Новости за 07.01.2021

The pro-Trump mob pushed through barricades and climbed walls, smashed windows and carried away mementos of their invasion. They jostled through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, pressed together shoulder to shoulder, shouting and talking and laughing. And they did it all largely without masks during the deadliest pandemic in a century.

The president incited a break-in at the Capitol; then Mick Mulvaney resigned as special envoy to Northern Ireland. Elaine Chao is reportedly stepping down as secretary of transportation. White House aides, including Sarah Matthews and Stephanie Grisham, slinked out by the hour. A cluster of advisers appear to be close behind.

The violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday by Donald Trump supporters, who were egged on by the president’s false claims that the election was fraudulent, was a bizarre and macabre event without precedent in Washington this side of the War of 1812. Four people died as the mob rampaged through congressional offices and the floor of the Senate, while politicians donned gas masks and hustled through secret corridors to safety. The riot revealed just how vulnerable the Capitol is—not just its workers, but its secrets. Читать дальше...

For more than three decades, photojournalist Ron Haviv has covered wars and unrest across five continents. One of his first international assignments was covering the 1989 coup attempt in Panama.* So when he watched President Trump order his fever-pitch mob of supporters to “walk down to the Capitol” on Wednesday to somehow correct the “egregious assault on our democracy” involved in counting and certifying votes, Haviv could gauge better than most what might happen next. 

There was a brief moment on Wednesday—before hundreds of MAGA goons stormed the Capitol and chased out lawmakers certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, before cable networks and social media feeds were inundated with images of would-be insurrectionists stalking the halls of Congress with Confederate flags and cavorting on the rostrum in the Senate chamber, before shots were fired and tear gas deployed and blood spilled, before the attempted coup was well and truly underway—when it... Читать дальше...

Edmund Fawcett has remarkable timing. His book Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition appeared two weeks before the U.S. election and a few weeks before a Brexit deadline. With Donald Trump’s refusal to concede defeat in a free and fair election, support in the Republican party for this openly authoritarian move, and Britain dropping out of a free-trade customs union, we can safely say that conservatism as we’ve known it is in an existential crisis. A tradition that once defined itself by the virtues of the rule of law... Читать дальше...

A dazed feeling, somewhere between nausea and numbness, washed over me Wednesday afternoon. It conjured up the way I felt after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. And it brought back that horrible morning in 2001 when planes flew into the twin towers.

America’s two-hundred-year streak of peacefully transferring power came to an end on Wednesday after President Donald Trump incited thousands of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, where lawmakers had gathered to confirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the November election. The seizure of the Capitol marked the first time the seat of government had fallen to hostile forces since British troops burned Washington in 1814.

President Trump solicited the march to the Capitol. He would be with them, he said. Instead he abandoned his cult within minutes: The presidential motorcade arrived at the White House just as his supporters rushed police lines separating them from the joint session of Congress that had just begun the process of accepting each state’s electors. Once these “patriots” advanced on them, Capitol police officers launched volleys of pepper spray at the crowd, who carried red MAGA flags and black-and-blue Back the Blue flags. Читать дальше...

“For one day, on January 6th, you, Vice President Pence, will be the most powerful man on earth…On that day, you and you alone will have the power to set not just America, but all of humanity free—or you will have the power to sentence us all to slavery.”