Democrats had their hands in Capitol storming

The world looked upon the US in shock on Wednesday night as chaos spread across Washington. Donald Trump's actions were indefensible. But the storming of the Capitol was not an isolated event, rather, a culminating one, argues Donald Forbes.

In the end, Donald Trump has been a greater calamity than his most fervent detractors believed possible. He corrupted the entire American body politic, Republicans and Democrats alike.

What happened at the Capitol on Wednesday was inexcusable.

The conduct of this election was inexcusable.

The toleration of rioting and looting in American cities since last May was inexcusable.

The surrender to arsonists of the 3rd precinct police station in Minneapolis by order of the progressive mayor after George Floyd died was inexcusable.

The attempted lynching in the Senate of judge Kavanaugh, in which a woman who is to be vice president was a ringleader, was inexcusable.

The impeachment of Trump in the House of Representatives on the word of a fake whistle blower was inexcusable.

The two-year Mueller investigation of what he knew to be a collusion hoax was inexcusable.

What the intelligence services and the FBI did – abetted by the Obama administration – to try to prevent Trump's election in 2016 was inexcusable.

The Resistance which threw sand in the gears of the country's government for four years was inexcusable.

Yet all this – all of it directly attributable to Democrats and their hatred of the president – was excused until the rabble who invaded the congress finally destroyed what was left of Trump's tattered political credibility.

This will not be excused. A democracy's most inviolable space is its legislature.

The storming of Congress may have been America's Winter Palace moment with the difference that the insurgents lost. Trump will leave the White House a defeated and derided clown-like figure repudiated by all Americans who care about the survival of democracy.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the senate, said a line was crossed on Wednesday. It was a pathetically inadequate way of describing an act so fraught with negative symbolism and possibly irreparable in what it represented. It was not even true.

The violation of the Capitol while it was in the solemn process of enshrining Joe Biden as the country's new president wasn't an isolated act but a culminating one.

A hundred lines had been crossed beforehand by the Democrats' Resistance to the outcome of the 2016 election that gave the White House to the incongruous Trump. America has been building inexorably to this moment for four years of relentless party warfare during which no blow was too low.

Who knows what will happen now. Eventually, as ye reap, so shall ye sow. A wounded animal, a metaphor for Trump's 73 million voters who think they were cheated, is never more dangerous than when at bay.

The United States, alone among the western democracies, no longer has an electoral system people believe in when they don't win. When they don't trust their votes, they trust their fists – or worse.

Trump departs repudiated even by many Republicans who know there is no alternative to the norms of democracy no matter how badly amoral Democrats have abused them.

Assuming he's allowed back on social media from which he is blocked, who will ever listen again to a word he says?

No one else would or should give him a platform to pursue his self-destructive narcissism at the expense of what Madeleine Albright once called "the indispensable country" and which is still needed by us all despite its sins.

In Trump's failure to overturn the election result, history's most protracted act of political suicide is at last over.

The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones: Trump has adopted Mark Anthony's epitaph for Caesar as his own and delivered us to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. For that alone, conservatives should damn him.

Whatever sane Republicans are left amidst this wreckage can now reflect that they may have lost the 2022 mid-terms on Wednesday and possibly a shot at regaining the presidency 2024. As a party, they have been bankrupted and discredited by a charlatan.

Democrats were ridiculed for comparing Trump to Hitler. Well, they were in fact right but not in the way they claimed. What Trump shares with Hitler is not fascism but a complete detachment from reality.