John Pavlovitz (on Substack, alas):

Five years ago, I would have bet my house that Republican voters’ patriotism, faith convictions, and simple humanity would have surfaced, and they would reject this violent lawlessness once and for all.

And as that January night turned to morning and as the scale and severity of what we’d witnessed and how close we all came to losing our Democracy became clear, I remember thinking to myself, “There is no way they will double down on this or on him now, or ever again.”

I was spectacularly wrong.

I remember watching, slack-jawed and fearful for our republic, as a violent mob breached the Capitol live on TV, raised the Confederate flag in that building for the first time in our history, and called for the assassination of lawmakers, all while the president of the United States reveled in the chaos and did nothing to end it.

I wrote then:

This is an attack on the American government, instigated and encouraged by a sitting president, in an illegal attempt to keep him in power.

This is no longer a theoretical coup attempt. This is an actual coup attempt. Whether it succeeds or not, it must be reported as such.

I also wrote:

This day will be read about in history books in every country in the world. This will be the legacy of Donald J. Trump.

I was not confident Trump would walk out of the White House voluntarily on January 20. And even if he did, I was deeply concerned that he would still have the attention of millions of people willing to commit armed insurrection in his name.

But once Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were certified, and the “peaceful” transfer of power did occur, and Trump did leave the building (if not exactly “willingly”), I became confident that Trump was done politically and that the inexplicable allure of Trumpism had finally dissipated.

How naïve.

I anticipated “one-term president who instigated an insurrection in a failed attempt to maintain power” as the one-line brief of his presidential biography and opening sentence to his eventual obituary.

Instead it will be “two-time president and convicted felon, who, despite instigating an insurrection, convinced 77 million voters to elect him for a second term, during which he constructed deportation camps; destroyed the East Wing; terrorized Americans with his “ICE” police force; illegally deported immigrants; abducted the president of Venezuela; enriched himself, his family, and his cronies via grift and patronage…”

Pavlovitz, again:

January 6th should have been America’s second chance at life; a moment for us to speak unequivocally that no one is above the law and no individual is greater than the whole.

That it became instead, a place for our fellow Americans to once again declare their undying allegiance to this man, and to an ugly, lumbering, violent march toward an ever-deepening bottom is one of the absolute most tragic realities of my lifetime.

Now, the engineer of this delayed but now completed insurrection has no limitations on his sociopathy.

Donald Trump’s biography may well end with “…and dismantled 250 years of American democracy.”