From the June 28 House hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson provided details on former President Donald Trump’s insistence on joining his supporters as they left his rally outside the White House and marched on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump knew they were armed and told his aides he was not worried about getting injured by the mob, where five people were killed and hundreds injured that day. The Secret Service overruled the president and whisked him from the rally and back to the West Wing.
“’I’m the ‘effing’ president, take me to the Capitol,’” an infuriated Trump told one Secret Service, according to Hutchinson. She said Trump tried to attack the agent assigned to protect him.
So, the question: Why was Trump so insistent on joining the march that what we’ve now learned was part of the coup plot by the former president and his inner circle?
Perhaps the answer is found in the history of Italian and German fascism.
On Oct. 24, 1922, Benito Mussolini called at a rally of 60,000 fascist militants in Naples to march on Rome.
“Our program is simple: we want to rule Italy,” the soon-to-be fascist leader told the crowd.
Four days late, about 30,000 Black Shirts marched on Rome. Mussolini did not march with them, but made sure he got photographed with the marchers before they headed to the Capitol, where they planned to take power through an armed insurrection.
However, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing a civil war, capitulated to the marchers and handed power to Mussolini to avoid violence.
Mussolini and his Black Shirt marchers.
One year later, inspired by Mussolini’s march, Adolf Hitler and the nascent Nazi Party staged a coup attempt in Munich against Germany’s government, the Weimar Republic.
Unlike Mussolini, though, Hitler joined the 2,000 marchers in their infamous “Beer Hall Putsch,” which the police stopped after killing 16 Nazi Party members. Hitler escaped, but was caught two later, charged with treason.
Widely publicized, the trial gave Hitler a platform in which to spout nationalist sentiments, but he was found guilty and sent to prison for five years. He served nine months, during which time he wrote Mein Kampf.
Hitler in "prison" with his fellow insurrectionists.Credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz
Afterward, he returned to politics and within 10 years, thanks largely to a weak and ineffective Weimar government, Hitler was essentially handed the chancellorship after conservative leaders persuaded the ailing President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint him in 1933.
Once Mussolini and Hitler assumed power, fascism consumed every level of society and politics and the two leaders effectively extinguished any opposition to their rule through murder and terror.
An admirer of history’s authoritarian leaders, Trump may have considered these moments in history as he plotted his coup.
However, from what we watched in real time on Jan. 6 and what we’ve learned from the hearings – including Trump’s plotting with Congressman Scott Perry (R-Pa) to enter the House chamber (which could have been with armed insurrectionists) – his motive may have been darker.
Among the endless news on the gun-front is that of a 10-year-old girl who shot and killed a woman because the woman was arguing with her mother. This occurred more than a week after the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and two weeks after the massacre of 10 African American grocery shoppers in Buffalo, New York by a white supremacist armed with the gun owners’ weapon of choice, the AR-15.
More horrific statistics about our nation that decades ago chose unbridled access to guns over the safety of its children. No other nation on Earth allows gun violence to go so unchecked.
Whatever legislative solutions Congress passes and the President signs won’t stop the violence. The gun industry, its subsidiaries and their customers will make sure of it. No one is safe from gun violence anymore, which is what the gun industry wanted—because more people will buy guns in fear of their safety, a safety that is not secured by gun ownership. Guns haven’t saved anyone from gun violence and Uvalde is yet another example.
Rampant gun deaths in the United States, now the leading cause of death in school children, is the fruit of a decision long supported by gun owners. For decades now, I have written about the need for gun control, to limit weapons used to “assault” (a word gun owners get angry when used) and kill large numbers of people. Initially, I blamed the National Rifle Association; the Gun Owners of America; and lawmakers, governors, and presidents (some too afraid or too bought by these group) for the slowly escalating violence.
And gun violence has been slowly escalating as states and Congress passed more and more promiscuous gun laws – conceal carry, open carry, “permitless” carry, eliminating assault weapon bans – while gun manufacturers not only sold more guns, but more powerful weapons. It’s like a frog in a pot of cold water on a stovetop burner, ignoring the danger as the water gradually heats to boiling. The nation is awash in guns, all kinds of guns, corresponding exactly with the gun violence that, with 250 mass shootings in the last month, has the nation boiling in death.
Government officials at federal, state and local levels, the NRA, and the GOA are certainly to blame, but so are the law-abiding gun owners (NRA, GOA members and non-members alike), as well as the media treating each mass shooting as an individual event instead of what they collective are—a narrative of denial and madness; religious leaders who are more interested in condemning people for their sexuality rather than their support of weapons of mass murder; the education system’s failure to muster the will to demand gun control; gun retailers and their failure to take background checks seriously, and voters who quickly lose interest.
In fact, there’s a lot of blame to go around, so much blame that no one individual and no one group can or will assume responsibility for the carnage. Until we all accept responsibility, until we all acknowledge there is no exception, no middle road, no two sides to the argument, that roiling cauldron will get hotter; more and more bodies of children, the elderly, anyone, will float to the top.
We all are in the line of fir—including citizens packing a weapon to protect themselves and those toxic personalities who like to threaten that if anyone takes their gun it will be from their “cold dead hands.” The years have seen a lot of cold dead hands. Their statistic is just as grim and is another contradiction to the “good guy with a gun” lie, particularly since there are many cases of “good guys” killing “good guys” with their legally acquired weapon. Or “good guys” killing or threatening their partner in domestic violence.
Like a deadly virus, no one knows what goes on in the minds and lives of all these “good guys.” They could perhaps angrily overreact (and who doesn’t do that?) and use their weapon in a burst of anger, something they may not normally do. They could experience a life event that stressed them to a breaking point and they begin firing. In fact, that’s exactly what some of the statistics show. Unfortunately, “good guys” with guns are just not, well, perfect, and ensuring a society safe from gun violence requires near perfection.
Guns are a disease in this country, the vaccine is gun control that would reduce the nearly 400 million guns infecting our society with violence and death. Gun control also needs to start the long-overdue process of changing mindsets through an honest reckoning with ourselves.
We have allowed 50 years of sloganeering about guns and distortions about the actual intent and purpose of the Second Amendment, which has poisoned thinking to a level where the nation’s view of life is callous and inhumane. Gun violence is a daily occurrence. We just shrug.
That is the sorrow of our age.
