Who's to blame? What you'll hear (and are already hearing) from the far-right is "ANTIFA", "false-flag operation" (which is of course debunk-able nonsense; the ring leaders are apparently well know to the FBI as far-right extremists).
From the slightly-less-rabid right we'll get the usual "a few bad apples" story, so often used in defending police shootings, the "good people on both sides" approach. What none of them will likely ever say is that the blame lies squarely with the GOP.
Republicans didn't just turn a blind eye to Trump's egregious behavior for four years; they enabled him, they coddled him, they allowed him to escape any consequences for his repeated bad acts. Susan Collins's post-impeachment "I think he's learned his lesson" is the most obvious example of their complicit subservience. Worse still, Sens. Hawley and Cruz, aided and abetted by eleven other US senators and more than half the GOP's house members, went along with the ridiculous charade that led Trump's base to think that there was a possibility the election might be overturned even after all the court challenges had failed.
That, ultimately, is where the blame for yesterday's event lies, perhaps even more so than with Trump himself. Had the GOP not implicitly endorsed his delusions by refusing to tell him clearly and decisively that once the court challenges were over, it was done and by putting up with his transgressions for four years, he would not have been quite so bold (or stupid) yesterday.
But as so often, the enablers and instigators will escape much of the blow-back while the DOJ prosecutes some "low level offenders". Not that I want to let Trump's rioters off the hook - what they did was terrible, but they had been goaded into it by none other than the president himself. His months long repeated claim that if he lost it could only be because of fraud was all they heard; and they trusted him. And so it is understandable that at the 11th hour, having been fed a diet of lies by Trump and the right wing media, they would truly believe that Trump had won and that they had to do something to save the country from what they had been convinced was a coup by the left.
Those who stormed the Capitol yesterday are not blameless, but neither are those who set the stage; those who will be charged had been told only minutes before, by the Commander in Chief no less, that they were acting in good faith. Did he tell them to storm the Capitol? No. Did his words imply they should. Absolutely! Those who will take the fall are to some degree the victims of another Trump scam, this time with the members of the GOP as accomplices.
How we got here, how yesterday happened, as shocking as it was, should not be not a surprise. How we fix it however is much more complicated.
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