As a peace-loving American, I was fretting, this morning, about the Jan6 Capitol insurrection. . . wondering whether it had been an isolated event . . .or maybe connected to some larger, fascistic plot to undermine our Rule of Law and overthrow our .gov of the people.
Then I came upon, in the New York Times, Frank Bruni’s written response to Cassidy Hutchinson’s recent testimony on Capitol Hill.
A strange thing happened.
The veteran journalist, Frank Bruni, raised a question or two that reflected exactly the questions that had entered my mind when I heard Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about trump’s infamous We’re going to the Capitol speech shortly before the riot happened.
On that January 6, 2021 morning, donald trump was being driven from the White House to the Ellipse to make a speech for his devotees.
Cassidy Hutchinson’s sworn testimony reveals important details about what was happening on that fateful day. A small crowd was gathering near the White House to hear what their leader had to say about Congress gathering to count the Electoral votes.
As the presidential Beast SUV approached the Ellipse, trump voiced his disappointment that the crowd appeared to be smaller than he had expected. He had been devising a plan in his mind to maximize the crowd size, for better publicity effect.
But there was a problem.
Security conditions at the the ellipse were being reported to trump’s Secret Service agents who were in the Beastly vehicle with him. The highly disciplined professional agents of various Security agencies had made provision for magnetometers, weapons detectors, to be operative in the vicinity of the gathering crowd, to assure that weapons would not be brought into that gathering.
This is standard procedure for any public presidential event in our nation’s Capital.
Meanwhile, out on our National Mall, near the Washington monument, weapons-bearing trumpists were deciding not to attend that speech event at the Ellipse, because they knew that the weapons they were carrying would be detected. Their AR’s and Glocks, etc. would either be confiscated or, at least, would become the basis for Police to deny their entrance to the gathering crowd for trump’s speech.
So the proud boys and the oathkeepers and other weapons-bearing Mall-cruisers redirected their travel direction so that no law-bearing Police would deprive them of their 2nd-Amendment lethality capabilities. As everybody knows now, those weapon-bearing oath-making proud guys showed up at the Capitol a little while later to do their dirty work.
Meanwhile, back at the Ellipse, as the donald was being driven in the Beast to make his speech, he was wanting to get the Police and other dutiful Security personnel to disable weapon-detecting ‘mags” so that those rowdies could be admitted to the speech and thereby keep his numbers up and his public support maximized.
In his effort to convince his SService guys to let the gun-toters into the Ellipse, donald’s main point was that those rowdy gun-toters would not hurt him.
Apart from any dutiful security concerns that these professional law-enforcers had for any other nearby US citizen, what really mattered to trump was that they were not there to hurt him. He did not express any concern about what death and destruction those gun-toting gangsters might inflict upon other Americans who might be in the vicinity.
I was fretting over some of these recently-reported developments when I happened upon Frank Bruni’s comments about the events of that day. I must say that the NYTimes writer, Professor from Duke, absolutely nailed it—voicing my concerns exactly, in a more qualified voice than I could ever summon:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/opinion/cassidy-hutchinson-testimony.html
These were Frank Bruni's opening sentences:
“If the Jan. 6 rioters weren’t going to be pointing their guns at him, then he didn’t care that they were armed.
There may be no better distillation of Donald Trump’s narcissism.”
This morning I was jotting down some thoughts about this Frank Bruni profundity while, as fate would have it, I happened to be flying out of the City whose newspaper brought Frank Bruni's thoughts into the public mind and in conjunction with my own fearful fretting.
So I snapped this pic, just to commemorate . . .
I don’t know . . . worried minds think alike? But, to the main point again: trump was not concerned about the danger posed by those gun-toters to anyone except himself.
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