Not once did I read it in the mainstream press, and not once did hear it on cable news: that the absence of Trump's brownshirts at Saturday's (presumed) non-event was a manifest warning.
"It's a trap." Such was the subterranean chatter detected by D.C., FBI, and DHS intelligence prior to the scheduled, neoNazi meet-and-greet. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three percenters and other putsch-savoring gangs were therefore deliberate in discouraging their rank-and-file thugs from attending.
But just what did "a trap" suggest? What, in fact, did these groups' advisories openly declare? The D.C. police could lay a trap only for those intending to do harm of some sort. Traps cannot be laid for the innocent and peaceful. Hence the Proud Boys et al. must have harbored violent intent all along; otherwise they would have issued no "trap" alerts for Sept. 18. In the coverage I heard, this went unmentioned.
In short, the violence-prone gangs will be back. Domestic-terrorist analysts have been clear in promulgating the general message that we're at the beginning — not the middle or end — of far-right militancy. Trumpian extremism is on the rise, the chatter is everywhere, the yahoos are sliming their way to even higher mucks of "kinetic" madness. The weekend's tranquility reports, then, were, in a way, unfortunate.
Another and more critical phenomenon went overlooked as well — a paradoxical fixture that greatly transcends the events, or non-events, of one day.
True, the yahoos are cowards, as I observed on Friday. Cowards are also bullies, and bullies will always avoid a fair fight. This singularly distinguishes them from Germany's far-right extremists of the early 1920s and others of history's revolutionary ilk. Nevertheless, while the Trumpists' fear and poltroonery are palpable, so is their unending menace.
For their pervasive blight is an inbred part — a small, underground but outsized part — of America's normalization of extremism.
How normalized has it become?
As the media were covering, in disappointed fits and starts, Saturday's absence of sensationalist, far-right extremism, a glaring instance of the real thing had occurred just 24 hours before. Yet it received little to no television coverage the following day, and in the press, neither the NY Times nor Washington Post treated it as front-page news. This overt, unprecedented and monstrous assault on American democracy was, I gather, but a ho-hum event in the media's estimation.
Friday, a former president of the United States and still base-acclaimed leader of the Republican Party sent a public, vastly intimidating, extortionist letter to Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, demanding that he singlehandedly reverse the state's 2020 presidential election results:
"Large scale Voter Fraud continues to be reported in Georgia," wrote Trump. "Enclosed is a report of 43,000 [invalid] Absentee Ballot Votes…. I would respectfully request that your department check this and, if true, along with many other claims of voter fraud and voter irregularities, start the process of decertifying the Election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner."
The letter's "if true" passage was a mere and typically fatuous throwaway, of course, given its subsequent "true" winner segment. But then came Trump's pointed intimidation meant to keep the secretary of state and governor's lights on at night and their sidearms loaded:
"People do not understand why you and Governor Brian Kemp adamantly refuse to acknowledge the now proven facts…. You and Governor Kemp are doing a tremendous disservice to the Great State of Georgia, and to our Nation — which is systematically being destroyed by an illegitimate president and his administration."
The letter was tantamount to calling out the Klan of yesteryear (i.e., the no-show buffoons of Saturday); an undisguised exhortation that its bed-sheeted yahoos pony up and ride, plant a burning cross in the censurable authorities' lawns, and for the latter to prepare for the deadly reckoning that any traitor to Trumpian supremacy deserves.
From Georgia the Trumpian Warriors would gallop, one assumes, to the Great Southwest and then northeasterly, where more "true" Electoral Votes would be unmasked. Illegitimate presidency begone, Trump back in the saddle.
It's all a part-laughable, part-nauseous, part-bewildering fantasy, for sure. Yet up to three-quarters of Trump's everyday followers not only believe in the corrupt illegitimacy of a sitting presidency, they're seemingly untroubled by his naked threats to sitting government officials — with an assist by barely attentive news media.
Combined with Republican state legislatures' breezy efforts to outright steal the 2022 and 2024 elections, we now have what must be described as a kind of rolling insurrection, scarcely noted and thus perfectly normalized.