yellow flag with red stripes trump supporters

Police confront Trump supporters on the second floor of the US Capitol near the entrance to the Senate after they breached security defenses. But in an address that used the words “fight” and “fighting” 20 times, from the mouth of a leader who had consistently winked at violence by his followers, it had the weight of a caveat tacked on as an afterthought. He told the thousands of people before him to march down Pennsylvania Avenue the mile and a half to the Capitol, to put pressure on Congress “peacefully and patriotically”. “If he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.”

“We’re going to have to fight much harder and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us,” Trump declared.

Trump’s 74-minute speech began close to noon, and was a grab-bag of familiar resentments against the media (the “enemy of the people”), Democrats, “weak Republicans” and his latest target, his own deputy, Mike Pence, who had minutes earlier declared to Congress he had no power to reverse the election result. Guilfoyle breaks into a hip-thrusting dance and then shouts into the camera: “Have the courage to do the right thing! Fight!” Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty ImagesĪ smartphone video of the Donald Trump Jr filmed inside the marquee backstage showed him and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, giddy with excitement. The tempo picked up with the Village People’s Macho Man to introduce the warm-up act, 76-year-old Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who called for the election to be resolved through “trial by combat”.Ī noose is seen on makeshift gallows outside the Capitol building. The choice of music on the sound system seemed deliberately melancholic, including Elton John’s Funeral for a Friend, the My Heart Will Go On theme from Titanic, and In the End, by Linkin Park, in which the repeated refrain is: “I tried so hard and got so far. Thousands of people filled one side of the mound under the monument and spilled on to Constitutional Avenue across from the Ellipse, an oval park in front of the White House where a stage had been set up, protected by bulletproof glass. Over the years, Trump has built a broad church for the aggrieved, for which the only doctrinal requirement has been loyalty to its high priest. A pair of women in scarves held yellow signs saying “Women belong in the kitchen” and ”Fake Christians Go to Hell”.

The crowd that converged under the giant needle of the Washington Monument was a carnival mix of red-hatted Maga aficionados, men dressed like commandos, and a sprinkling of apocalyptic cults. Trump protesters clash with police outside the Capitol. Donald Trump was not about to let the federal government go to war with “his people”, who he had invited to the nation’s capital in a last-ditch effort to reverse his emphatic election defeat, due to be certified by Congress on Wednesday. This appeared to be deliberate, at least in part. On Wednesday, it was close to defenceless. Then, Washington resembled a city under occupation. The contrast with the mass deployments of over 5,000 troops for the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer could not have been more glaring. The plan was to act as relaxed and low-key as possible, presumably so as not to irritate the crowd. It later turned out that the Capitol police had turned down offers of support from the national guard, only calling for reinforcements when it was too late. This was America’s “shining city upon a hill” but only the thinnest blue line was there to guard it at the crucial hour. The protest has turned into an insurrection, breaching the home of US democracy, for the first time since the British army set it on fire in 1814.Įven those who had warned in vain of the Trump crowd’s criminal intent were stunned at how quickly the nation’s defences buckled. Donald Trump addresses supporters at the Ellipse in Washington, urging them to march on the Capitol.

Yellow flag with red stripes trump supporters