This has been one unreal day as events unfolded in DC revealing we’ve a major problem with the forces unleashed by the T-Rump and his enablers. Although there was a delay lashed by fear and uncertainty (and one death), Congress is back to work on what had been in the past, a ‘procedural event,’ and not a dramatic clusterfuck like this, and maybe by later tonight we’ll finally have the go-ahead for President-Elect Joe Biden.

Congresscritters escorted by heavily-armed police back into chambers is like a scene from a West Wing/Twilight Zone mash-up:

Senators are heading back to the Capitol now pic.twitter.com/VIdenHtqSO

— Alan He (@alanhe) January 7, 2021

The real aftermath of this whole affair is all eyes, and fingers pointed, are on the T-Rump and his lying, violence-inducing bullshit the last weeks producing the tragic outcome we witnessed today. So bad the T-Rump’s antics, Twitter had to respond:

As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy. https://t.co/k6OkjNG3bM

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

Also, the Guardian‘s live blog appended:

The social media giant added, “Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account.”

The White House has also already called a lid for tonight, meaning the president will not make any other public appearances today, so we won’t be hearing from him for the rest of the night.

Hopefully.

The T-Rump owns this mess. He’s been running his fat yap since the election, building momentum for the shit happening today, a scene continually referred to by commenters as ‘unreal,’ or something only seen in a banana republic, but directly caused by the T-Rump, and in the the US of A.
David Corn at Mother Jones this afternoon:

Trump owned this terrorism.
He has whipped up his cultish followers with lies and conspiracy theories.
At a rally on Wednesday morning, Trump told his supporters that the 2020 election was a grave crime and that Republicans and Democrats on the Hill were about to destroy American democracy by accepting the results.
(During that event, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and chief coup-stirrer, called for “trial by combat.”)
Trump directed his frenzied supporters toward the Capitol, where they breached police lines and took over the building.
They shut down Congress.
They terrorized lawmakers and staff, they fought with security forces, they broke American democracy.

And most-likely will get away with it.
However, Daniel Larison at The American Conservative, also this afternoon, proclaims T-Rump needs to be kicked out of office now:

There has been a debate for the last two months over whether Trump’s inept efforts to steal the election and remain in power amounted to a coup, but today’s events have settled the question.
The president incited a mob to storm the halls of Congress in the name of his deranged lies about the election.
It may fall into the category of an autogolpe (self-coup) by a president that refuses to give up power, but it is nonetheless an attack on the Constitution and the country.
It cannot be tolerated, and it must be punished for the sake of the future health of our democratic republic.

If Pat Buchanan’s old outfit calls it, the shit is thick on your ass.

Further in the same vein from Foreign Policy in the aftermath of today’s events:

It’s undeniable at this point.
The United States is witnessing a coup attempt — a forceful effort to seize power against the legal framework.
The president has caused the interruption of the process that would certify his removal from office.
The mechanics of constitutional government have been suspended.
Americans are in danger of losing constitutional government to a degree unmatched even during the Civil War, a period when secession itself did not postpone either the holding of elections or the transition of power between presidents.

The moment we face as Americans, in other words, compares more closely to the August 1991 coup that attempted to remove President Mikhail Gorbachev from the head of the Soviet Union or the 1993 armed standoff between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian legislature.

Yet right up until this moment a chorus of voices was telling us not to worry.

The past several years have been a boom industry for political scientists who work on topics like coups and democratic erosion, including several of the experts quoted in the Post piece.
As the United States has entered seemingly uncharted democratic waters, journalists and readers alike have decided that standard horse-race journalism is not up to the task of interpreting politics.

As tensions have risen, however, there has been a profound divide between those who believed that, in the end, institutions would save us—that the United States’ democratic traditions would be preserved — and those who were clear that we faced a period that could end with a standoff of this magnitude.

Action be taken, but…
AOC one-worded it:

Impeach.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 7, 2021

David Frum, a longtime Republican waterboy, at The Atlantic agrees, calling to ‘Remove this treasonous president‘ without delay, maybe tonight:

All through this day, Republican pundits have expressed shock and puzzlement that it could come to this.
“We don’t know who these people are,” the radio host Mark Levin tweeted.
That’s the same Mark Levin who wrote an article urging Congress to challenge the results of the 2020 election, an article approvingly tweeted by Trump on December 30.
In fact, we know “who these people are.”
They are the monsters incubated, birthed, nurtured, fed, trained, and now loosed by Trump and by his enablers in politics and the media.

We wait the consequences of today’s shit… One early is the fact Jon Ossoff was declared winner in Georgia, joining Rev. Raphael Warnock on their way to the US Senate and the story, as profound as any, was back-burnered due to the mess in DC. And with Kamala Harris as tie-breaker, Democrats control the Senate.
Hip-hip hurray!

(Illustration: Salvador Dali’s ‘Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion,’ found here)