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Insurrection offers a profound and incisive analysis of the underlying factors that culminated in the assault on Washington’s Capitol on that fateful day in January 2021. Going far beyond journalistic accounts, the book delves into structural trends within the United States, providing a broader and deeper context for comprehending the magnitude of the uprising.
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The January 6th insurrection was a stunning and unprecedented attack on the center of American government. Unlike previous national traumas that united the country in the face of turmoil, the siege has only further divided Americans, as many continue to dispute the facts and downplay its significance.
Short, John Rennie (2024-01-31T22:58:59.000). Insurrection: What the January 6 Assault on the Capitol Reveals about America and Democracy . Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
January 6, 2021, Washington, DC. It was a cold, cloudy, gray day. The beautiful days of fall had passed, the deep cold and winter storms of late January and February were still to come, and the cherry blossoms of March and April that adorn the city were still months away from flowering. The day started off cold, around 40°F at first light. Winds from the west kept the temperatures low all day, and it was only around 42°F at noon when Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, stood on a platform specially constructed for the event on the Ellipse just south of the White House. He spoke to a crowd of supporters, between 10,000 and 15,000 people who had assembled from around the country, obeying his call to action. He told the crowd and the audience watching on live television that the recent election was stolen: “They rigged it like they’ve never rigged an election before . . . we will stop this steal.” He reiterated his 77-day-long messaging that the election of November 2020 had been stolen from him by radical Democrats, big tech, and the media. It was a typical Trump speech filled with lies and deceptions, self-aggrandizement aggrandizement and puffery, outrage, meanderings, and just plain bluster that only occasionally came into sharp focus when he exhorted his followers to action: “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness: you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
Karl, Jonathan (2025-10-27T23:58:59.000). Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. x
Introduction
Dead tired and losing my voice, I decided to make a quick call before lying down for the first time in more than twenty-four hours. The phone rang once, and then it rang a second time. I expected it would go to voicemail. It was 7:30 a.m. on November 6, 2024, the morning after the election. I had been up all night tracking the results live for ABC News and had just gotten back to my hotel room after discussing discussing Donald Trump’s victory on Good Morning America. A historic victory, and one I had not seen coming. I had spent much of the previous four years reporting on Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, his lonely exit from the White House, his legal travails, and the dire warnings from so many people who had been close to him about what would happen if he ever returned to power. And now, despite it all, Trump had won—and won big. By any objective measure, his victory was stunning. He swept all seven battleground states. He made inroads into some of the most reliably Democratic cities in the country—San Francisco, Chicago, New York—and performed better with nonwhite voters than any Republican presidential candidate in decades. It wasn’t a landslide. His margin of victory in the Electoral College ranked forty-fourth out of sixty total US presidential elections, well behind Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 and 1984 and Barack Obama’s in 2008. But he had achieved something no Republican presidential nominee had in two decades: He won the popular vote. With Trump now heading back to the White House, I figured I would call him and leave a voicemail message acknowledging his win and congratulating him on his victory. Thanks to American democracy, the man I had described as a threat to American democracy would soon be the forty-seventh president of the United States.
Jalonick, Mary Clare. Storm at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6th (p. 2). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
“Congress Itself Is the Target” At 7:37 p.m. on January 5, 2021, the day before Congress was to convene a joint session to certify Joe Biden’s presidency, an intelligence analyst with the FBI’s Washington field office sent an email to law enforcement partners in the area, including the Capitol Police, Metropolitan Police Department, and US Park Police. The innocuity of the message belied the explosive content of the attachment, reading only “Please see the attached SIR released this evening by Norfolk for awareness.”1 If any of the intended recipients had read the so-called situational information report (SIR) for the joint session of Congress the next day—and many of them had not—they would have seen an ominous excerpt from an unidentified online discussion that the Norfolk, Virginia field office had considered of great enough concern to escalate: Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their [Black Lives Matter] and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal. A Capitol Police analyst who opened the email forwarded it to his supervisor, or maybe to the force’s Intelligence Operations Section—accounts afterward differed. But one thing was certain: It never reached Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. The warning of “war” from supporters of President Donald Trump was far from the only indication of possible violence surrounding the January 6th certification. Trump had been signaling throughout 2020 that he wouldn’t accept the election results if he were defeated. “The only way they’re going to win is by a rigged election,” he said of Democrats at a rally in August. He made similar remarks many more times leading up to November and then predictably challenged the results when he lost.