American Carnage

Even the wifi password was a signal. Attendees at President Donald Trump’s rally in Dalton, Georgia, on January 4 who wanted to log in to the Make America Great network had to enter the phrase into their devices: “SeeYouJan6!” Trump was in town that night ostensibly to boost two Republican Senate candidates, but he spent much of his speech railing about the “stolen” 2020 election—and inciting supporters to descend on the nation’s capital two days later. “They’re not taking this White House,” he declared, Marine One spotlighted behind him. The crowd roared. “We’re going to fight like hell.”

Throughout the summer and early fall, amid polls forecasting a Trump loss, the president and his surrogates had ramped up their baseless claims that the election would be tainted by massive fraud. (The election proved to be “the most secure in American history,” according to US cybersecurity director Chris Krebs, whom Trump quickly fired for saying so.) By mid-December, as Trump’s campaign was losing dozens of lawsuits alleging manipulated results in battleground states, Trump began targeting January 6, the day Congress would certify President Joe Biden’s victory. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” Trump tweeted. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” The election was “the biggest SCAM in our nation’s history,” he wrote in another tweet, adding: “Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.”

Trump did more than just invite supporters to. “And we will fight to the death to protect those rights.” In a tweet the day after Christmas, Trump suggested that if the Democrats were in his position, the “Rigged & Stolen” presidential election would be considered “an act of war, and fight to the death.”