The Return of the Tower of Babel, Chapter Six, Saturnalia, Part 4
March on the Capitol
4. MARCH ON THE CAPITOL
On January 6th 2021, while State delegations were reporting their votes, Donald J. Trump, POTUS XLV, asked a gathering of his fans to halt the Electoral count and and concomitant regime change with a coup. No way to counter-spin or nuance this:
We won this election and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election. . . . It's a disgrace. There's never been anything like that. You can take Third World countries, just take a look . . . their elections are more honest than what we have been going through in this country. . . . [N]obody knows what the hell is going on. There's never been anything like this. We will not let them silence your voices. We're not going to let it happen. Not going to let it happen. . . . Think about it. Detroit had more votes than it had voters. Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than . . . they had voters and many other states also.19
He was talking the way he was taught to talk, the way he had always talked, the way Fred and the mafia goons talked, spinning the myths in which they lived and starred 24-7. He was weaving it out of thin air, mixing fuckery and fantasy, but it had a megalomaniac momentum and paranoid veridicality.
He said a whole lot more too, so no one should have been surprised when a materialized egregore propelled itself from the Ellipse down Pennsylvania Avenue with a goal of disrupting the vote, stopping Biden’s certification, and getting justice for themselves and their President. It wasn’t a viable coup, but it was a coup (as well as a lynch mob), and it would have killed if the opportunity had presented itself:
We fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. . . . Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution. . . . After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you.20
People “exchanged looks of astonishment and delight.”21
We’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength. . . . Be ready to fight!22
To the child king, these were activations, poor man’s mantras, the sort of magic cheerleading he was accustomed to manifesting, improvising as he went along. His goal was to inflame the rally and impose his unhappiness on Congress, Mike Pence, and the nation, and he succeeded:
The mob was ready to “tear Pence limb from limb,” former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman noted on MSNBC Saturday. It was “as dark as it gets,” he added, calling it a “set up” by Trump. He angrily responded to a chilling video of Trump supporters on Jan. 6 in which one can be heard saying that “Pence just caved,” before adding that “we’re going to drag [that] motherf**ker through the streets.”
Trump already knew by then that Pence had decided he would not aid his effort to overturn the 2020 election, noted Litman. Yet Trump still indicated to his supporters before they breached the Capitol building that Pence could be pressured into rejecting the electoral votes.
“Trump goes out to the crowd and pretends ... it’s all up to Pence,” Litman emphasized. “He knows that Pence has already decided, but keeping it open like that is designed to induce , , , murderous rage in the crowd when they do find out.”
Once Trump’s supporters discovered Pence was not going to reject the electoral votes cast for Joe Biden in key states, the crowd became “absolutely inflamed,” he continued.
“We have testimony , , , that it was no joke,” Litman said, referring to the hearings of the House select committee investigating the insurrection. “They were ready to tear him [Pence] limb from limb. So Trump plays this dishonestly in such a way to rev the crowd up to its maximum level of violence. Really sinister.”23
In the performance piece, Pence gets torn from limb to limb or hanged, but it’s not real, so he is brought back to life when the play is over. Because it isn’t a play, Trump is trapped between two powerful desires, to obliterate Pence and to resurrect him chastened. He can’t have both, but he tries to in the way that an autistic person tries to create a self-contradictory mirage.
To MAGA loyalists, the call to action was unambiguous, as real as “real” gets, from a real POTUS in the lineage of Washington, Jefferson, and the Roosevelts. They militarized with increasing resolve. Then they broke through barricades, smashed windows, kicked down doors, punched and tased guards, and took over the Capitol building briefly while Trump watched on t.v., replaying his favorite moments, giddy in prank and delight.
That wasn’t his coup. That was his Zeusian fit of thunder and lightning to scare mere mortals and pols, though it could have served his coup if he had gotten himself down from Olympus and into the Iliad. The coup was in the dashboard behind the hoopla.
He had a scheme. It was a Rube Goldberg machine of a scheme, but it hung together if the dominos fell and balls rolled into their holes setting off pendulums whacking weights into other weights. It was concocted by Algonquin J. Calhoun, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn, and Sidney Powell: Get Pence to reject Democratic electors for the six or seven states that Trump decided to claim he had won, throw them back to the legislatures for stooge MAGA slates, then have the legislatures authenticate these Republican replacements. It was ingenious in its way, a last-ditch attempt to reinterpret the 12th Amendment to the Constitution and bend rules that were more dubious and malleable than most people, even those paid to know, realized. Business had been conducted for generations by gentleman’s rules and common law, nothing more obligatory or constitutional holding succession in place. But Trump was neither a gentleman nor a rules guy.
Trump’s trouble was, it was based on the notion that he had the majority of the America populace and a friendly deep FBI and military behind him. That was a requirement for a real coup. He didn’t. He didn’t even have his Vice President or most of his own party. And more than half of America would have, in the trope of George Conway, still husband then of his Senior Counselor Kellyanne, crawled through glass to stop him.
At very least it would have created a constitutional crisis and given him a pretext to call out the troops. Matt Taibbi pointed out the grandiosity on both sides, Trump on the power of his phantom army and the Democrats in trying to pin the non-phantom version on him. It was a fake showtime coup fronting an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine doomed to break down at the marble or the latch:
I don’t mean to understate the seriousness of January 6th, even though it’s been absurdly misreported for over a year now. No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup.” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t [spend] 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says, “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either “coup” or “insurrection” in describing it.24
The March on the Capitol is difficult to characterize because it was many things at once:
•It was the aggregate outcome of Trump’s presidency and governing style: dog whistles producing temporary autonomous zones. That the assault was conducted by Trump’s Rent-A-Mob cannot be minced or nuanced away. He levied the full force of the “Stop the Steal” egregore and, like zombies, the crowd advanced to its post-hypnotic command. Donald called the march a “love fest”; I’d modify that to “a demagogue’s idea of a love fest” as well as a sociopath’s view of “love.”
Before Trump had even finished his speech, approximately eight thousand people started moving up the Mall. “We’re storming the Capitol!” some yelled. “It’s us versus the cops. . . . Every law maker who breaks their own stupid fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung. . . .” One man was “holding a coiled noose. People yelled, ‘Hang Mike Pence!’” Another said to a cop, “We can take you out.” Somebody yelled, “Shoot the politicians! Fight for Trump. . . . Where the fuck is Nancy?”25
Memes turned into political theater. Political theater became an actual riot During the French Revolution, events of Pluviôse and Thermidor played a similar role, albeit more bloodily with a working guillotine.
•It was the climax of a collision between Trump’s delusion of authoritarian rule with the reality of a still functional democracy and deep governing bureaucracy.
Before the 2022 House hearings on the January 6th love fest, even knowledgeable Americans didn’t realize how little Trump understood the Presidency, even after four years of ostensibly embodying it, and how much he still thought of himself as a combination of godfather and king who could order anyone to do his bidding—also how much he favored appearance over effect and how poorly managed his temper was, how easily he crossed lines of civil society and basic good judgment. Sebastian Murdock recounted Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the June 28th meeting of the committee, a Caligulan tragicomedy:
Former President Donald Trump knew his supporters were armed with weapons the day of the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol attack, but insisted they be allowed to watch him speak before the riot.
“I heard the president say something to the effect of, ‘I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags [metal detectors] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here,’” said Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. . . .
Hutchinson recalled that Trump had been informed by Secret Service that his supporters had brought weapons to his rally shortly before the attack on the Capitol. Those weapons included bear spray, spears, guns and flagpoles used as weapons.
Trump, however, was apparently fixated on the crowd size and demanded more of his supporters be allowed to bypass metal detectors to watch him speak. . . .“He was furious because he wanted the arena we had at the ellipse to be maxed out to capacity,” Hutchinson said of Trump’s demeanor. . . .
Trump wanted to go to the Capitol with them, according to the testimony. As his supporters ― many of them armed ― began the walk to the Capitol, Secret Service officers whisked Trump away in his presidential limo, but the then-president demanded he be taken to the Capitol. . . .
“The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the f-ing president, take me up to the Capitol now.’ To which [Secret Service agent Bobby Engel] responded, ‘Sir, we have to go back to the West Wing,’” Hutchinson testified, recounting a story another Trump aide had told her.
An “irate” Trump then attempted to grab the steering wheel and reached towards Engel’s neck. . . .
“Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel and when Mr. [Anthony] Ornato had recounted the story to me [Hutchison said] he had motioned towards his clavicles.”26
We learned later from the January 6th Committee that “the fucking president” wanted 10,000 National Guardsmen to form a protective phalanx for him as he marched to the Capitol, straight from Hollywood’s Roman Empire or a past life. Aides laughed behind his back—that he was going to march to the Capitol when they had never seen him walk the length of a golf course without a motorized cart.
In another part of her testimony, Hutchinson showed how Trump’s January 6th behavior was part of an extended tantrum by someone who was never taught how to lose, or permitted to lose:
[F]ollowing a meeting between Trump and then-Attorney General William Barr in early December 2020, after Barr had told the Associated Press there was no evidence of fraud, Hutchinson recalled walking into the White House dining room and found a smashed porcelain plate and ketchup dripping down the wall. Trump had thrown his lunch at the wall in a fit of rage.27
She also said that Rudy Giuliani had told her that it was going to be “‘a great day.’ Why? she asked.
“‘We’re going to the Capitol. It’s going to be great. The president is going to be there. He’s going to look powerful. He’s going to be with the members. He’s going to be with the senators.’”28
It was like delighting in the re-run of a film about Cincinnatus or Ceausescu on a street surveillance webcam.
Trump called her testimony “fake news.”
•It was a cumulative “white supremacy” Mardi Gras militia drill, a Tea Party, a Sadie Hawkins whoop: “Let’s go fuck them up!” It was preparation for the real thing, after the Great Collapse and Inland Sea.
I mean, what would have come next if they had taken over the Capitol and killed a few Aristos? They didn’t have guns, soldiers, or aircraft to carry out a coup, not yet. Instead, they rehearsed, laid groundwork, and developed language and tactics. They ran a proxy scenario in Trumpian finery.
•It was the grand finale of the Trump Reality Show and the opening salvo of another ceremony. It was the end of the game and the commencing of something that won’t be a game. Super-journalist Mark Danner imagines an alternative outcome to January 6th, 2021, with a different Secret Service agent, a cowed Mike Pence, and a shamelessly determined and power-hungry Republican Congress voting Trump back in office and leaving the Democrats to plead before a Republican-stacked Supreme Court:
There in his chic black overcoat he would have waved, smiled, thrust his fist in the air as the tens of thousands of his faithful, far and near, raised their voices in a bloodcurdling roar. And finally, after shaking scores of hands, taking a few selfies, and perhaps offering an inspiring word or two through a megaphone, he would have led the crowd up the steps, as the cheers rose deafeningly and the little screens of the cell phones held aloft conveyed him making his triumphant way up to the domed temple in thousands of miniature images.
For had the president chosen to stride up those steps, who would have dared stop him? His followers would have fallen in behind him and the Capitol police would have fallen away before him and he would have breached the doors himself, his gold-orange hair shining beneath the mythic white dome in the crisp cold sunlight of that historic January day.
Is that how Donald John Trump, forty-fifth president of the United States, had imagined it? And if so, what did he then intend? Would he have led his chanting, flag-waving followers through the ceremonial doors, past the looming statues, down the marble hallways, and into the Senate chamber, there to face squarely his white-haired, stalwart vice-president, poised in frozen shock on the dais? With his Senate supporters gathered around their victorious leader, shaking his hand, pounding him on the back, would President Trump have smiled up at Mike Pence, held out his famously small hand, and demanded the certificates certifying the electoral votes of the “stolen” election? And would Pence, a man who had shown himself until this very day to be one of the most obsequious public officials in American history, have dared refuse? And then perhaps, in a dramatic gesture for his rowdy minions and the senators and the congressmen and the television cameras and the whole world watching, Donald Trump with his own two hands would have torn those tokens of legitimacy asunder.29
•It was QAnon in real time, made for YouTube, cell phones, and FBI re-runs.
•It was old-fashioned civil disobedience, capping seven months (or four years) of exploratory disobedience, a cancel-culture escalation from Charlottesville to Minneapolis and Portland (Oregon), from Tuscoloosa to Lansing to D.C.
•It was recreational violence, ritual vandalism, gang initiation, experimental transgression, criminal entitlement, exercise of open carry, militia machismo, and trial by lynch mob. It was “We’re taking our house back. You shoot and I’ll take your fucking ass out.”30
It may not have been a real coup, and casualty figures may have been inflated, but they did gas, shock, and pummel Capitol police officers, many of whom were Trump voters, and they would have murdered Congressfolk if they had had time. They intended to stop the electoral vote, but they needed Mike Pence to collaborate. The three and counting Supreme stooges would presumably handle the rest. But Pence wouldn’t play—he was too old-school—and the Supreme Court wouldn’t either. They didn’t want to be a pretend tribunal in a banana republic.
It was a coup. What Trump and his cohorts believed, not unreasonably given how coups are carried out in banana republics that don’t have bicentennials, was that they could throw around a bunch of rounds and fireworks and, once more, force Pence to dj the main event, reject those swing-state Biden electors, send them back to those GOP-controlled state legislatures and, with the ostensible backing of Republican House members, use the Rube Goldberg machine to hold onto power without the military—as if the Aristos and Pentagon would have stood for that. . . . But Trump had already seen how his bullying and chutzpah tended to cow everyone in his path—why not Senators and the Supreme Court?
Journalist Sonam Sheth summarized “the six-step plan for Vice President Pence to unilaterally throw the election to Trump, something Pence did not have the legal or constitutional authority to do. But Trump who wholeheartedly supported the plan, pushed Pence publicly and privately to stop Congress from certifying Biden's electoral victory:
A federal judge skewered Eastman and Trump last month over their efforts to subvert After "filing and losing more than sixty suits, this plan was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means," US District Judge David Carter said in a scathing ruling, adding that the "illegality of the plan was obvious."
Trump and Eastman "launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history," Carter wrote. "Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower — it was a coup in search of a legal theory."31
You have to give Eastman credit. A loyal Trumpian waterboy, he grokked that pomp and circumstance could be more compelling than law. It didn’t matter if it was a jerry-rigged argument. The idea was to be so loud and convincing that the MAGA Mission Impossible force would somehow get their marionette back into the Oval Office.
Election conspiracy theories that are tied to evangelical apocalypticism bypass rational discrimination about what can work and what can’t. The MAGA legions didn’t care; they went straight to a bible-driven vigilante ‘taking back of America.’ Evangelical crusaders provided an ideal vehicle for Trump to sacralize his own unevangelical agenda. Like FLDS leader Warren Jeffs, he could put on the royal robes and mantle when necessary to preach either women or power. Journalist Jon Ward describes a “spiritual warfare” that played a much greater role in January 6th and its subsequent revivals than initially thought:
Two weeks after President Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, a group of Christian pastors stood on stage inside a nondenominational church in a suburb of Phoenix, whipping the congregation into a frenzy of prayer mixed with violent and bloody imagery.
After 45 minutes of singing, and a request for money, and another 45 minutes of remarks from a featured speaker, the real show began: A rock band began playing anthemic background music while a procession of self-proclaimed “prophets” came to the stage to weave a tale of war between good and evil. . . .
“Let there be the roar from the army of God!” yelled one Florida pastor named Donald Lynch, pumping his fist as hundreds of people stood around the stage jumping up and down, raising their arms in the air and crying out. “Release the roar! Release the roar! Out of your belly!” [For real noir, it should have been David Lynch, Dennis Hopper, and the Sandman.]
Lynch spoke of a vision he claimed God had given him of an evil giant — symbolizing Biden and the Democrats —and of instructions he claimed God had given him to deal violently with that giant. [It was Christianized djin warfare and the reappearance of the Welsh dark man of the forest.]
“God said, ‘Do you have the stomach to finish the job? Put your foot on his chin and expose the neck. Pick up that weapon and find you are strong enough to wield it,” Lynch said, his husky voice straining. He began to shout. “Finish this! Finish this! I say finish this!”
It was pandemonium. It went on for over an hour. And this same scene was repeated in churches over the next month in seven states then-President Donald Trump was trying to throw out millions of legitimate votes in a bid to stay in power: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona. [It was an attempt at old-fashioned Jehovan purgation, circa 1000 AD.]
Roughly two dozen religious leaders traveled to these battleground states over the course of a month, holding revival meetings where they mixed the rhetoric of violent spiritual warfare with prayers for the reinstatement of Trump in the presidency.32
[And you are surprised that this cowed every aspiring Republican politician? Trump had once again worked chaos magic.]
This isn’t new for either America or the world. It went on in Persia, Rome, France, Saxony, Germany, and Rwanda.
•It was the moment when ordinary politicians like Mitch and Kevin realized that the “show” was real, the hyperbolic rhetoric neither hyperbolic nor rhetorical—and that encouraging sociopathy as means to political ends was like a pyromaniac doing a controlled burn.
That’s where we still stand, between half-baked ideologues and their own stale sanctimonies, in a maw of meretricious performance art and mock crusades.
Little Marco, Josh Hawley, and the others woke up like Indiana Pence, “These are crazy people and now they’re in our house and could kill us.” The line between pretend vigilantism and true target practice had been crossed; there were ex-military dudes and hunters carrying guns, looking for legislators. They were trigger-happy and in lynch mode. They spoke openly about it later: "We broke into the Capitol . . . we got inside, we did our part. We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin' brain but we didn't find her."33
They would have if she had turned the wrong way in the hall. They would have murdered Pence. That would not have been to Trump’s ultimate benefit.
More to the point, the warlocks touched Ben Franklin’s implements, the stations and laptops of powers, and saw that they were empty, nothing but petrified wood, paperweights, and stale runes.
•It was a revolt against intellectual elitism, scientism, social snobbism, mandated decorum, Aristo duplicity, classist control, and a technocratic takeover of health freedom, the God code and Christic vibration. The anger over Anthony Fauci’s contribution to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute and his bumbling cover-up in that co-conspiratorial Nature Magazine article—the street didn’t need to read the publication to pick up the vibe—extended to much of the technocracy, though they did prize their own guns, tasers, and smart phones.
•It was as much Abbie Hoffman as Enrique Tarrio, Jr. That there is no longer a distinction between symbol and reality, or corporate fascism and neo-Liberalism, means that any attempt to overthrow an American government will mix allies with enemies, and patriots (either way) with informers and spies.
•The assault was a subconscious ritual that will continue to ripen as long as Aquarian energy is driven by Piscean hypermaterialism through clogged conduits. There is no reason otherwise why vegans, anarchists, and naturopaths should be marauding with Oath Keepers and Proud Boys under QAnon’s kōans and a Confederate flag. A friend confided, “I’m a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, always have been. But I don’t know who’s who anymore. I mean, who’s the reactionaries and who’s the progressives?”
Scorecards are obsolete, uniforms irrelevant. The reactionaries have become the ones standing up for health freedom and food security, while the Liberals support Big Agri and Big Pharma. Who is Left and who is Right when anti-vaxx conspiracists join the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter outside Barclay Center to protest Kyrie Irving’s not being allowed to play, when the Canadian government sends out Environmental Agents in Hazmat suits to poison rivers in New Brunswick on behalf of First Nations? Even the police don’t know which law or order they are defending. Who is pretending to liberate us as they bind us in chains?
Do you think that Derek Chauvin was anything more than a shoddily trained, traumatized, deer-in-the-headlights underclass bully, a sacrificial lamb and scapegoat for Liberal posturing and white guilt? Democratic Party cowardice in pinning their long-term complicity on the same poor dude they will call on the next time some scary-looking guy is loitering outside their gate or stalking their daughter is as laughable as it is unconscionable. When Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi calls the cops, do you think he or she is going to care whether Derek Chauvin or Denzel Washington shows up. [Paul Pelosi did have to call and clearly didn’t care.]
•In a 1960s poem “The Alchemist,” Robert Kelly recommended taking the politicians out of the building into daylight and showing them “the fire & energy of at least one immediate star.” Otherwise, he warned, “we will walk forever down the hallways into mirrors and / stagger and look to our left hand for support & and the sun / will have set inside us & the world will be filled with Law.”34
Filled with law—that’s what authoritarian politicians on both sides of the aisle have in mind. Show them the fire & energy of at least one immediate star—in less literary terms, that’s what the January 6th mob did—showed the Aristos the local daystar. And still we stagger and reach out for hands that aren’t there. And, as Mick Jagger sang long ago, none will ever do. Rising seas and failing banks testify to performance art as governance.
•Anyone who claims they were only White Supremacists, Right Wing seditionists, and Trump acolytes—though that’s exactly who they were—is missing the point. They were showing the heads of the town the sort of hydrogen fusion that supports their every yawp and breath, the privilege and gifts they take for granted, the photon flow behind each volt of photosynthesis, caviar, scotch, transportation, stock option, graft, pork, and privilege. They were attacking, if we didn’t know it (and they didn’t either) the theft of identity and freedom by a high-tech transhumanist hegemony, a medico-pharmaceutical monopoly, a used-car oligarchy, a surveillance state that figured out how to dupe the worst of communism and the worst of fascism into serving each other (see the next chapter on Ukraine). They were making a stand against the multinational elite and a liability-free plutocracy that seeks to take over space-time.
They may not have grokked the machine in the garden, but they feared the demise of everything that made them human, the agency and liberty to pursue life, happiness, and everything the fuck else.
Despite their Trumpian definition of “human,” cowboy-militia tactics, alt-right playbook, and absence of compassion and social responsibility, they were evolving from a rowdy, pugnacious adolescence in which rude boys, proud girls, and dead white zombies stage fascist theater and perform testosteroned ass-kicking. Their zodiacal vibration was not that far from the rasta battle cry: “So if you continue to burn up the herbs, / we gonna burn down the cane fields.”35 That’s herbs with an aspirated Jamaican “h” for cannabis (and coups).
We don’t know what January’s dark day of the soul will bear in coming decans. Having passed through the underworld, participants may yet molt into benigner battalions and kinder gods. But the head of the snake can’t be placated or strong-armed away; it must be met and converted. When dragons no longer look like Asian ornamentals, they will still be energy waves in the atmosphere. That’s the carpet on which Aquarius will enter, the rest of the zodiac rearranged into his tail.
Endnotes
19. “Transcript of Trump’s Speech at Rally Before US Capitol Riot,” sfgate.com, January 13, 2021.
20. Luke Mogelson, “The Storm,” New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2021, p. 34 and Danner, “Be Ready to Fight,” The New York Review of Books, Feb. 11, 2021, pp. 4 and 6 (rearranged by me).
21. Luke Mogelson, “The Storm,” p. 34.
22. Luke Mogelson, “The Storm,” p. 34 and Danner, “Be Ready to Fight,” p. 4.
23. Mary Papenfuss, “Trump 'Induced Murderous Rage' In Insurrection Mob, Says Former Justice Official,” Huffington Post, June 18, 2022. I have rearranged this quote for readability.
24. Matt Taibbi, “A Tale of Two Authoritarians,” TK News, Substack, January 7, 2022.
25. Luke Mogelson, “The Storm,” pp. 34-36.
26. Sebastian Murdock, “Trump Knew Supporters Had Weapons On Jan. 6 But Didn't Care, Top Aide Testifies,” Huffington Post, June 28, 2022.
27. Mark Danner, “The Slow-Motion Coup,” The New York Review of Books, October 6, 2022, p. 39.
28. Mark Danner, “The Slow-Motion Coup,” The New York Review of Books, October 6, 2022, p. 39.
29 Tom LoBianco, “Trump was alerted that Cabinet considered using 25th Amendment, aide testifies,” Yahoo News, June 28, 2022.
30. Mia Jankowicz, “A judge dismissed claims by a Capitol riot suspect that he shouldn't be held responsible because Trump put him up to it,” Business Insider, February 24, 2021.
31. Sonam Sheth, “GOP Rep. Chip Roy complained that 'frigging Rudy needs to hush' as Giuliani led Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election,” Yahoo Insider, April 15, 2022.
32. Jon Ward, “Radical beliefs in 'spiritual warfare' played a major role in Jan. 6, an expert argues,” Yahoo News, February 16, 2023.
33. Lauren Frias, “2 women charged in Capitol riot said they were 'looking' for Pelosi 'to shoot her in the friggin' brain,’” Business Insider, January 30, 2021
34. Robert Kelly, “The Alchemist,” in Grossinger (editor), The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century, p. 131.
35. John Holt, “Police in Helicopter,” AllMusic, 1983.
