Everyone but the most die hard Trump cultists knew january 6 was an insurrection when it happened and knew Trump was responsible. Elite pundits changed their tune only once the courts got involved, rewriting history because they fear the implications of the case. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
And *I* maintain (for the purposes of getting an elite pundit job) that Trump wanted to avoid a violent insurrection to such an extent that he illegally arm-twisted election officials in multiple states to find phantom votes and throw out valid votes, and that's why hes our next Nobel Prize winner.
There is no one on the planet who believes Trump wouldn't have used violence and the military if he thought that would work. He would then, he would now. Everyone knows this.
That's been the most maddening part of the trump era, for me. All these people who know exactly what he is, where he's been and what he's doing, pretending not to. Because they approve. We all know what's going on here and we have since 2016, we just disagree on whether we think it's good or bad.
There was like 24-48hrs after 1/6 when there was the glimmer of sanity. When people like McConnell and Rubio were giving speeches/statements calling it an insurrection and blaming Trump.
They were scared there might be actual repercussions. Now that repercussions for politicians are mostly off the table, they will keep pushing until it all breaks. It's a binary. Repercussions or fascism.
They either know what trump is and they approve or they don’t know what he is because they don’t want to know. They don’t like the implications of fascism being popular.
I don't know why people struggle to understand that there were two prongs to the insurrection: forcing Pence to throw out the certification & get SCOTUS to rubber stamp the fake electors, then use that veneer of legitimacy to order troops to quell the mass protests that would ensue.
