The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Vermont officials were unanimous in holding President Trump responsible for the violence in Washington this week — including Gov. Phil Scott, who was the first Republican governor or senator to call for Trump’s removal from office.
The siege of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday was unprecedented, overshadowing the opening of the 2021 legislative session in Montpelier and drawing condemnation from leaders across the political spectrum. But reckoning with the consequences will be complex, experts say.
“This is a critical juncture for American democracy,” said Kemi Fuentes-George, an associate professor of political science at Middlebury College.
For Vermonters observing the chaos from a distance, Fuentes-George said, it’s critical to take the actions of the rioters and Trump’s enablers in Congress seriously. “It’s very important to recognize that establishing a narrative in which this kind of behavior is seen as standard political behavior is dangerous, because it establishes a narrative in which these kinds of things can be forgiven and further normalized.”
Linda Fowler, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, said holding high-ranking Republicans accountable for promoting Trump’s lies about election fraud is an important next step.
“Grownups should have been telling Trump supporters a long time ago that their side lost,” Fowler said. “The unwillingness of Republican leaders to do that, I think, is just as egregious as what the president did on Wednesday morning.”
Below is a partial transcript of this podcast, edited for length and clarity.
What was going through your mind as you watched this play out on Wednesday?
Kemi Fuentes-George: A lot of what we see playing out are things that people had talked about in 2015. The way that Trump, and people in the Republican Party, have appealed to white nationalism, historically, is they don’t come out and say, “Hey, white nationalists, we really like your ideology, we support your desire for a white ethnostate.” There’s a lot of kind of coded language that is obvious to anyone who understands anything about the racial history of the United States. And yet, at step after step, people who really should have known better, including people who extensively study political science, have continually framed it as, the criticisms are off base or are unfair, or have been exaggerated. And it’s been very frustrating and anger-inducing this entire time.
Fuentes-George said the police response on Wednesday made the racial dynamic clear: authorities were relatively gentle on the mostly white Trump supporters, compared to how they’ve treated racial justice activists.
Kemi Fuentes-George: This past year, we have seen protests all across the United States, asking the police system and the law enforcement system to not extrajudicially murder or brutalize Black and brown people. And at many of these vigils and protests, no matter how peaceful they’ve been, there has been a vicious crackdown by the forces of law and order. We had the tear gassing of the violin vigil for Elijah McClain. There was a tear gassing of protesters on the Capitol so Trump could hold up a Bible right in front of a church. And there was the protester in Buffalo, New York, the elderly man who was pushed down on the ground so that his head was fractured.
And the constant scenes of police officers beating, running over, tear gassing, firing rubber bullets at Black Lives Matter protesters. And then you have this crowd breaking into the Capitol steps, taking selfies of themselves inside the Capitol, vandalizing offices, smashing windows, and the response of law enforcement has been, in comparison, a joke.
I’m not saying that I want law enforcement to go brutalize the Proud Boys in the way that they brutalize BLM activists. What I’m saying is that law enforcement should respond to BLM activists with the same restraint and care and compassion that they’ve responded to violent white supremacists trying to overthrow the election for Trump.
How shocked we should be at these images that we saw on Wednesday? I’ve seen this range of reactions, with some people saying “this is the end of our democracy,” and others interpreting this as sort of like an internet prank come to life. How should we be interpreting these images?
Kemi Fuentes-George: My take on it is, I’m actually kind of surprised that some people say that they’re shocked. Because if you understand American history, and you look at past examples of angry white backlash against racially progressive politics, this is very much in line with things that we’ve seen. In the 1990s, with the the backlash against Clinton, and the rise of the militant group, the Michigan militia, Timothy McVeigh. We saw this again under Obama, a massive increase in the number of white supremacist organizations under Obama. And you know, we certainly saw this in Reconstruction.
So a lot of what we’re seeing right now is a continuation of a strain of white supremacy that has been at the core of America’s founding since 1619. And on top of that, what we’ve seen just thinking about the last few years, we’ve seen the Republican president say that any election that he loses is fraudulent, inciting police violence against black protesters, cozying up to Proud Boys, famously telling them to stand by, having them take those words and put it on their own merchandise — aided and abetted by the Republican Senate, the Republican members in the House and state Republican parties.
So when you have a system in which the head of the organization is explicitly cozying up to white supremacists, and in which the Republican Senate and the Republican members of the House are either refusing to condemn him, or supporting his claims of an undemocratic system … I genuinely do not understand why Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Republican congressmembers are acting surprised. They directly contributed to this. Their shock to me feels very disingenuous.
What about just for everyday citizens who may be seeing these images and struggling to understand the weight of what they’re seeing? What’s your advice for people who are trying to interpret this flood of news about what happened on Wednesday?
Kemi Fuentes-George: It is very alarming. This is a critical juncture for American democracy. And my concern, and the concern for a lot of people, is for this to be treated in the way that the Bush administration was treated in the transition to the Obama period, in which the mistakes and lies and exaggerations that got us into the Iraq war were kind of swept under the rug. And people said, let’s just leave the past behind, we’re not going to prosecute or censure anybody in that administration.
Because if we move forward from this point without some kind of consequence — for the Republican politicians in particular, but not exclusively — the president, who has spent years undermining the legitimacy of democratic elections, years fomenting angry white militants and terrorists, then what we’re going to see is a further empowering of these kinds of behaviors.
Linda Fowler is a professor of government at Dartmouth College. She said the violence Wednesday took her back to 1970, when she worked at the House of Representatives.
Linda Fowler: And the Capitol had been agitated all week with rumors that a group of domestic terrorists called the Weathermen were coming to Washington to take part in a major demonstration that had been planned to protest the bombing of neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War. It was a giant protest. But there was a lot of agitation about the Weathermen, who had been blowing up labs and things on university campuses. A small group, but dangerous.
I left the office that night at about six, and I went downstairs to find my car and go home for the weekend. And the whole Rayburn Garage, which is a huge space, was filled with paratroopers and jeeps and walkie talkies. I got into my car. I was so stunned that the people’s house had become a battle station, that I just sat there crying. I was very young at the time, and [it was] my sort of first encounter with really bad stuff.
I tell this story to my students every year when I teach Introduction to American Politics, and how disheartening it was, and how fearful it made me that the government was about to go to war with its citizens. But what happened yesterday was that it was the citizens going to war with its government.
Fowler said to her, the attack on the Capitol symbolized how Trump has made an enemy of Congress throughout his presidency.
Linda Fowler: He’s refused to follow congressional procedures about oversight. He’s refused to have his administration appointees appear. He’s refused to submit nominations and has everybody serving as acting. This was just the final flipping of the bird, if you will, to an institution that he clearly despises. I think it was deliberate on his part. I think it was malicious.
Fowler said what happens next depends not just on Trump — but on how other Republican politicians are held accountable.
Linda Fowler: There has been a very deliberate feeding of lies. There has been the holding out of impossible prospects, that in the end they would get what they wanted. Grownups should have been telling Trump supporters a long time ago that their side lost. They did extremely well — they got record turnout for a Republican candidate — but it wasn’t quite good enough. And the unwillingness of Republican leaders to do that, I think, is just as egregious as what the president did on Wednesday morning.
Certainly I remember from my youth and early adulthood, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of violence. And the violence was on the left. But it was never embraced by Democratic officials. The people advocating violence were always marginalized. They were not elected to Congress. They were not appointed to public office. And now what we have is, “Oh, we condemn violence, wink, wink.” And so I think that the top people in the Republican Party deserve a lot of responsibility for this.
How do you think we get back to that place where violence is not being egged on by people in positions of power like this?
Linda Fowler: Having studied politicians for many decades now, they basically will go where they think they can find political support. And that’s exactly what Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz were doing. And instead, what they’re finding is universal condemnation.
I think losing the Georgia electorate, the two Senate runoffs on Tuesday, was sort of a repudiation — you can engage in these kinds of tactics, but in the end, they don’t work. But the change of heart will have to come from the members who were appalled by what happened yesterday, and who are also very fearful — that they, I hope, will, when they’re next in recess, do some serious soul searching when they’re home with their constituents about how they should behave.
I asked Kemi Fuentes-George what all this means for Vermonters. How should people who are concerned about this news, but watching from afar, move forward?
Kemi Fuentes-George: The number one thing is to take it seriously. It’s very easy, particularly in Vermont, to feel insulated from a lot of what’s going on in D.C. And the danger with that is that when you have political discussions, or political disagreements, it’s very easy in Vermont to write off the behavior of Mitch McConnell, or Lindsey Graham, or Devin Nunez or whoever, as just standard politics or standard politicking, or intellectual diversity or whatever the ameliorating phrase might be. But it’s very important to recognize that establishing a narrative in which this kind of behavior is seen as standard political behavior is dangerous, because it establishes a narrative in which these kinds of things can be forgiven and further normalized. What I would want is, at a minimum, for people in Vermont to recognize the danger that the republic is facing right now if this kind of behavior and this set of political norms goes unchallenged.
Fuentes-George said that to him, this could represent a realignment for conservative politics.
Kemi Fuentes-George: We are essentially at a point in which conservatives — and I want to make the distinction here between conservatives and Republicans — have to decide what kind of party they want to support or to be a member of. Matt Gaetz last year said the Republican Party is now the Trump party. OK. And he’s right, although I will say that Trumpism and elements of Trumpism to some extent were established before Trump. It’s not as if he was the only one to appeal to white nationalism and white resentment. And so if the conservatives are happy with that being the credo, then they should recognize that and we should recognize that as well.
However, if conservatives who are genuinely concerned about the intensification of the continued white resentment at the heart of the Republican Party, then they should do something. Either excommunicate people like Trump and Nunez and Gaetz and McConnell and so on. Or accept the condemnation that people have made about the Republican Party, including other conservatives who’ve left like Ben Sasse.
We’ve been thinking about this quite a bit because we have a Republican governor here in Vermont, but one who’s been pretty vocal about his dislike for Donald Trump, and yesterday put out one of the more forceful statements we’ve seen from a Republican calling for Trump’s removal from office. How does Phil Scott figure into all this?
Kemi Fuentes-George: Phil Scott is a very interesting character. For the most part, I think he’s been a reasonable person, even if it’s even if he’s been someone who is not ideologically entirely simpatico with me. That’s fine. But Phil Scott is at the same critical juncture as the rest of Republicans.
To me, it looks like he’s been trying to kind of have it both ways. On one hand, you’re criticizing the Republican Party that’s been most indoctrinated by Trumpism — but also remaining Republican. I’m not entirely sure if he’s going to be able to continue walking this tightrope.
I think calling for the excommunication of Trump is probably a good step. But again, Trumpism is not going to end with Trump. This kind of rhetoric is not only Trump. Once he’s gone, what then? We still have Josh Hawley, we still have Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio. We still have all these people carrying on the mantle in the Republican Party. So is he then going to be kind of the face to soften what the Republican Party really has become? I don’t think he’s going to be able to avoid being lumped in with where the Republican Party’s coming from for much longer.
