The 2021 United States coup d'etat attempt was an insurrection launched by far-right supporters of Donald Trump in Washington DC on 6 January 2021 with the objective of overturning the results of the 2020 United States presidential election; the insurrection took place on the same day as the US Senate elections in Georgia (5 January) and the official Electoral College vote count in Congress (6 January), which would result in the Democratic Party winning the Senate and the presidency, respectively. The coup occurred amid the 5-6 January 2021 "Save America Rally", during which the outgoing President Donald Trump had called on his supporters to "fight like hell" to "take back our country" by marching on the Capitol amid the certification vote; it also occurred within the greater context of a rise in right-wing and far-right militancy after Rudy Giuliani called for the Republicans to engage the Democrats in a "trial by combat" and Donald Trump Jr. called for "total war" following his father's electoral defeat. Thousands of fanatical Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building, breaking into the US Senate and attempting to breach the US House of Representatives before they were turned back by police and forcibly ushered out following the fatal shooting of one of their members, Ashli Babbitt. The coup attempt left 4 insurrectionists dead and over 68 arrested, while over 50 local police officers were injured in the fighting, and one Capitol Police officer was mortally wounded after being struck by an insurrectionist wielding a fire extinguisher. The Capitol was cleared of insurrectionists by 6:00 PM, when a curfew set in and the police began to round up defiant insurrectionists who refused to leave the Capitol grounds. The coup attempt drew international condemnation, and it led to a realignment of the Republican Party away from Trump as some of his fiercest defenders, including Lindsey Graham, Mike Pence, and Mitch McConnell, strongly denounced the coup, and several Republican leaders came to support the removal of Trump from office. The crisis was universally labelled an "insurrection", and President-elect Joe Biden, other leaders from both parties, and the international community denounced the rioters as "domestic terrorists" who desecrated the "temple of democracy" in America. By 1 February 2021, 228 people had been charged or arrested for the insurrection.
History
Armed and unarmed Trump supporters stormed past four layers of defenses at the Capitol building, forcing the member of the US Congress to shelter in place, and leading to confrontations with armed police. The storming of the capitol in Washington was accompanied by the storming of the state capitols of Kansas and Georgia in support of Trump. The Capitol building was ransacked and looted by the far-right mob (with Richard Barnett posing in Nancy Pelosi's office and Jake Angeli confronting police in his shamanistic costume), and IEDs were found near the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee headquarters, located near the Capitol building. While Trump issued a video message suggesting for his followers to "go home in peace", he reiterated earlier claims of voter fraud in the presidential and Senate elections, and one of his advisors told CNN that Trump did not want to calm the riots. He also called the insurrectionists "special" people and expressed his love for them, having, before the storming, told the insurrectionists that they would march on the Capitol together and force the Congress to investigate "voter fraud" in the battleground states of the 2020 presidential election. Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum cheered on the "peaceful" insurgents by saying, "This is a huge victory for these protesters. They have disrupted the system in an enormous way!" Nations around the world condemned what they observed as an "attack on democracy", and President-elect Joe Biden called the events an insurrection and borderline sedition. Even Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois condemned the violence as a "coup attempt".
After 5:00 PM, by which time several police officers had been injured, riot police were deployed to clear the neo-fascists from the Capitol grounds, while the rioter Ashli Babbitt was shot dead in the Capitol building. By 6:00 PM, when Mayor Muriel Bowser's curfew began, riot police had ushered the rioters out of the Capitol, and the count of the Electoral College votes resumed after 8:00 PM. During the reconvened session of Congress, politicians from both parties spoke out against the "insurrection", and even Trump's strongest supporter in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, formally disassociated himself from Trump, whom the Democrats and Republican Senators Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse blamed for fanning the flames (during the storming of the Capitol, Romney even urged his fellow Republican members of Congress to tell Trump to call the insurrection off). Proposals to remove Trump either through the 25th Amendment or through impeachment received bipartisan support, and several media outlets speculated that the coup attempt had destroyed Trump's chances at a political comeback following his loss of the presidency. Despite the widespread, bipartisan condemnation of the coup attempt, Republican representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Mo Brooks of Alabama falsely claimed that the insurrectionists were actually Antifa activists (who were let into the Capitol as part of a wider plot), a conspiracy theory which was often repeated by hardline Trump supporters on social media.
Aftermath
Articles of impeachment against Trump for "incitement of insurrection" were drawn up in the House on 11 January; that same day, the FBI warned of armed protests at state capitols across the nation from 16 to 20 January 2020, and an armed group threatened to start a "huge uprising" if there was an attempt to remove Trump from office via the 25th Amendment. In response, Michigan banned guns from its state capitol. 25,000 National Guardsmen were dispatched to guard the Capitol building over the next several days, with many of them sleeping on the Capitol floor. At the same time, Trump's social media presence was curtailed after several social media companies banned his accounts for spreading disinformation and encouraging violence; he was banned from Twitter on 8 January, Facebook blocked him until 20 January, YouTube temporarily blocked him on 13 January, Snapchat permanently locked Trump's account on 13 January, and the far-right app Parler was shut down by Amazon on 10 January before moving its website to Russia on 17 January. On 13 January, the House voted to impeach Trump for a second time by a margin of 232-197, with ten Republicans crossing party lines to vote in favor of impeachment; the Republican-dominated US Senate decided to delay an impeachment vote until after Inauguration Day, while a sizable faction of the GOP argued against the prospective impeachment of Trump once he was a private citizen; doing so would strip him of Secret Service protection and bar him from running from public office ever again. By 20 January, Inauguration Day, the threatened "armed protests" had failed to materialize, and Joe Biden was peacefully inaugurated as President of the United States, with Trump being the first President to snub his successor's inauguration since Andrew Johnson in 1869. The participants in the storming of the Capitol were, by then, still being tracked down and arrested with the help of internet sleuths, with Proud Boys organizer Joe Biggs being arrested that same day.
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