Today, Explained - America still can’t agree on its insurrection

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

One year later, the United States is still trying to wrap its head around what happened on January 6, 2021. (It was an insurrection.) This year, our democracy once again will be tested. Today’s show was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos. Happy New Year. It's 2022, and we're going to bring in the new year by living in the past. It was this week last year when a mob of angry, mostly white men attacked the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election. It was the closest American democracy had come to being derailed since the Civil War. And yet, it's quite possible

to ask 20 Americans what happened that day and get 20 different answers. On the show today, we're going to hear from a bunch of Americans who can't seem to agree on what happened that day. You certainly will not agree with some of them. Some of them certainly wouldn't agree with a lot of you. You're going to hear misinterpretations. You're going to hear some straight up lies. You're going to hear some strong language. And after you hear all that, we're going to try and understand where all the disagreement leaves us, the influence of January 6th on this American experiment in democracy as we enter another election year. We've got good versus evil right now going on in our country.

People who just want to be heard. People who don't want to sit by and let, you know, tyrannical things happen. What happened today will be used by the people taking power to justify stripping you of the rights you were born with as an American. This country is divided right down the middle, and you're on one side or the other. The president gave a rally and told people to go over and peacefully protest. There were some agitators amongst them and they went into the Capitol. Many of them were shooed in by the Capitol police. Since that time, the Democrats have been making more of this than they should.

There's like a video of them hitting the cop with flags and shit. It's like, what the fuck? Like, how did that happen? How did it deteriorate to that? Travis Scott told people to jump up and go hype crazy and people got fucking crushed to death. That was the deadly riot of 2021. How are you going to take an oath to defend the Constitution and then try to disturb a session of Congress during what's supposed to be one of our most precious political things, you know, the transfer of power? How are you going to do that?

What did you think was going to happen? Did you think it would work? Hello, my name is Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney. January 6, 2021 is a day I will never forget. It is one of the darkest days in American history. A lot of my colleagues were terrified for their lives that day. Thankfully, I was in my office. Those of us that were not being counted, which was

Arizona and Pennsylvania, where they had contested counts, were told to leave the floor because of COVID. I went back to my office and watched from there. So I was never terrified for my life, as many of my colleagues were in the Capitol, I did feel terrified for our democracy. Many foreigners would tell me that what they most admired about our great country was the peaceful transfer of power. It was violated on that day. The committee will come to order. Without objection, the committee is authorized to declare a recess of the committee at any time. Today, the committee will examine one of the darkest days in our Nation's history. On that day, a violent mob incited by shameless

lies told by a defeated President launched the worst attack on our Republic since the Civil War. Democrats have said the events of the Capitol on January 6th were an assault on our democracy. And if that's true, if disorderly conduct in a restricted building is an assault on democracy, then what do we call setting fire to a federal court in Portland, Oregon, where people inside, what do we call that? This hearing is called the Capitol insurrection. Let's be honest with the American people.

It was not an insurrection, and we cannot call it that and be truthful. The House floor was never breached, and it was not an insurrection. At 2.07, a mob of Trump supporters breached the steps. I don't know who did a poll that is Trump supporters. In fact, it was Trump supporters who lost their lives that day, not Trump supporters who were taking the lives of others. There was an undisciplined mob. There were some rioters and some who committed acts of vandalism. But let me be clear, there was no insurrection. And to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie. My fellow officers and I were committed to not letting any rioters breach the Capitol.

The rioters attempted to breach the Capitol were shouting, Trump, send us. Pick the right side. We want Trump. I could feel myself losing oxygen and recall thinking to myself, this is how I'm going to die, defending this entrance. At some point during the fighting, I was dragged from the line of officers and into the crowd. I heard someone scream. I got one.

At one point, I came face to face with an attacker who repeatedly lunged for me and attempted to remove my firearm. I heard chanting from some in the crowd, get his gun and kill him with his own gun. The Justice Department released video this week of Daniel Rodriguez's interrogation. In that video, the 39-year-old admits using a stun gun on a metropolitan police officer, Michael Fanone. If he's the commander-in-chief and the leader of our country and he's calling for help, I thought he was calling for help.

I thought he was... I thought we were doing the right thing. I thought we were just... I had no plans of what was going to happen. I didn't know what was going to happen. I'm not a leader of anybody. You know, we've only wanted justice, and that's one of the reasons why we got behind President Trump so strongly is because we really felt like he was going to deliver on that front.

In my opinion now, where politics stand, I feel like President Trump didn't deliver in the area of justice like we would like to have seen. You know, we were the population that cried, lock her up, lock her up, lock her up for four years. And at the end of President Trump's term, the only ones that got locked up were me and others like me. My name is Coy Griffin. I'm a Otero County Commissioner here in New Mexico, as well as I'm the founder of Cowboys for Trump. The insurrection took place on November 3rd.

That was election day and before and after. That was to me the insurrection. And the January 6th was a protest. But if you would have looked at the crowds, nobody wants to talk about that. I believe it was the biggest and most people people and I've spoken to very big crowds. And then unfortunately some bad things happened but also the other side had some very bad things happen. I think Trump will go down as one of the best presidents in history. You know history has a way of rewriting things and you know I think the man will be on Rushmore one day.

We got room for one more face up there and he's gonna be up there. I mean, he said it best, America first. We're facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That's not hyperbole, since the Civil War. The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol, as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.

I'm not saying this to alarm you. I'm saying this because you should be alarmed. A guy in a fuzzy suit and a horn helmet got to stand at a lectern somehow. I mean, it was wild. It was weird. And now Joe Biden is president and I think that the government was not overthrown. Watching it in real time on TV, it did not feel like a threat. People got in and kind of looked around and went, oh shit, I'm in the Capitol building. We talked to a lot of people for this episode, but this was a perspective that actually surprised me. My name is James. I'm in New York. A moderate guy who watched everything unfold and

was like, eh, no big deal. Like they were on a tour because there were not enough security guards. And then as more things have come out, and they've arrested so many of these people, and it seems like a lot of them are going to go to jail, I don't know. It just doesn't feel like powerful people did a horrible thing as much as a bunch of bing bongs went on a parade and this obscure law enforcement agency called the Capitol Police just like didn't

have it together enough to stop them from getting in there. But some of these bing bongs had weapons, tactical gear, you know, plastic zip tie handcuffs to restrain lawmakers, presumably. There were, you know, Blue Lives Matter flag-waving, cop-loving rioters beating up cops. You don't think one of them might have done that to a member of Congress or a senator, maybe even Mike Pence? There's a picture of one of the guys, you know, with his feet kicked up on Nancy Pelosi's desk. Even still, there's some disconnect of like, man, would that guy really have like killed the Speaker of the House? Do you think if one of these people

had been wandering the hall and they were like, oh shit, there's Mitt Romney. Quick, let me get the Beretta and this guy. Would they have? Or would they have just been like, oh shit, there's Mitt Romney and then like continued marching on? I don't know. Like there's Mitt Romney, and then like continued marching on. I don't know,

like there's a part of me that feels not totally convinced that anything was gonna go down. Like the word insurrection just seems like such a, just such a weird stretch to me. Like it was a riot. You can definitely call it a riot, but it feels bad faith to call it a legitimate coup attempt. But maybe it was. Maybe it was just a coup attempt by the most inept, half-assed losers who never were going to succeed at the thing that they said they wanted. I could be wrong. If they don't fix this shit, we're going to fuck this country. You think this is one fucking day?

Millions of Americans are out. To protect the Constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic. USA! USA! Fuck your police! Can I speak to Pelosi? Yeah, we're coming, bitch. Oh, my bitch? We're coming for you, too, fucking traitor.

No! No! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason!

Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! Treason! The federal liberty! The federal constitution! Support for Today Explained Thank you. wire cutter, AuraFrame, to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Barton Gelman, you spent months reporting this month's cover story at The Atlantic.

It's titled Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun. In it, you argued January 6th was essentially a dry run for the next successful insurrection. And I wonder, in all your reporting, did you run into someone like James from New York who we just heard from who thought January 6th was mostly a bunch of bing bongs on parade? I heard arguments like that, although I have to give a lot of kudos to bing bongs on parade. That's my favorite phrase yet to describe it. Look, what the insurrection was for any individual in it is up to them. But it was not a bunch of random, chaotic, self-organized rioters who came in. They were summoned to Washington. They were organized. And they were part of a coherent plan, which was to delay the congressional count of the

electoral vote for long enough that Trump could persuade state legislatures around the country to retract their electors, although there is no such thing in the Constitution, and to substitute Trump electors for Biden electors in the states that Biden won. That was the overarching purpose of it. That was part of the plan. Not everyone who marched on the Capitol may have known that, but quite a few did know that. They went there with the mission explicitly from Trump of preventing the electoral count. And what concerns you and what you write about in your piece for The Atlantic is that though they failed on January 6th, they might succeed the next time they try? There are two main through lines. One is that January 6th as a kinetic event was the debut

of a political movement that is broad and numerous and conspiratorial, and angry, and prepared to use violence for political ends. We have not had a politically violent mass movement in this country for more than 100 years, but we have one now because there are some 20 million Trump supporters who believe, according to careful opinion polls, both that Biden is an illegitimate president and that violence is justified flat out to restore Trump to the White House. The other through line is that Republicans are going around the country, county by county, precinct by precinct, and state by state to find what were the obstacles last time when Trump tried to overturn the election, what prevented him from succeeding. And they are pulling those obstacles out by the roots.

Well, let's go through those two through lines one by one, starting with the one you just gave us. In the aftermath of the January 6th insurrection, there was a glimmer of hope that this could be something of an awakening in American politics. But it very much went the other way. Yeah. Republicans at the national level, including many leaders and including many people who had been Trump partisans up until then, recoiled at the violence. There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible

for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. Lindsey Graham said, I'm out. I'm finished. Trump and I, we've had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. Oh, my God, I hate it. All I can say is count me out.

Enough is enough. I've tried to be helpful. But there was a very early sign that it was not going to be a universal Republican response because 147 House Republicans voted nevertheless immediately after the insurrection to invalidate electors from one or more states. I rise up for myself and 60 of my colleagues to object to the counting of the electoral ballots from Arizona. Is the objection in writing and signed by a senator?

Yes, it is. It is. But what you've seen in the years since is that everyone who criticized Trump has pulled back and shut up with a number of exceptions you could count on one or two hands. There's a lot of people, though, that I've talked to, you know, that are mad at me for just telling the truth, which used to be a pretty basic, you know, low bar, that really truly believe that Donald Trump was elected president again. And those exceptions, the ones who continue to criticize Trump, who continue to acknowledge Biden's victory, are being drummed out of the party.

I am not ready to cede the Republican Party, and I'm not ready to cede it to the voices of extremism. Famous examples like Liz Cheney, who has been censured, stripped of her party membership in Wyoming, stripped of her leadership position in the House, and may well lose her seat. There's a short list, and they're all heading for the exits. And this isn't just elected officials. I mean, the issue here is that I believe the majority

of Republican voters believe that there was foul play in the election and that Joe Biden didn't achieve a clean win? Yeah, it's actually worse than that. It's, first of all, a supermajority. The most recent reputable national poll from PRRI has it that 68% of Republicans, which is a catastrophically high figure, believe Biden cheated, that Trump won. They don't suspect foul play. They don't think the election wasn't fully clean. They flat out say that Trump won and the election was rigged against him. And we have never had election denialism on that scale in this country ever. In the 1860 election, the Confederates recognized that Lincoln won. It was because they recognized that, that they tried to secede.

And this maybe sets up your other through line, which is that a not insignificant number of these Republican voters or Donald Trump followers are willing to take up arms, exercise violence in order to secure what they see as a political victory. Is that right? What's the number and why is it troubling to you? In a series of polls that were done at the University of Chicago, the number that came out was about 8% of American adults believe that Biden is an illegitimate president and that violence is justified to unseat him and put Trump back in the White House. That equates to about 21 million American adults, most of whom own weapons, many of whom believe that militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters and violent groups like the

Proud Boys are necessary. There's plenty of evidence of Antifa and BLM coming into neighborhoods already, and they're threatening to come in and kill families, burn their houses down, kill their pets. That's also a number we haven't seen in a very long time, arguably not since the 1920s when the second Ku Klux Klan arose. It's been since then we haven't had a kind of middle class mass violent movement in this country. And make no mistake, these are a different demographic than the politically violent have been in the lifetimes of anyone now alive. Political violence around the world is typically conducted by young men in their 20s or early 30s, heavily unemployed, usually low education.

That's not at all the picture of the insurgents we're getting from those arrested for crimes on January 6th. We're seeing people with a mean age of about 42 who are substantially all employed, many in white-collar jobs, owning businesses, highly educated, as much or more so than the average American. This is a very different profile. And these are people, again, who are prepared to use violence for political ends. And they were triggered by Trump's summons on January 6th, and they're waiting for the next summons to come. Aside from this belief in the former president's big lie that the election was stolen for them, were there other belief systems that united the insurrectionists and now this troubling percentage of Americans, as much as it sounds like 20 million, who believe that their election was stolen from them in 2020?

There was one uniting belief among this group of potentially violent Trump supporters. They were asked many, many questions about their political beliefs, and only one got supermajority support. That was that they believe the central premise of a theory known as the Great Replacement. The idea that people of color, minorities, are displacing white people in America from their positions of power and privilege. There are more rights accruing now to minorities than there are to white people. At the same time, a study of the places where the insurgents came from on January 6 finds that they're much more likely to come from a county where the white population

is in decline relative to other populations. And so we have people who are fearful of loss of status and power in society to rising minorities. And in the worldview of the great replacement, a figure that is regarded with fear and dread, is the census projection that in 2045, white people will no longer be a majority of the population in the United States. You write in your piece that an unpunished plot is practice for the next. But is it fair to say that this plot was unpunished? Haven't there been more than 700 people charged so far for their involvement in the insurrection on January 6th? Yeah, we're talking about foot soldiers and we're not talking about plotters. We're talking about people who responded to a message from leaders, who responded to a message from a media ecosystem

that told them that their votes had been stolen. The plot was the broader conspiracy by Trump and his supporters, leaders of the Republican Party around the country, to overturn the lawful results of an election. And of course, there is this committee in Congress that's trying to investigate the former president's involvement, his administration's involvement in what transpired on January 6th. What progress have they made and what discoveries have they made in their investigation?

First of all, happily, there are signs that they're not limiting their investigation strictly to the events of January 6th itself. Trump personally, and aided by his acolytes, tried to persuade election officials to reverse the actual outcome and to appoint electors for Trump or to certify the election for Trump or to decertify Biden's victory. They are regarding that as part of their mandate, which is a good thing because they would be missing a great deal otherwise. And they are trying to assign responsibility for the violence on January 6th by looking into who paid for the organization of this initial rally, what leaders said in public, what they said in private, who was talking to whom. And you had that example back in mid-December when Mark Meadows was recommended with prosecution. We are here to address a very serious matter. Contempt of Congress by a former chief of staff to a former president of the United States.

After handing over thousands of pages of documents, including text messages, that showed that many, many people around Trump in the hours between 1 and 4 p.m. were begging him to intercede and to tell the rioters to go home. Including his own son, Donald Trump Jr., I believe? Including his own son. Donald Trump Jr. texted again and again, quote, we need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now.

It has gone too far and gotten out of hand, end quote. It's quite extraordinary to hear the words of Liz Cheney. You know, she said that even Ivanka, the former president's daughter, would say, stop the violence. People saying that Trump was destroying his legacy by allowing this horror to continue. Is the window of opportunity here closing to have consequences for the planners of the insurrection? The midterm elections are, of course, later this year. And if there is a change in who controls Congress, there will no longer be any investigations into what happened on January 6th, correct? If Republicans take control of the House, then when the new Congress begins in the first order of business on that day, the new Republican majority leader will cancel the committee.

And I think Benny Thompson, the chair of the committee, and the vice chair, Liz Cheney, are well aware of that and fully intend to unveil their work product before the election. Time is running out to hold people accountable in time to prevent them from using the same kinds of techniques in the 2022 and the 2024 election. And is the 2022 midterm election itself going to be a bellwether of the health of our democracy? I'm in a little bit of a bind in answering this. As a journalist, I don't take sides in favor of one party or the other. I'm struggling with the fact that the Republican Party right now is an authoritarian party that is not respecting democratic norms. And a journalist is for truth and for democracy. And so I simply have to say that for the current Republican Party, doing what it's doing to take control of both houses of Congress in 2022 augurs very poorly for a fair election for president in 2024. That's because the fundamental strategy that Trump employed and is setting up to employ next time is based on the

fact that there are numerous swing states in a presidential election that Biden won last time that are controlled by state senate and state house Republicans. Let's say they're Republican local governments in the state and those states turn blue in the presidential race. Trump tried to persuade those legislatures to send Trump electors to the electoral college, even though Biden won the state. And in order to do that, Congress has to give the okay. Congress on January 6th, for example, would have had to accept that the fake Republican electors were valid, and the Democratic electors chosen by the people of those states were invalid. That wasn't going to happen when the Democrats controlled one of the two houses

of Congress. If Republicans control both houses, it could happen in 2024. We have only one party in American politics today that is prepared to lose an election and call it legitimate. And that's the Democratic Party. They are playing by the usual rules. If they don't win this time, they'll win the next time. They accept the verdict of the referees. Republicans are not in that place. Republicans are prepared to win by cheating.

Republicans are prepared to win by cheating. Republicans are prepared to win by stacking the rules. Republicans are not prepared to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic win. And that is an existential problem for democracy. Barton Gelman is a staff writer at The Atlantic. You can find his piece on the state of our democracy on the cover of this month's issue. Victoria Chamberlain produced our show today. I'm Sean Ramos for him.

It's Today Explained. Thank you.