Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
That's it. That's the tweet.
It's been seared into my mind since Wednesday. I saw it come across my feed in more-or-less realtime during the Insurrection Event. Both houses of Congress had been adjourned and were in the process of sheltering, the mob had broken into the Capitol and was continuing to fight and pour their way in, and this, this is what the President had to say at that precise point in time.
Stepping back in time from there a little bit, I'm thinking of the quote from the senior official downplaying the President's reaction to the election back in November, as reported in the Washington Post, "What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?...He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave."
The day before the Insurrection Event, Zeynep Tufekci had a piece published in The Atlantic about the President's phone call to pressure the Secretary of State of Georgia to find his missing votes. She compares that event (among others) as pointing a loaded gun at our democracy. She makes the appeal that these performances, these little humorings, are nonetheless incredibly dangerous. We can think that nothing will happen, but that doesn't make them simply performative:
A theater show is performative because the actors and the audience know it’s a performance. If a gun is hanging on the wall in a Chekhov play, we know two things: that it will go off by the end of the play, and that it must actually be a fake or unloaded gun, because it’s only a play. When a loaded gun is brought out in real life, the fact that the person holding it is incompetent or clownish doesn’t make that gun performative; it’s still a gun.
On Wednesday, the curtain was pulled back to reveal the difference between the simulation and the reality, and that gun—and at least one other—went off inside the Capitol, claiming a handful of lives. I admit, I honestly feel a little bit silly for holding out as much disbelief as I had. It's not that the President is suddenly someone terribly different than who he's showed himself to be in the last five or fifteen or thirty years, it's that we realize that our assumptions of security and stability are just that. On the Sunday or Monday before the Insurrection Event, I remember thinking to myself that we probably, optimistically, ten years away from open political violence. Actually, my original number was five years, but that seemed a bit dour. On that Tuesday evening, as I was heading home, I thought to myself it was a shame that there wasn't a two-foot blizzard on its way in for the next day. I'm still holding out hope for one for the week of the Inauguration.
If you hand my 20-month old son anything glass, there's about even odds it ends up getting thrown and broken. It confounds the mind to think of that as a metaphor for the President and democracy. And yet.