Yesterday, we watched pro Trump supporters attempt to subvert the will of the majority. The event could be likened to the burning of Time wherein Emperor Nero was said to watch Rome burn while he played the fiddle. The United States president lit the torch that nearly set the bastion of world democracy on the fire. He and his daughter Ivanka stoke the fire while waiting for it to consume the entire country.
Ivanka called the irate protesters Patriots in a now deleted tweet.
America was shaken on Wednesday as a mob of Donald Trump supporters staged an insurrection at the US Capitol building in Washington DC, storming the debating chambers and clashing with armed police.
Four people died in the ensuing unrest that rocked the capital on Wednesday, Washington DC police said, including a woman who was shot dead by the US Capitol police. Three others died in “medical emergencies”, the DC police chief, Robert Contee, said.
The siege is among the worst security breaches in American history and came after Trump had earlier urged a crowd of his supporters to march on the Capitol and undo his November election defeat.
'Stand back and stand by': how Trumpism led to the Capitol siege
The violence halted the tallying of electoral college votes to affirm Joe Biden’s victory, with Mike Pence, the vice-president, and members of Congress evacuated to undisclosed locations for their safety.
DC police said the woman who was killed at the Capitol was shot as the mob tried to break through a barricaded door where police were armed on the other side. She was hospitalized with a gunshot wound and later died.
Having lit the political fire, Trump made a belated plea for calm but repeated the lie that the election was rigged. “I know your pain, I know you’re hurt,” he said. “We had an election that was stolen from us.
“But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order, we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. We love you.”
The Capitol dome is known worldwide as a political symbol and the House of Representatives and Senate chambers are revered as almost sacred. But Wednesday’s carnage struck the latest and perhaps most savage blow to the America’s reputation as a paragon of liberal democracy.
The events in America have struck a chord amongst anarchists especially in the African continent who would no longer view sanctions by Western powers as sufficient grounds to avoid acts capable of trumping on the will of majority of electorates. For this reason, the American people must not sweep these acts under the rug. All individuals involved in those acts must be brought to book.
In Nigeria, these events have resulted in Governor Wike of the PDP appealing to the ruling APC to show extraordinary courage in 2023 in the event that it loses the presidential elections.
For his part in safeguarding American democracy, Pence should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the next president and Congressional Gold Medal for his extraordinary courage in the face of extraordinary bullying and threat by the President even when he could have been part of the beneficiaries of the coup.
