On the first day I joined the Select Committee Investigating the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, I was told to watch my back.
An administrative aide and I were walking from Capitol Hill’s main campus to our own intentionally nondescript, off-the-beaten-path office building after collecting my ID. I noted that I would be walking to work every day: an envious 15-minute commute door to door. He advised me to switch up my route. Daily.
“You know, in case you’re being followed,” he said.
I had come directly from serving as a homicide prosecutor. I had held murderers and gang members to account for years. Made them and sometimes their families upset with me. I had heard how they talked about me in their jail calls. Never in my seven years there had anyone made a warning like this one.
I brushed it off and laughed. I didn’t end up taking divergent paths to work. And – although our Committee received an unprecedented mountain of threats, so many that two staffers were tasked with sifting through them for credible ones – I thankfully never felt in danger in my 15 months studying the first nonpeaceful transfer of power in our nation’s history.
But the staffer’s concern was an apt reflection of the growing normalization of political violence in this country.
Candidate Donald Trump came onto the political scene encouraging his supporters to “knock the crap out of” dissenters in his crowds, and he promised to “pay the legal fees” for them. Because the millions marching in the streets after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 “made him look weak,” then-President Trump suggested law enforcement should “just shoot them in the legs or something” and sic “vicious dogs” on them a la Bull Connor during the throes of desegregation. On the Committee, I focused on President Trump’s attempts that same summer to federalize the D.C. police under his singular command, invoke the Insurrection Act to waive the illegality of deploying active-duty troops against domestic citizens, and clear out constitutionally protected demonstrations using tear gas and rubber bullets to stage a photo-op with uniformed military leadership.
It comes from the top. His foot soldiers heard the message loud and clear.
I always intended One in the Chamber to be satire. A fun-house-mirror reflection of our powder-keg political climate. A clarion call for changing course before we devolved into the pure, unadulterated chaos foregrounding the story.
But as I wrote and time passed, the exaggerated lens I used to expose our culture’s deep cleavages stayed the same but our commitment to the ‘war’ in ‘culture wars’ deepened. The two – fiction and truth – began to merge.
A man mailed homemade pipe bombs to prominent Trump critics. A teenager crossed state lines with an AR-15-style rifle intending to exact vigilante justice on liberal protestors he viewed as rioters, two of whom he killed and one he injured in what he – and a jury of his peers – said was self-defense. The home belonging to the former Speaker of the House was broken into by a man with a hammer who then pummeled her husband in the head with it when he couldn’t find her. A group of men put together and finalized a detailed plot over the course of several months to tie up and kidnap the sitting governor of Michigan.
You can’t make this stuff up. It’s real life – not a story.
Political leaders have always faced violence. Some of it sounding straight from the pages of a novel. Everything from a Manson family devotee named Squeaky Fromme pointing a loaded gun – no rounds in the chamber – at President Gerald Ford to the man who shot President Ronald Reagan to impress the actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had developed an obsession unbeknownst to her.
The difference today is that the inspiration for and legitimization of the violence is coming right from the top. The pipe-bomb mailer said that attending Trump rallies – a cocktail of grievance politics and spun-up aggression – was like “a new found drug” for him. The acquitted teenage vigilante is celebrated on a certain conservative news network for the shooting deaths he wrought, a solemn event, justified or not. Conspiracy theories ran wild online, boosted by Elon Musk and Donald Trump himself, justifying the aggravated battery against an elder man merely for being married to the opposition party’s putative leader. And detractors highlight that some of the men seeking to hogtie the Michigan governor were acquitted as proof of some sort of false flag, despite the fact that nine of them pled guilty or were convicted by a jury for their crimes.
It feels like so long ago – and the narrative surrounding it, at least for half of the country, has changed since its immediate aftermath – but a roving crowd of thousands stormed the U.S. Capitol, set up a makeshift noose and gallows on Capitol grounds, and came within 40 feet of the fleeing Vice President who they were openly and loudly calling to be hanged. Donald Trump had, earlier that morning, gone from a rally script that mentioned Mike Pence zero times to including – after a combative call between the two men where the Vice President insisted he could not unilaterally discount the votes of the majority of the country – repeated references to his second-in-command and inciting the hopped-up crowd to “fight like hell.” Despite knowing that many in the horde were armed. The Secret Service had warned President Trump that large swaths of people were choosing not to enter the venue and submit to the magnetometers in order to keep their weapons from being confiscated: “I don’t f’ing care . . . they’re not here to harm me,” he said, acknowledging they were there to harm someone. And, yet, he riled them up and directed them to the Capitol, where all of the country’s political leaders were staged like sitting ducks.
After that, nothing feels so far-fetched anymore.
One in the Chamber follows a group of junior Capitol Hill staffers – notoriously underpaid, overworked, and maltreated – as they plot to kill their egomaniacal bosses. It was meant as an extreme thought experiment intended to raise the alarm on where we might end up if we don’t tone down the rhetoric and stop painting our political opponents with targets on their backs.
But you don’t need an overactive imagination to picture it after all. Just pick up a newspaper.
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