This article reflects the individual views of the author and not of Her Campus Media.
The attack on the Capitol building on Jan. 6 was without a doubt one of the saddest days in contemporary United States history. It showed us the reality of an America that had been cultivating these horrific sentiments for generations and culminated in such an atrocious event. It stemmed from President Donald Trump’s call for people to “Stop the Steal” and protest the election results that gave the victory to current President-elect Joe Biden. He called upon his follower base to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and said, “We’re going to the Capitol,” explicitly promoting the intrusion, which then turned into an unprecedented attack on the building that hosts the legislative branch of our government.
With this intention, the problem that arises from his declaring the election as fraudulent is that even if this was the case, there is no evidence to support the argument, making it a great threat to the democratic system upon which this government is based upon. This also proves to be a more systematic issue in the country, once of ignorance perhaps, or one of something as serious as fascism and white supremacy, on which we fought a civil war and more recently a world war.
Donald Trump’s measures as president may have been unpopular in many ways, but his rhetoric and phraseology are what proves to have been the most dangerous of all. Throughout his four years as head of state, he has managed to spread a message of hostility that has woken up a fan base of Americans who comply with him. A message that essentially promotes white supremacy, fascism, misogyny and ignorance, among a variety of other things in a group that has proven to unconditionally back these ideologies. The danger that he presents is that people don’t necessarily support him for his accomplishments as president, but for this degrading message that he promotes, something so dangerous that has led to a coup d’état in our country.
Some political scientists call what happened an autogolpe or “self-coup,” in which the president is the one inciting the rebellion against their very own government with the purpose of unjustly maintaining his power. Foreseeing this, in the year 1787, the founding fathers included a multitude of items, including the separation of power, in the constitution to prevent such an attempt, which finally occurred in the year 2021.
Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of the 43rd U.S. President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush, got emotional recalling the events on the Capitol that day. Bush Hager explained that “these images are not our America… this is not the America that we want our kids to know.” Bush Hager was implying that the mob that attacked the Capitol is not the reality of who American society really is. I think that this event is a side effect to a much greater problem, one in which sadly, this is the reality of the America we live in. An America in which approximately 74 million Americans voted for President Trump and everything that he represents.
Consequently, the 45th president of the United States became the first president to be impeached for a second time in American history this past Wednesday, Jan. 14. Since then, a variety of social media outlets have revoked his accounts, most famously Twitter—his preferred form of communication with the masses—in an attempt to deprive him of a platform to continue to spread his logic.
Moreover, the current world order is one based upon the United States of America, whose president is the leader of the free world and as a consequence, the leader of the world as a whole. When this leader dares to behave in such an absurd manner, it makes us citizens nervous, but it makes the whole world tremble. If the President of the United States demonstrates such ineptitude and instability in his leadership style, what should we expect next? What hope do we have for the future of the world? These are questions that we can only maintain as we continue to hold elected officials accountable for everything they do in the name of our nation.
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