented themselves as allies of law enforcement. As
anti-lockdowners had shown in Michigan, however, this alliance was conditional and tended to break down whenever laws intruded on
conservative priorities. Right-wingers rationalized the inconsistency by
assigning the epithet “oath breaker” to any American in uniform who
executed his duties in a manner they disliked
About a month after the 2020 Presidential election, at a rally in
Washington, D.C., I followed hundreds of Trump supporters as they
marauded on the streets around the White House, assaulting pedestrians,
vandalizing Black churches, and seeking to engage antifascists in fist
fights. The Metropolitan Police, the Park Police, and the Capitol Police
did their best to keep the two sides separate. Their interference
enraged the Trump supporters, who called the officers “piggies,”
“cunts,” and “pieces of shit.” Some of the insults were
indistinguishable from those shouted by leftists in Portland.
“Fuck your paychecks!”
“Fuck the blue!”
“Vigilante justice will be king!”
“Defund the police!”
Many of these same Trump supporters returned to D.C. on January 5, 2021,
and by then it was clear that law enforcement would no longer be exempt
from their belligerence. Online, Proud Boys made plain that their days
of backing the blue were over. “Fuck these DC Police,” one commented.
“Fuck those cock suckers up. Beat them down. You dont get to return to
your families.”
The next day,
I followed thousands of people up the National Mall after Trump’s
incendiary speech from the Ellipse. On the west side of the Capitol, two
broad flights of granite steps descended from an outdoor terrace on the
third floor. In anticipation of Joe Biden’s Presidential Inauguration,
huge bleachers had been erected over the steps, with a
ten-thousand-square-foot platform constructed between them; the
bleachers had been wrapped in ripstop tarpaulin, creating a sort of
monolith that functioned as a rampart. Trump supporters climbed the
steps and began cutting through the fabric with knives. Officers blocked
an opening at the bottom of the bleachers, but they were outnumbered
and obviously intimidated as the mob pressed against them, screaming
insults, pelting them with cans and bottles. Some people shoved and
punched individual officers; others linked arms and rammed their backs
into a row of riot shields, their eyes squeezed shut against blasts of
pepper spray. A few Trump supporters used their own chemical agents
against the police. The stone slabs underfoot were smeared with blood.
“You’re a bunch of oath breakers!” a man making his way along the police
line barked through a bullhorn. “You’re traitors to the country!”
Seconds later, the mob overwhelmed the officers and everyone flooded
into the understructure of the bleachers. Toward the top, a temporary
security wall contained three doors, one of which was instantly
breached. Dozens of police stood behind the wall, using shields,
nightsticks, and chemical munitions to prevent the mob from crossing the
threshold. Other officers took up positions on the platform above us,
firing a barrage of pepper balls into the horde. A few feet away, I
recognized a corpulent man with a graying goatee and glasses leaning all
his weight into the bodies directly beside me.
It was Jason Howland, another co-founder of the American Patriot
Council. At the Lansing rally on June 18th, I’d watched Howland rail
against George Floyd protesters, calling them “operatives of fear and
dissent.” Now he dropped his head, planted his feet, and added his
considerable mass to the others churning over the police. Balanced on a
crossbeam above him was his compatriot Ryan Kelley, who, six months
earlier, had thanked law enforcement for “standing up for our
communities.” (Neither man could be reached for comment.) In D.C., a
cell-phone video captured Kelley yelling at rioters, “This is war,
baby!”
I eventually found myself in the chamber of the U.S. Senate, where Trump
supporters rifled through desks, took documents, and delivered prayers
and speeches from a dais that had recently been occupied by
Vice-President Mike Pence. When a young Capitol Police officer with a
medical mask over red facial hair entered the room, he approached a
rioter who had been shot with a rubber bullet and was bleeding from his
cheek. “You good, sir?” the officer asked with concern. “You need
medical attention?”
I’m good, thank you,” the rioter answered.In
the moment, I attributed the officer’s incongruously affable demeanor
to the fact that he was by himself and perhaps afraid. But shortly
thereafter, two more Capitol Police officers arrived. One was a sergeant
with a shaved head whose uniform was half untucked and missing buttons,
his necktie ripped and crooked. A man wearing a TRUMP
beanie with a furry pompom approached him. “Got a little bit of a
situation?” the man asked jokingly. He was holding a gold-tasselled
American flag over his shoulder. Sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans were rolled-up documents that I had seen him take from a senator’s desk.
I’ve had better days,” the sergeant said.
“You all right, man?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“You sure?”
The sergeant pointed at his colleague. “I feel better than he looks.”
The
officer was covered with a white powdery substance, as if a sack of
flour had been dumped on him. “Some dude got me with a fire
extinguisher,” he said.
“I think I ate a whole container of pepper spray,” the sergeant added,
with similar good cheer. It was as if they were recounting some
long-ago, amusing experience that had nothing to do with the rioters in
the Senate chamber.
t is tempting to understand such bizarre scenes as part of a
“de-escalation” strategy. The problem with this is that there was no
strategy, to de-escalate or otherwise. “We were on our own, totally on
our own,” an officer later recalled. In the absence of guidance,
officers had to decide for themselves how to engage with the mob. One
posed for pictures with rioters inside the building. A video appears to
show others allowing a restive crowd to pass through a perimeter on the
east side of the grounds. A lieutenant was filmed wearing a MAGA
hat and coördinating with Oath Keepers to help his beleaguered
colleagues exit the building. In the footage, the crowd cheers and a
woman gives the officers a hug. (Later, several members of law enforcement would be
placed under investigation and reprimanded for their conduct. According
to the Capitol Police, none of the inquiries found that officers had
“aided the rioters before or during the attack.”)
My impression was that a simple contract—sometimes tacit, sometimes
explicit—governed most interactions between Trump supporters and law
enforcement on January 6th: the insurrectionists would attack only those
officers who stood in their way, while bestowing the usual respect and
deference on those who stood down. Still, the vicious brutality
encountered by officers who fought back makes the passivity of some of
their peers all the more confounding. I’d been in the Senate chamber for
about twenty minutes when a large phalanx of Metropolitan Police
entered. The Trump supporters were suddenly corralled, with no avenue of
escape. Assuming that everyone in the chamber would be detained and
that our phones would be confiscated, I withdrew my wallet and prepared
to show my press card. But no arrests were made. No one was searched.
Nobody questioned. The red-bearded officer approached a rioter and spoke to him
privately, after which the rioter announced, “We gotta go, guys,
otherwise we’re goin’ in handcuffs.” As we filed out through the main
door, the sergeant with the shaved head told us, “Be safe. We appreciate
you being peaceful.”
The corridor outside was also full of police. “This
way,” one of them said, extending his arm in invitation. Another officer
led us to a staircase. His hair was dishevelled, he looked exhausted,
and he was limping. A Proud Boy wearing biker gloves and a
black-and-yellow flannel kept telling him, “We support you guys, O.K.?
We support you guys. We support you guys.”
“Thank you,” the battered officer replied.
I followed the Proud Boy to an emergency exit and out
of the building. Police in riot gear stood beneath a portico; as I
filmed them with my phone while walking backward, a female officer (who
had no way of knowing that I was a member of the press) jabbed her
finger in the air, pointing emphatically at something behind me. I
turned to look. Had she spotted some of the purloined documents? Was she
signalling a colleague?
No. There was a low step, and she was worried that I might trip.
Strategic forbearance is one thing. But can we really attribute such
outright solicitude, in the midst of what one officer called a “medieval
battle,” to some tactical shrewdness intended to beguile a volatile
adversary? I don’t think so. I think that the complex, often
contradictory actions of officers on January 6th flowed from their
complex, often contradictory relationship with that adversary. The day
after the attack, one member of the Capitol Police sent a private
message on Facebook to an insurrectionist who had admitted on that
platform that he had entered the building. Introducing himself as
someone “who agrees with your political stance,” the officer advised him
to delete the confession.
“Just looking out!” he explained.
More
than eight thousand D.C. officers belong to the Fraternal Order of
Police, which enthusiastically endorsed Trump twice. In 2019, the
organization’s D.C. branch held its annual holiday party at the Trump
International Hotel. (The decision was controversial and the event
poorly attended.) Nor is there any reason to assume that the Capitol
Police or the Metropolitan Police was immune from the insidious bigotry,
or infiltration by white supremacists, that plagued other police
departments. In a 2001 class-action lawsuit, more than two hundred and
fifty Black officers claimed that “racial discrimination is rampant in
the ranks of the U.S. Capitol Police,” and subsequent lawsuits have made similar allegations. (The Capitol Police have disputed many of the
claims.) Two months after January 6th, a Jewish congressional staffer
photographed a copy of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—a
century-old anti-Semitic text that influenced some of the very Americans
who spearheaded the insurrection—on a Capitol Police officer’s desk
Numerous law-enforcement agents and their relatives participated in the
attack. Thomas Webster, a retired N.Y.P.D. officer, was filmed
assaulting a member of the Metropolitan Police with a metal pipe and
calling him a “fucking piece of shit.” (Webster was sentenced to ten
years in prison.) A grand jury indicted Alan Hostetter, a former chief
of police for La Habra, California, on multiple charges related to the
siege. “People at the highest levels need to be made an example of with
an execution or two or three,” Hostetter had declared, in a YouTube
video. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Two officers from Virginia took
selfies inside the building. One of them, Thomas Robertson, posted on
social media, “The right IN ONE DAY took the f***** U.S. Capitol. Keep poking us.” (Robertson was convicted of
five felonies and sentenced to more than seven years in prison.) Scott
Fairlamb, the son of a New Jersey state trooper, was sentenced to three
and half years after being filmed outside the Capitol punching an
officer in the head. Fairlamb’s brother was a senior agent in the Secret
Service who had led Michelle Obama’s security detail. A lawyer
representing Fairlamb told HuffPost that his client donated to
law-enforcement charities and shared “the same ideological viewpoint” as
the police.
One way to think about January 6th is as the consummation, in real time,
of a tumultuous shift between two distinct eras of conservatism. Before
2020, most conservatives celebrated law enforcement as the protectors
of a system that was, on balance, reliably favorable to their interests.
By the end of 2020, after the lockdowns and the election, many
conservatives had come to see that system the same way that right-wing
extremists did—as corrupt and tyrannical, perhaps even satanic. At the
same time, so long as Trump was still in power and weaponizing law
enforcement against leftists, neither conservatives nor the police were
forced to confront what this meant for their alliance. That reckoning could no longer be avoided
on January 6th, and it is understandable that people on both sides of
the line persisted in respecting the terms of a compact that was now
obsolete.The platoon members who were cheered and
hugged by Trump supporters seconds after being assaulted by them must
have experienced the same disorientation as some victims of abusive
relationships, and one wonders how many officers at the Capitol
believed—or wanted to believe—that the people trying to kill them also
loved them. During testimony before a Senate committee, the officer
Harry Dunn described a rioter who “displayed what looked like a law-enforcement badge, and told me, ‘We’re doing this for you.’ ” As
if to memorialize the dissonance, Trump, a couple of minutes after I
exited the Capitol, tweeted, “Remember, WE are the Party of Law &
Order.”
After leaving the Capitol, I followed several people around a corner, to
the north end of the building. Incredibly, a renewed offensive was
being mounted there, and some of the intruders who had just been
politely escorted from the Senate chamber—including the man with the TRUMP
beanie and the rolled-up documents in his back pocket—joined the
attack. Using metal barricades as battering rams, the mob charged
officers guarding an entrance and screamed at them, “Choose a side!” and
“We stood behind you—you stand behind us!”
At some point, a gaunt and somewhat tremulous officer from the Metro
Transit Police stepped forward and asked to borrow a rioter’s megaphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention, please?” he said. The
obsequious request was met with jeers and insults. Nevertheless, the
transit officer persisted: “I hear you. President Bush also said this
after 9/11. ‘We hear you.’ ”
This was a remarkable reference. Three days after the attack on the
World Trade Center, Bush had visited Ground Zero. Standing amid the
ruins, he had borrowed a megaphone to address the firefighters,
paramedics, and other rescue workers clearing debris. “I can hear you,”
Bush told them. “The rest of the world hears you. And the people who
knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” It was an
expression of solidarity with the victims of a grave injustice, and it
was a vow to the bereaved that their dispossession would be avenged. We
now know that Bush was also uniting the country against an imaginary
enemy, honoring American patriots while invoking their injury to
legitimize a bogus war. His audience had chanted, “U.S.A.”
In May, 2020, when I had arrived in Minneapolis after a nine-hour drive
from Michigan, I had gone directly to the Third Precinct house—the
station to which Derek Chauvin, the officer who’d killed George Floyd,
belonged. When I got there, the building was on fire. As I stood in the
street watching flames leap from the second-story windows, a young Black
resident of the city remarked, “Hopefully, they hear us.
During the seven months that had passed since then, I’d attended many
protests for racial justice—yet the transit officer standing before the
Trump supporters was the first member of law enforcement I had seen
offering an assurance that he had heard anyone. Black
protesters in Minneapolis had taken heed of the indiscriminate violence
with which the police and military responded to their appeals (at least
eighty-nine people, ranging in age from fifteen to seventy-seven, went
to the hospital); they had believed President Trump when he threatened
their lives (“When the looting starts, the shooting starts”); and they
had reasonably surmised that demonstrating came with a risk of being
killed. Conversely, on January 6th, Trump’s followers also listened to
him (“We have truth and justice on our side”), took heed of the
military’s absence and of law enforcement’s restraint, and reasonably surmised that they could proceed with impunity.
None of the insurrectionists I observed appeared to experience
fear—certainly nothing resembling the physical terror that I had seen
police and soldiers elicit during Black Lives Matter protests following
George Floyd’s death. One day in Minneapolis, I was following peaceful
marchers when troops in armored Humvees surrounded and brutalized them
with less-lethal munitions. Some of the marchers panicked, fearing that
the bullets were real. “Don’t shoot!” a young Black man pleaded, raising
his arms. “Let us leave!” (Minutes later, a rubber bullet struck him
squarely in the chest.) The Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, on the other hand, assumed that there was a
limit to what could be done to them, and one ingratiating
law-enforcement official after another—from the transit officer to the
sergeant with the shaved head—confirmed this assumption.
In April, 2021, an inspector general testifying before a House committee
revealed another likely reason that so many insurrectionists felt so
undaunted: the Capitol Police had not availed itself of sting-ball
grenades or of 40-millimetre launchers capable of shooting beanbags,
sponge bullets, and other large-bore projectiles, both of which had been
regularly deployed against racial-justice protesters across the country
over the summer. (A sergeant’s body camera in Minneapolis recorded him
telling officers, “You got to hit them with the forties.”) Such weapons
“would have helped us that day to enhance our ability to protect the
Capitol,” the inspector general explained. Nonetheless, an assistant deputy chief of police had
forbidden their use, because of their potential to “cause life-altering
injury and/or death.” While I was under the bleachers, the rounds that
rained down on us, whatever calibre they were, did nothing to repel or
even discourage the attackers from crossing that critical choke point.
“Is that all you got?” one Trump supporter had taunted. The answer was
no—but that was all they were willing to use. (The sole exception was Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot while breaching a lobby adjacent
to the House chambers, where lawmakers were fleeing. The officer who
fired the round would be condemned by Trump and his supporters.)
Even if the docility of some law-enforcement members on January 6th
could be chalked up to a good-faith attempt at de-escalation, it was a
profound misjudgment that only emboldened many insurrectionists. After
the transit officer told the Trump supporters that he heard them, he
went on to say, “We are not here to kick you out and use force. That is
not why we are here.”
“We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” a man yelled over him. “With a lot
bigger rounds!” Another added, “If we have to tool up, it’s gonna be
over! We’re coming heavy!” I also overheard a woman talking on her
phone. “We need to come back with guns,” she said. “One time with guns,
and then we’ll never have to do this again.”
Two days earlier, the department had released a statement telling Proud
Boys and antifascists that it would not “keep people apart” should they
choose to assault one another. The hands-off policy, which effectively
assured the Proud Boys that they would receive a wide berth to commit
violence when they came to town, underscored how little January 6th had
changed law-enforcement blindness to the threat posed by right-wing
extremists. At the same time, the efforts of Trump and his allies to
diminish and distort the events of January 6th have precluded any
meaningful reckoning with right-wing extremism, and have all but
guaranteed that it will continue to metastasize, irrespective of the
specific groups, movements, and causes through which it finds
expression.
On the night of January 6th, after the Capitol had been secured, Trump
tweeted, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred
landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously
stripped away from great patriots.” The statement was not only a defense
of the insurrection and a tribute to its perpetrators; it was also a
threat. This is what happens; this is what will happen. Since
then, numerous conservative politicians have more or less promised
violence if Democrats continue to win office—or if Trump is held
accountable for any of his alleged crimes. The Arizona state
representative Wendy Rogers tweeted in July, 2021, “The election fraud
will either be exposed and stopped and many people will go to jail or
they will keep doing it ushering in a new era of 1776.” That October, at a conservative
conference in Idaho, an audience member asked, “How many elections are
they gonna steal before we kill these people?” On Twitter, a Republican
lawmaker responded, “The question is fair.” Senator Lindsey Graham
recently told Fox News that “there’ll be riots in the streets” if Trump
is prosecuted for illegally removing classified material from the White
House. Trump swiftly shared Graham’s comments on Truth Social, his
social-media company.
Hoping to stave off an encroaching despair on the morning after the
Capitol attack, I caught a taxi to the Lincoln Memorial. When I arrived,
the monument was closed. Squad cars were pulling up. Officers expelled a
braying mob.
Many of the people wore red MAGA hats and TRUMP 2020
shirts. I asked someone what had happened. It seemed that a woman had
been posing for pictures with an American flag and a Gadsden flag—DON’T TREAD ON ME
below a hissing snake, on a yellow field—when an officer advised her
that such displays were not allowed. (She later claimed that the officer
had grabbed the flags away from her.) A fracas had ensued. Now the
Trump supporters converged at the bottom of the steps and began calling
the officers Nazis, Marxists, and pigs. Young men in Oxford shirts waved
their middle fingers. “Aren’t we the pussies?” a little bald man asked
others in the crowd. “Honestly, we’re not overrunning them?”
“That’s when they just start executing people,” a petite, bespectacled woman said, glaring hatefully at the police.
It occurred to me that some of the officers impassively absorbing this
abuse probably had friends in the hospital. Roughly a hundred and fifty
law-enforcement agents had been wounded the previous day. Some had
sustained brain injuries. According to the Capitol Police Labor
Committee, one had suffered “two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal
disks.” Another was stabbed with “a metal fence stake.” Now, though, it
was not the police but the Trump supporters who were outraged.
The woman with the Gadsden flag was a pastor from Los Angeles. “How dare they?” she demanded. “What is wrong with this country? This is not my America. I don’t understand.”
That made two of us. I could think of only one question to ask. “Where do we go from here?”
The
pastor wiped her tears. “I will tell you this,” she sobbed. “I will not
turn the other cheek to what’s not right. This is not right. This is not right.” ♦
