6612/19532
What a time to find out that the National Guard is just one bloke.
Extraordinary end to the day and America. I had seen that things were getting a bit tasty over at the Capitol before I sat down to do my podcast with the delightful genius Nina Conti (and watching her stuff all day made me ashamed to even jokingly suggest that I was a ventriloquist - her audience participation stuff is so good that all I could put in my notebook was "fucking magic" - laughter conjured from the minutest of human reactions and instant characterisation), but on coming down (stairs and from the gig) I discovered that things had properly kicked off.
Like being in a pan of water that is gently heated up the world seems to have got used to Trump and accepted the many transgressions that he's made from the start, thinking somehow they weren't small steps towards this inevitability. Tonight it felt like commentators and politicians felt he'd finally gone too far. But tomorrow the excuses and justifications will start and then what...?
When faced with actual death would the Trump apologists in the senate finally think that maybe not being alive any more was enough of a justification to stand up to him? Not for all of them.
I did my jigsaw and watched democracy sway like a skyscraper in an earth quake. And Trump still declaring love for the people he'd convinced that he'd been somehow cheated of an election, in spite of him being President and no actual evidence beyond videos of people throwing votes away in the woods. Sophisticated enough to pull this off, but not sophisticated enough to use a shredder or furnace and not be filmed.
Proper history in the making. Except that when it comes to history, a moment like this isn't really that remarkable or memorable, because it gets a bit overshadowed by what comes next.
I don't know if the people trying to fuel the conspiracy theorists and extremists have a plan beyond thinking it can win them the next lot of voting. But it seems to me to be a dangerously unpredictable game that would only be played by a total fucking idiot. But I suppose history shows us lots of examples of that and the results for the people who thought they could harness the power of idiocy.
I made quite good progress on the jigsaw though.
