As we measure the remainder of Donald Trump’s tenure in hours, I’ve been thinking a lot about the other national tragedies I’ve witnessed as an adult — the 2016 election, Emanuel AME, Sandy Hook, the financial crisis, George W. Bush’s re-election, the Iraq War, September 11. In trying to process the January 6 insurrection, there are elements and emotions I recognize from all of these, namely shock, anger, sadness, even glib gallows humor (a hallmark of both the Trump and Bush administrations, played out largely on Twitter).

Like so much of the Trump years, the insurrection once again requires me to admit to being “shocked, but not surprised”, which is in and of itself just so exhausting.

The shock of the insurrection, though, continues to play out, in slow motion, perhaps fittingly more like the pandemic than an attack. As bad as it was to watch play out that day, we’re continuing to learn it was much worse than we think. David Graham, writing in The Atlantic, details how:

And the violence was far worse than first reported. One Capitol Police officer died following the assault, another died by suicide soon after, and dozens of officers were injured, some seriously.

We also now know more about President Donald Trump’s response. While it was clear from the start that he had incited the crowd, further reporting has indicated that he watched the attempted coup with delight. He actively resisted calling out the National Guard, a task that reportedly fell to the besieged Pence. He was induced by his horrified staff to condemn the mob, but reportedly regrets doing so. … Under almost no circumstances would the insurrection have succeeded at overturning the election, though that doesn’t lessen the gravity of the attempted coup. But it could have been much worse. A firefight could have broken out between police and putschists. Members of Congress could have been taken hostage or killed. Pelosi could have been shot and killed. Pence could have been lynched. The insurrectionists were there because the president of the United States lied to them, claiming that the election had been stolen and that Pence could save Trump’s presidency, and because he had demanded that they act. “We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said that day.

A more visceral portrayal of the day comes from ProPublica, with this arresting narrative stitched together from over 500 videos pulled from Parler before it was shut down; the accompanying essay by Alec MacGillis tries to make sense of this few hours of video from hundreds of different vantage points. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have put together timelines that walk through the day.

The timelines make for fascinating artifacts, capturing not just the event and the minutiae but the means by which so much of the era became corrupted. A cacophony of anger caught on shaky video, streamed on DLive, collapsing the medium and the message in real-time.

It’s certainly fitting one of the most wrenching narratives of the day comes from Luke Mogelson, who’s reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria before embedding among the insurrectionists:

There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current. Everyone seemed to understand what was about to happen. The past nine weeks had been steadily building toward this moment. On November 7th, mere hours after Biden’s win was projected, I attended a protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol, in Harrisburg. Hundreds of Trump supporters, including heavily armed militia members, vowed to revolt. When I asked a man with an assault rifle—a “combat-skills instructor” for a militia called the Pennsylvania Three Percent—how likely he considered the prospect of civil conflict, he told me, “It’s coming.” Since then, Trump and his allies had done everything they could to spread and intensify this bitter aggrievement. On December 5th, Trump acknowledged, “I’ve probably worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever have in my life.” (He was not talking about managing the pandemic, which since the election has claimed a hundred and fifty thousand American lives.) Militant pro-Trump outfits like the Proud Boys—a national organization dedicated to “reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism” in America—had been openly gearing up for major violence. In early January, on Parler, an unfiltered social-media site favored by conservatives, Joe Biggs, a top Proud Boys leader, had written, “Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung.”

How did we get here has been a project I’ve been spinning around and around since Trump’s rotten election, revealing not just an innocence but a privilege of not having to see us for what we are, and as often as not I feel no closer to understanding it. Sam Sanders and Jamelle Bouie remind us we’ve had insurrections before and that the failures of Reconstruction and our national inability to confront our racist past continue to haunt us today.

The other obvious historical marker, the rise of fascism across Europe, seems discordant, no matter how many times I read about the Trump “putsch”. The Hitler comparisons always feel trite, I’m inclined to think we serve the moment better without being satisfied by labeling it fascism. Historian Richard J Evans:

To state these obvious facts is not to ­encourage complacency. It means that rather than fighting the demons of the past — fascism, Nazism, the militarised politics of Europe’s interwar years — it is necessary to fight the new demons of the present: disinformation, conspiracy theories and the blurring of fact and falsehood.

Beyond those horrifying dangers of basic epistemology is the uniquely American tragedy of racist violence that has time and time and time again fueled our worst moments. Eric Foner reminds us of the dangers from within:

The events of January 6 are the logical culmination of the disrespect for the rule of law nurtured by the Trump presidency, evidenced in the glorification of armed neo-fascist groups, most notoriously until now at Charlottesville; the whipping up of anti-mask and anti-lockdown riots in Michigan and other states; and the refusal to accept the clear results of the presidential election. But those familiar with American history know that the Capitol riot was hardly the first effort to overturn extralegally the results of a democratic election. The Reconstruction era and the years that followed witnessed many such events, some far more violent than the January 6 riot. Scores of members of a Black militia unit were murdered in 1873 in Colfax, La., by armed whites who seized control of the local government from elected Black officials. An uprising the following year by the White League sought to overthrow the biracial Reconstruction government of Louisiana. (A monument to this effort to restore white supremacy stood for decades in New Orleans until removed in 2017 by Mayor Mitch Landrieu.) In 1898, a coup by armed whites in Wilmington, N.C., ousted the elected biracial local government. By the early 20th century, Black voting and office holding had essentially ended throughout the South. This is not just ancient history. As recently as 2013, the Supreme Court eviscerated key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to widespread efforts in Republican-controlled states to suppress the ability to vote. Let’s not assume that until the Capitol riot the United States was a well-functioning democracy.

Timothy Snyder offers a very harsh look at what may be coming.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will no longer be president, something to celebrate for certain. Tonight, I don’t feel jubilance or excitement or even relief — one of the many degradations of the past four years has been to take that from us, to replace it with a constant sense of anxiety and dread and certainty there is no bottom with these people. Part of the work going forward will be to remember that.