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On January 6, while Congress was certifying the 2020 election results, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC. They smashed windows, broke through doors, breached the building, and ran through it, snapping photos of themselves carting off documents and artifacts. No attacking force has rampaged through the Capitol since 1814, when British soldiers torched it during the War of 1812. Tasked with protecting lawmakers and the building, the Capitol Police’s response was wildly disorganized. Their actions ranged from shooting a woman dead to taking a selfie with a rioter. Officers were pepper-sprayed and hit with...

By Kathy Roberts Forde, Associate Professor, Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Kristin Gustafson, Associate Teaching Professor in Media and Communication, University of Washington, Bothell While the attempted coup by Trump fanatics on January 6 was unsuccessful in its goal to topple the government and remove American democracy, the 1898 coup in Wilmington, North Carolina highlights the tragic consequences that could have befallen our nation. These two events, separated by 122 years, share critical features. Each was organized and planned. Each was an effort to steal an election and disfranchise voters. Each was animated by white racist fears....

By mid-February 2021, American deaths from COVID-19 may well surpass the country’s 405,400 deaths during the Second World War. By around mid-May, more Americans will have died from the virus than during the Civil War, which killed 655,000, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when 675,000 are estimated to have perished. Yet America’s largely self-inflicted COVID-19 disaster may be eclipsed by the country’s political unraveling, which has proceeded with warp speed in the last few weeks, with the once celebrated American way of succession in power via the ballot box dealt a body blow by a large sector...

The U.S. Capitol building was assaulted and occupied on January 6 by an angry and violent insurrectionary mob incited by Donald Trump and his closest family members and cronies. Was it a “coup?” Republican House member Adam Kinzinger said so. Many have called it that. Republican Senator Mitt Romney called it an “insurrection.” Many have used this term as well. We can argue about which terms best apply and how, and also about the moral and legal implications of applying such terms. What is beyond argument is a fact: there was a violent takeover of Congress – the representative...

Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation split along party lines on January 13 for the bipartisan vote to impeach President Donald Trump over his role in inciting the deadly January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In statements, press conferences and speeches on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, House members weighed in on the historic second impeachment of a sitting president. The vote on January 13 came one week after a mob of violent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes — and less than one week before the inauguration...