Pictured Above: the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
By Declan Langton ’22
Managing Editor of Content
Maggie Micklo ’21 was driving home from a doctor’s appointment when the news broke. It was Jan. 6, 2021. She was listening to the radio for the final count of Electoral College votes to certify Joe Biden’s win of the presidential election. Then, the news suddenly changed: A violent mob had entered the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
“The reporters were clearly confused, and at first, I didn’t believe that people had actually entered the building,” Micklo said.
Micklo, a politics and French double major, is also the president of the Mount Holyoke College Democrats. Two summers ago, she worked in the Capitol.
“Even on a normal day, the building was always so secure,” she described. “I never imagined that there could be such a security breach. … I was terrified. It felt apocalyptic in some ways.”
During the late morning of Jan. 6, a crowd of hundreds had assembled on the Capitol lawn. Among these people were the far-right extremist group, the Proud Boys, whom former President Donald Trump had previously told to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate.
In the early afternoon, Trump addressed the crowd, saying “You have to show strength” before instructing them to march to the Capitol building. “We’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” Trump said, referring to those challenging the presidential certification, including Texas Republican Ted Cruz and Missouri Republican Josh Hawley.
After 1 p.m., Trump called again for his supporters to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.” Within the hour, the barricades surrounding the building were either breached or opened. TikTok user Marcus DiPaola captured the moment Capitol police opened a barricade on the building’s northeast side. An officer can be seen gesturing inward toward the building. From the video, it is unclear whom he is directing. Members of the crowd already inside beckoned their fellow insurrectionists past the perimeter. After 2 p.m., the mob stormed the building.
Micklo and her family followed the events while sitting by the TV. Her mother read tweets from her congressman aloud.
Assistant Professor of Politics Adam Hilton was also watching the events live. “I knew that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and a few of the other die-hard Trump defenders were planning to overturn the certification and so I was watching, expecting that kind of thing,” he said. “I had no inclination that something as dramatic as the insurrection was going to occur.” He categorized the event as “one of those moments, … like watching 9/11 happen in real-time. You kn[ew] that history was unfolding before your eyes.”
Though at first, the violence seemed sudden and unexpected, in reality, there was a massive buildup to the event.
“We’ve been on a disturbing trajectory under the Trump presidency. … Even with his soon departure and … second impeachment, it’s very disturbing how many Republicans backed him and that he’s likely going to continue to have a grip on that party, even when he’s out of office,” Hilton explained.
The hours following the insurrection demonstrated the impact of Trump’s deep ties in the Republican Party. The evening of, as the votes of the Electoral College were at last certified, Cruz denounced Trump’s actions. Later, he would speak against the second impeachment.
"What I see in play here are deep currents in American history that too many people had thought had dried up. I think Trump politically was a genius in essentially tapping into those currents and bringing them to the surface,” Professor of History Dan Czitrom said. For Czitrom, “deep currents” are systemic racism and anti-democratic features in the American political system, such as the Electoral College and the Senate, which give more power to land than people, and finally, allegations of voter fraud. Those allegations are “almost always … trying to mask the reality of vote[r] suppression,” Czitrom added.
“Trump and his xenophobia and his white nationalism, for lack of a better term, [are] very disturbing because [they’re] actually out of sync with where we think public opinion is trending, which means it’s targeting a really narrow and very militant and extreme slice of the population,” Hilton explained. “We saw on Jan. 6 what that population is capable of doing.”
Proud demonstrations of racism and anti-Semitism were in full force from the crowd of rioters. There were photos captured of a man inside the Capitol wearing a black hoodie with “Camp Auschwitz'” printed on the front. If there were any doubts about how pre-planned the event was, there were even shirts printed for the day, reading “MAGA Civil War January 6, 2021.” Vox described the font as akin to that of a Marvel blockbuster movie.
Czitrom was disturbed by this explicit anti-Semitism.“When you see people wearing T-shirts that say ‘Camp Auschwitz,’ there’s no bargaining with these people. As a Jew, a person with that kind of sweatshirt is a threat to my life. So I’m not interested in reaching out to these people. I’m not interested in finding common ground or calling for unity,” he said.
The small police presence was a sticking point for discussions in the following weeks. Micklo called the insurrection a “failure” of Capitol security and federal law enforcement. “It is a failure of so many systems that these people were able to loot and commit crimes in our Capitol and then be nicely escorted away by police officers,” she said. “I was disgusted the entire day and felt completely disappointed in our country, but not necessarily surprised. We should have seen this coming, and we should have been prepared.”
Czitrom compared the police presence on Jan. 6 to that of past protests. He thought back to the end of the 1960s and the mobilization to end the Vietnam War. As a student at SUNY Binghamton, he traveled down to Washington with a busload of his classmates. “I remember getting to Washington being utterly astounded at the number of army troops, National Guard, cops, Capitol police. It was like an armed camp,” he recalled.
Enormous police presence at protests can be found even more recently than the 1960s.
“My mind went to the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 and the brutal police reaction to peaceful demonstrations,” politics major Lydia Henning ’21 said.
“Official explanations of tepid police action cited the public outcry after the BLM protests, but that doesn't fully account for why there were so few police and why they were so easily overpowered,” Henning explained. She is currently working on a senior thesis about policing at protests.
“Police and security officials didn’t (and don't) view pro-police or pro-Trump groups as threatening to the system in the way that anti-police brutality or pro-Black life groups threaten the power of a state built on white supremacy and enforced by the police and military,” she added.
Czitrom was also concerned about these connections.
“Again, you had all these military people in full riot gear ready to rumble, and here we are Jan. 6, 2021, and where’s the security? That leads me to think there was going to be revelations about inside knowledge, inside jobs, that kind of thing. It’s hard to explain otherwise,” Czitrom said. “It wouldn’t shock me to find out that there were some members of the Capitol police or even Congress that were somehow implicated in this,” he added.
Czitrom’s theorization is not a far reach. According to the magazine Mother Jones, a Capitol Police officer was seen taking a selfie with a rioter. Twenty other officers are under investigation for demonstrating similar sympathies. There were also off-duty officers who joined the mob that day and proudly flashed their badges as they entered the building.
The insurrection goes down in history as the final official remark of white supremacy carried out and elevated by the Trump administration. Despite Trump’s second impeachment on Jan. 13, the racist overtones of his administration and his followers will continue to play a role in American politics.
“However the arrests and the prosecution shakes out, that’s not going to solve [...] The drift of the Republican Party, the fact that you have a majority of congressional Republicans supporting this challenge, which is utterly baseless and is really nothing more than an elaborate conspiracy theory,” Czitrom explained. “Will there be Trumpism after Trump? I think there will be. That is what people need to be thinking about.”