Scheduled chaos on January 6

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"

          Donald Trump

Expect protests, violence, and maybe mobilization of the military.

Celebrations of the resiliency of American democracy are premature. January 6 is the day Congress counts the electoral votes. That is the day Trump called for people to demand Congress void the election and retain him in office. I don't expect those demonstrations to be peaceful. Trump has invited them to be unruly. Violence is a tool Michael Flynn said Trump should use. Trump can save democracy, he said, by observing violence, invoking the Insurrection Act to mobilize troops, declaring marshal law, and voiding the 2020 elections in states Trump lost.

Protests and crowds have a mind of their own. They get out of control easily. In this case there is both fuel for the fire in an aroused citizenry and a president with two weeks left on his term who has openly welcomed rebellion against an election he calls illegitimate.

Portland, summer of 2020

Democrats should not be surprised. Trump supporters in the streets on January 6 will consider it fair game and payback. They saw what happened this summer in the aftermath of George Floyd's  death. Americans protested on the streets. Some of those protests became unruly, then flagrantly so, especially in Portland, Oregon. If Democrats can be violent, so can they. 

The disruptions in Oregon caused some alert Democrats--Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, among them--to speak out promptly, saying peaceful protests were fine but violence was wrong "period, end of story."  Unfortunately, public officials with the power to direct police and national guard troops were slower and more reluctant. There were protesters saying that "violence is the language of the oppressed," that violence was the vehicle of change, and that opposing violence was blaming the victim. Protests got hijacked by people who used them as cover for vandalism, looting, and hooliganism. Trump and the Trump-oriented media called that "Biden's America."  

Now it is Trump's turn. He has one remaining card to play. He has direct democracy, in the form of pro-Trump protesters, whose assembly can turn violent, which will enable Trump--require him, he will say--to restore order. A great many Republican voters remain convinced that Trump simply must have been robbed of victory. We are seeing another iteration of the classic mechanism of the inertia of belief. Believing is seeing. When the evidence doesn't fit the belief, disbelieve the evidence.

Too late. Rebellion is in the air

The gatekeepers of Republican opinion have lost their ability to control what they created in their audiences and constituents. Fox News daytime news hosts are disbelieved by the same audience that watches their evening opinion hosts. Rupert Murdock's NY Post has lost patience with Trump and told him to stop his insanity. Too late. Trump has become frantic with tweets because the public officials he wishes would validate his claim of a fraudulent election are refusing. Trump is lashing out at election officials, governors, senators, the courts, and his own appointed law enforcement people, saying they lack courage. 

By defining it as a matter of courage--the wisdom and justice of it being assumed--Trump asks the public to step up and supply the force to keep him in office. 

Trump's supporters don't want to stand down. Some are Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys, happy to find trouble. Many are gun owners. Most are regular citizens who believe President Trump and consider themselves patriotic. The notion of the brave private citizen, fighting for justice and democracy against tyranny, is part of the mythic image of themselves. They like the fact that Trump does not accept losing. The election could have been stolen. They write me: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." 

Boogaloo Boys, armed in Michigan 

I consider a letter I received from a retired physician, a White male, a self-identified Christian, to be a primary source. He expresses a point of view that circulates within Christian and conservative social media circles. He is adamant that Trump deserves office and that the country's welfare depends on it. He takes "massive election fraud" as a given. A coup d'état is not destroying a free democracy; it is saving it.

He wrote me: 

     As I see it, and I am not alone by far, this is the very serious state to which America had deteriorated in the past 12 years prior to a non-politician being elected President. I believe we are headed for even worse if this massive election fraud is allowed to stand. We would lose all the advances President Trump has achieved in the past 4 years by his reversal of this deterioration toward a totalitarian oligarchy.

 
     Trump has been constantly maligned, lied about, demeaned, and continuously attacked like no other sitting President in our history by the majority of the corrupt liberal media. That media is itself controlled by Wall Street, the corporate, entertainment, judicial and political elite in order to maintain their power, control, and wealth at the expense of the American people. Our very existence as a free democracy is in peril.  Trump has the guts, tenacity, perseverance, and ego to say, as Churchill once said, '"never, never, never give up." [Signed] _____

I understand that this letter is from just one person, an anecdote, not data. Democrats should not dismiss this person as a nut case, a guy who bought the Trump con. He communicates with many people who feel as he does, people who believe they are saving democracy by overturning a democratic election. A contradiction? Not to him, not to people who start with the premise that Biden is undeserving of the office, that he could not possibly have won a fair election, and that the people who did vote for Biden were sheep led astray by elites. 

Trump can sell. He has true believers. 

Kansas state capital, September 2020

The protests will not be peaceful. How violent they become is not in the hands of wise, responsible people. The violence will be in the hands of people who gather into crowds, some of whom were motivated to carry rifles to statehouses, to cross state lines to confront and engage demonstrators, and to wave guns at passersby. People who are itching for a fight usually find one. They may consider it a "Flight 93" situation on the morning of 911, in which airplane passengers need to take action because the alternative is certain death; there is nothing to lose and the world is at stake.

I expect January 6th to be a very bad day in America. Trump will welcome this. It may bring him what he wants. I suspect Bill Barr did not want any part of it. His odd early leaving the AG post was a signal of how bad it might get and what Trump has in mind.