The US Capitol uprising was impressive and predictable, the result of a Republican Party that repeatedly allowed President Donald Trump’s destructive behavior.
When Trump was a presidential candidate in 2016, Republican officials ignored his plea to supporters to “take the shit out” of protesters. Less than a year after he took office, Republican Party leaders argued that he was taken out of context when he said there were “very good people” on both sides of a deadly demonstration of white supremacy.
Last summer, most party leaders turned a blind eye when Trump forcibly removed hundreds of peaceful protesters from a demonstration near the White House so he could pose with a Bible in front of a church.
But the violent siege of the Capitol offers a new, and perhaps final, moment of reckoning for the GOP. The party’s usual excuses for Trump – he is not a typical politician and is not interested in following Washington’s subtleties – have not reached images of mobs occupying some of the most sacred spaces of American democracy.
The party, which was defined in the past four years by its loyalty to Trump, began to recalibrate after Wednesday’s chaos.
One of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said “that’s enough.”
Deputy Nancy Mace, RS.C., said Trump’s accomplishments in office “were eliminated today.”
Trump’s former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, now a special envoy to Northern Ireland, has joined an increasing number of government officials who are resigning. “I can not do it. I can’t stay, ”Mulvaney told CNBC on Thursday. “Those who choose to stay, and I talked to some of them, are choosing to stay because they are concerned that the president might put someone worse.”
Stephanie Grisham, chief of staff to First Lady Melania Trump and former press secretary of the White House, presented her resignation. Deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, White House social secretary Rickie Niceta and deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews also resigned, officials said.
For the party to move forward, it will be necessary to deal with the reality that Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and a margin of 306-232 at the Electoral College, a result that Congress certified on Thursday, when he ended up accepting all the electoral votes.
Trump acknowledged that his term was coming to an end, but not that he really lost.
“Although I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts confirm it, there will be an orderly transition on January 20,” he said in a statement minutes after Congress certified the vote. “I always said that we would continue our fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it is only the beginning of our struggle to make America great again! “
Former Republican President George W. Bush described the violent crowd as “a sick and moving sight”. He refused to call Trump or his allies, but the implication was clear when Bush said the siege “was carried out by people whose passions were ignited by falsehoods and false hopes”.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a leading House Republican and daughter of Bush’s vice president, was much more direct in an interview with Fox News.
“There is no doubt that the president formed the crowd. The president stirred up the crowd, ”said Cheney. “He lit the flame.”
Bush and Cheney were already among a smaller group of Republican officials willing to condemn Trump’s most outrageous behavior at times. The overwhelming majority of the GOP has been much more reserved, eager to keep Trump’s fire base on their side.
Still, Trump’s control over his party seemed somewhat weakened when members of Congress returned to the Capitol on Wednesday night, after spending several hours hiding in safe places after being evacuated. Before they left, a handful of Republican senators and more than 100 Republican members of the House opposed the vote to certify Biden’s victory.
It was a movement led by Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, each with their own presidential ambitions for 2024, over the objection of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who warned that US democracy “would go into a deadly spiral” Congress rejected the state election results.
When they resumed the debate, however, much of the energy behind the extraordinary momentum had dissipated. Several Republicans abandoned their objections entirely. Hawley and Cruz did not, but they offered reduced arguments.
Hawley condemned the day’s violence, but also called for an investigation into “irregularities and fraud”. Earlier in the day, his hometown newspaper, The Kansas City Star, released an editorial accusing Hawley of “having blood on his hands” for allowing Trump’s false claims.
Other Republicans were clearly more concerned with the violence of the day and the events that preceded them.
“Dear MAGA- I am one of you,” tweeted former White House adviser Alyssa Farah. “But I need you to hear me: the election was NOT stolen. We lose.”
Jefferson Thomas, who led the Trump campaign in Colorado, expressed some regret about joining the Trump team in the first place, calling Wednesday’s events “a shame for our country”.
“This is not what I imagined when I signed up for #MAGA. If I knew it would be like this, I would never have entered, ”he wrote on Twitter.
While there were obvious cracks in Trump’s control over the Republican Party, his fiercest detractors came from a family group of frequent critics.
Former Trump defense secretary Jim Mattis, who denounced the president as a threat to the constitution last year, described the violent attack on the Capitol as “an effort to subdue American democracy by the government of the crowd” and “was fueled by Mr. Trump. ”
“His use of the presidency to destroy confidence in our election and poison our fellow citizens was made possible by pseudo-political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice,” said Mattis.
Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s communications director at the White House in 2017, often says harsh words to Trump. But he offered his toughest on Wednesday to Trump’s Republican facilitators.
“Republican elected officials who still support Trump need to be tried alongside him for treason,” he tweeted.
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Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard, from Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.