We the people are watching our country burn, seeing images on television and social media of police in riot gear storming our nation’s capital in Washington D.C. as it is overrun by Americans who believe they have been cheated and wronged and disenfranchised.
We the people are witnessing treason, not from outside of our ranks, but from within our Oval Office.
We the people are being watched by hundreds of millions of humans, not just within our borders but from around the world, as Trump supporters take to the streets to let their voices be heard.
This was not an organic movement, born from frustration with the current administration. It was planted, watered and encouraged to bloom under the watchful eye of our Commander in Chief, as he beckoned his supporters to the Capitol to rise up against the tradition of holding an Electoral College vote count, the same tradition that has directed our ability to seat a new president since 1804.
For more than 200 years, Congress has met to confirm the winner of presidential elections by counting votes cast by states’ electors, and for over 200 years, that process has been employed with minimal drama. While there have been occasional bumps in the road, none have led to the type of mass resistance and hysteria that currently grips our nation’s Capital.
We are under siege from within. The protestors are not chanting to end slavery, demand equality, or lower their taxes. They have coalesced around a series of lies spread amongst them by right-wing conspiracy theories and media, and online hubs filled with violence and venom. They have taken to the steps of the Capitol, the rotunda, the floor of the Senate to announce their spittle-laced and profanity-laden demands that the current president be seated for another four years, despite his overwhelming loss to our President-Elect, Joe Biden.
Those who carried water for the sitting president are now forced to reckon with what they have wrought on our populace—a fierce brew of sedition and self-righteousness bred in chat rooms and dark corners of our country.
We the people watch as the president and his allies plead for calm and peace, when they have spent the past four years injecting vitriol into the language of democracy.
We the people deserve to have a country helmed by competent and empathic leaders who believe in the rights granted to us in our Constitution.
We the people voted, and the result is Donald J. Trump lost his seat in our house.
It’s time for him to face the consequences of his rhetoric, his incitement, his refusal to accept defeat.
We the people deserve better.
Reach Press Banner reporter Christina Wise at cw***@we****.com.
