....
Officer Harry Dunn, who is Black,
testified that he was called the N-word by rioters who were infuriated that he had mentioned voting for Joe Biden. Sergeant Aquilino Gonell,
an Army veteran and immigrant, testified that he was called a “traitor”
and said that, “for the first time, I was more afraid to work at the Capitol than during my entire Army deployment to Iraq.” By contrast, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, who is white and who can be seen on video bloodied and being crushed by rioters, said that
some of them tried to “recruit” him, with one asking, “Are you my brother?”
The catalyst for the Capitol riot was the fact that Trump, the sitting president of the United States, had engaged in a
months-long propaganda campaign to convince his supporters that Biden had been illegitimately elected, and indulged a series of hare-brained schemes to cling to power even after being defeated including
pressuring Republican legislators to void the results in their states, imposing on
the Justice Department to declare the results fraudulent, demanding the Supreme Court
declare him winner by fiat, and
telling state election officials to “find” fraudulent votes as pretext for him to contest the outcome. The behavior of the mob on January 6, however, is difficult to comprehend without grasping how Trump and the rioters understand the role of police.
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