STORM AT THE CAPITOL

A comprehensive oral history of what Donald Trump called “a day of love.”

Jalonick, congressional reporter for the Associated Press, has made it a practice ever since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to ask interviewees about their experiences, “no matter the topic.” From the stories she gathers here, one theme is that plenty of people on the Hill had a sense of foreboding on and before that day, including Senate chaplain Barry Black, who foresaw “that this was probably going to be a day like no other we had ever experienced.” The Republican chair of the Senate Rules Committee recalls that the Capitol Police were anticipating something, given two previous outbreaks of violence in D.C. on the part of Trump supporters. An Iowa construction worker who participated in the breach of the Capitol agrees: All Trump had to do was say “My fellow Americans” at the start of a speech, and his praetorian guard was soon on hand. And so, says an Oath Keeper from Florida, “I was prepared to stop the certification process one way or the other.” Indeed, a Capitol Police captain observes, the audience for Trump’s speech that day was full of people dressed in tactical gear who “appeared to be prepared for much more than listening to politicians speak in a park.” Jalonick’s dramatis personae is vast, and it falls in two broad camps: the participants, largely unrepentant, along with enablers such as then-Representative Matt Gaetz, who tried to blame the attack on antifa, “the beginning,” Jalonick writes, “of a much broader effort to downplay the insurrection that I couldn’t possibly have imagined in that moment”; and then all the rest, horrified and disgusted at the attempt to overturn the Constitution—an attempt, this book makes clear, that was coordinated from the top down.

A document of central concern to all those concerned with the future of American democracy.