The US, a nation divided - Is Jan 6, 2021 a coup or protest?

I WANTED to open this commentary with "As Americans marked the Capitol riot of Jan 6, 2021". But then I reconsidered and decided that to be more accurate I probably should replace "Americans" with "some Americans" or perhaps "half of Americans".

Democrats in Washington did mark the first anniversary of the violent assault on the US Capitol with speeches, moments of silence, candlelight vigils and an impassioned speech delivered by President Joe Biden from the National Statuary Hall where protesters had broken in a year ago and battled with the police as they attacked the seat of American democracy.

With very few exceptions, GOP lawmakers avoided these and other events and refrained from issuing condemnations of the year-old attack. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming was the only Republican congressperson present on the floor of the House of Representatives for a midday moment of silence to commemorate the police officers who died defending the Capitol.

The rioters who were armed with baseball bats and flagpoles and inspired by former president Donald Trump's accusations that the Democrats had "stolen" the 2020 presidential election, broke into the Capitol that wintry day to disrupt the counting of the Electoral College votes ratifying president Trump's defeat.

Since then there have been some hopes, expressed among others by President Biden on his Inauguration Day, that Americans would begin recovering from the national trauma of Jan 6. For close to a year the president has urged the nation to return to normalcy and has even refrained from mentioning his predecessor by name or from using the term "coup", favoured by many Democrats to describe the Capitol siege.

But since President Biden entered office, Republican politicians led by Trump's allies, joined by pundits on Fox News and conservative bloggers, have continued to promote what Democrats call the "big lie" and what Trumpists refer to as "the Steal". That the 2020 presidential election was rigged and stolen, that it was a "fraud" or the "crime of the century", as the former president put it; and they have done that without a shred of evidence to support their allegations.

'Just rowdy tourists'

Moreover, as part of their narrative, many Republicans have insisted that Jan 6 was just a protest march during which unfortunately some of the participants got carried away. The protesters, they say, were nothing more than rowdy tourists who were demonised by the mainstream media.

Some of Trump's fans, including Tucker Carlson on Fox News, have even alleged that Jan 6 was a "false flag" operation. According to this conspiracy theory, the FBI had instigated the violence that day, and transformed a group of American "patriots" into traitors. Just another example of the so-called Deep State trying to demonise the former president and his supporters.

All of this may sound to some like nutty ideas advanced by a fringe group of right-wing activists. But in fact, one opinion poll after another indicates that at least two-thirds of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was indeed stolen from Trump and that he and not Biden was the legitimate president. In a way, these Republicans share the false claims that fuelled the violent mob to storm the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying Candidate Biden's win.

Which explains why a recent Washington Post-University Maryland poll indicated that while most Americans believe that President Trump bears "some" or "a lot" of responsibility for what happened on Jan 6, 72 per cent of Republicans say that he bears little or no responsibility. Those opinion polls also show that a clear majority of Democrats believe that former president Trump was responsible "a lot" for the Jan 6 attack.

At the same time, close to 50 per cent of Republicans have bought into the conspiracy theory that suggests that left-wing agitators were actually responsible for the violence that day and that the Democrats and the media were trying to make Trump's supporters look bad.

The Democrats, insisting that Trump's rhetoric and actions were behind Jan 6, have countered the Trumpist narrative by using their legislative power to try to prosecute Trump in a Senate impeachment trial. But lacking a two-third majority in the Senate, they failed to convict him.

'A sideshow'

A few GOP Senators did vote to convict Trump and some Republicans were initially critical of his role on Jan 6. But by now it seems that not only the activists in the party but also its entire leadership are united behind the notion that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. The Capitol riots, they assert, were a sideshow and certainly not a challenge to the US democratic institutions, as the Democrats have argued.

Which is why only 2 Republicans have supported the creation of the House select committee that is now investigating Jan 6. Most Republicans suggest that it's nothing more than a political ploy by the Democrats to distract public attention from the failures of the Biden presidency on the eve of this year's midterm elections.

But on Thursday President Biden decided that in the face of these Republican obstructions and lies he had no choice but to launch a direct, personal and fierce attack against former president Trump portraying him as nothing short of a clear and present danger to the US Constitution and America's democratic institutions.

In his address in the Capitol, President Biden denounced his predecessor in office for promoting violence, for waging an "undemocratic" and "un-American" campaign against the legitimacy of the US election system, for spreading a "web of lies" about the 2020 election, and for holding "a dagger at the throat of America".

President Biden's speech was a powerful repudiation of the former president and his supporters, and of Trumpism as an ideology. He seemed to compare Trump to the world's authoritarian leaders, insisting that "he values power over principle" and "sees his interests as more important than his country's interests", and that "his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution".

Political war

The president blamed Trump for the violence on Jan 6, maintaining that he had "rallied the mob to attack" while he was "sitting in the private room of the Oval Office in the White House, watching it all on television and doing nothing for hours as police were assaulted, lives at risk, the nation's Capitol under siege". From that perspective, his speech amounted to declaring a political war on the former president whom he might face again in the 2024 presidential race.

President Biden and his political aides have apparently concluded that since his chances of changing the minds of Trump's supporters were close to zero and since Republican lawmakers were intent on disrupting his presidency, he had nothing to lose politically and electorally by bashing the former president as the enemy of the people.

The problem is that while Democrats say that Jan 6 would have a major impact on their political worldview, only a small percentage of Republicans and Independents say so. In fact, close to half of voters in a recent Morning Consult poll said they didn't expect the Capitol assault to have an effect on their votes this year or in 2024.

Moreover, the Democrats have yet to discover evidence to support allegations that Jan 6 was a "coup" instigated by Trump or the Republicans in a sense that they were planning to overthrow the government.

But there is no doubt that the words of the US pledge of allegiance that Americans are "One Nation, Under God, Indivisible" sound a bit outdated these days. That instead there are now 2 American nations sharing the same country who don't share the same view of the political reality; and even more distressing, that some of them are ready to use violence against the other side in order to achieve their aims.