Trump's March on the Capitol

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.