One of most violent days in the history of Washington DC, was 6 January 2021, and the instigator was Donald J Trump, who this week has endeavored to seize control of the nation’s capital, after reports that a former employee of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) was assaulted in the city.

In a sense the new event echoes the old; both are illegitimate power grabs made on the basis of lies. In 2021 it was a lie about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election; in the summer of 2025 it’s lies about crime levels. Reliable sources – including the Biden Department of Justice in January – have noted that violent crime there is at a 30-year low. Five people died as a result of that 2021 attack on Congress, and dozens of law enforcement officers were injured, some gravely, by the mob Trump incited. On his first day in office in 2025 he pardoned 1,500 of the convicted criminals who stormed the capital, some of whom went on to commit more crimes.

The hypocrisy is obvious, or it would be if most discourse about contemporary events wasn’t so contemporary that events before last month get left out. Of course hypocrisy and double standards are a key element of the rightwing commitment to inequality, and their violence imposes their version of order, even when it breaks bones and the law. As Wilhoit’s law famously put it: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

The........

© The Guardian