Interview with a researcher on democracy – Bombs in front of the Capitol – “Terror is much more evident than a coup”

Mr. Lütjen, you lived in Tennessee from 2017 to 2020, teaching college there, researching American politics, and writing a book on the Democrats-Republicans gap. After the experiences of this time: Did the events in Washington still surprise you on Wednesday?

That may sound flirty, but it didn’t surprise me at all. It was the day that Donald Trump’s fantasy world collided with reality. Because if you looked at Breitbart and the relevant forums in recent weeks, you had the feeling: people really believed that Trump still had an ace up his sleeve to stay in power, and then they’re tough. Reality landed. When he tweeted “it’s going to be wild” two days earlier, you had to be very optimistic to believe it would be peaceful.

But was it foreseeable that intruders would raid the Capitol meeting rooms and the situation would get worse?

The storm at the Capitol didn’t scare me too much. Those were terrible images, but I couldn’t see that a revolutionary movement was seeking power. There was something grotesque, akin to a carnival, about the way people walked in and took selfies. Fantasies of empowerment and insurrection have long been around and materialized on Wednesday. But I’m more concerned about the people who dropped those two tube bombs near Republican and Democratic buildings. That is a completely different intention, which to me indicates that the United States is heading toward a decade of right-wing terrorism.

Are you referring to the individual extremist perpetrators that could emerge from such a movement?

I don’t know if there are so few. That could be thousands if you assume that a large number of Trump’s nearly 75 million voters believe everything he says. Hundreds of thousands of them are organized into militias, but they still have a bourgeois existence to lose and therefore would not shoot other citizens, even if some have such fantasies. But there are a few hundred, maybe thousands, who have nothing to lose and who could organize into an underground group. The threat of terrorism is much more obvious than a coup.

According to polls, there is relatively broad support for the procedure on Capitol Hill among Republican voters.

So how the Republican Party relates to Trump now will be crucial. Since the spring of 2016, when Trump became a presidential candidate, almost everyone in the party has fought him, because the rank and file did too. It is to be feared that while the Republicans are all in shock right now, the facts will be blamed on the individual perpetrators and in a few weeks it will be back on the same polarizing course that existed before.

How do you rate the distancing of high-ranking Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham from Trump?

One wonders what options Republicans have had so far: in truth, they have followed the party’s base. If all Republicans like Mitt Romney had gone to the resistance, I don’t know if that Trump base would have been tamed or not. Why have so many grown apart now? Some people may have been really shocked, but for many it was an opportunistic decision because Trump is no longer as useful to the party as he was in previous years and months.

Do you think classical conservative Republicans will just accept this approach on Capitol Hill?

It will not pass without a trace. Trump also deliberately tweeted that they are the “Law and Order” party, which corresponds to the self-image of traditional Republicans, who voted for Trump, for example, because then they would have less taxes. you have to pay. They will be deterred, but there will be a rationalization of events in this group: people were angry, wanted to breathe. But whether that will deter traditional Republicans from perhaps backing a populist demagogue again in 2024 is another matter.