A day of infamy but also a clarifying one. The scenes at the US capitol building yesterday were both a wholly predictable and a predicted finale to Donald Trump’s wretched presidency. Predictable because it was obvious four years ago – at least it was obvious to those who cared to open their eyes – that Trump was a festering threat to America’s great democratic experiment. And predicted because everything Trump has said and done since losing the presidential election in November led inexorably to this final, shabby, shameful coda to his presidency.
For if you spend years lying to people and years telling them they are being cheated, you cannot feign surprise if they subsequently take you at your word and act in ways that could only – and even then only tenuously – be justified if you had actually been telling them the truth. The storming of the Capitol was not an aberration; it was the final proof of Trump’s presidency.
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