On Wednesday, January 6th, as Congress gathered to ratify the election of Joe Biden to the Presidency, Donald Trump staged a rally outside the White House. “We will never give up, we will never concede,” he told the crowd, before imploring them to “fight” the results. What followed was a siege of democracy, as thousands of Trump supporters marched to the Capitol, breached its walls, and wreaked havoc within the halls and offices of Congress. By the morning, four people were dead and dozens had been arrested. In the cover for the January 18th issue of the magazine, the Cuban-American artist Edel Rodriguez captures the mood of the day. “A part of America died on January 6th,” Rodriguez said. “The flag at half-mast marks that moment.” For more coverage of the riots, read:
Evan Osnos’s dispatch from the Capitol:
For anyone who has been to the U.S. Capitol, the scenes that followed were so unhinged that they took a moment to absorb. In the two decades since September 11th, much of the grounds of Congress have been encircled by rings of security. Now any sense of control was gone. The mob quickly overwhelmed the police, broke windows, and forced open doors. A jittery throng coursed through the Capitol, mugging with the statues and lounging at the desks of senators and representatives. They rummaged through drawers and brandished their loot for photographers. A man in a wool Trump hat, with a pom-pom on it, and a rictus of glee, carried off a carved wooden podium bearing the seal of the Speaker of the House.
Masha Gessen on the police response to the rioters:
Black Lives Matter protesters are other to the Capitol Police. So are survivors of sexual assault or women who protest for the right to choose. But an armed mob storming the Capitol, and their Instigator-in-Chief, are, apparently, familiar enough to be dismissed as clowns. (Some of them, in their face paint and strange headgear, even seemed to embrace their identification as clowns.) The invaders may be full of contempt for a system that they think doesn’t represent them, but on Wednesday they managed to prove that it does. The system, which shrugged off their violence like it had been a toddler’s tantrum, represents them. It’s the rest of us it’s failing to protect.
Vinson Cunningham on the definitive photograph of the Senate siege:
I don’t know why that particular image, of the idiot infiltrator in the chamber where business of an often ceremonial kind is customarily done, strikes me so vividly. If I ever sensed something sacred about the goings on at the Capitol, that sense has been all but entirely snuffed out by the seditious cowardice on display there during the past four years. In a hastily arranged speech, President-elect Joe Biden called the Capitol a “citadel of liberty,” but these days I’m not so sure. In another mood, I’d call the picture darkly funny, a final Trumpian absurdity—someday maybe I’ll get there—but my response today isn’t comedic.
And for more covers that highlight the Trump Presidency, see below:
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