Yesterday, as an angry mob of thousands stormed Capitol Hill, threatening the American system of government, I sat in my living room. Historically, when mobs storm seats of government, they declare a new government. Yesterday’s violence resulted in a few selfies and nothing more. Criminal charges are sure to follow, as they should.

Many were shocked that the riots finally made their way to the Capitol, but we’ve watched the slow march over the past 10 months. Businesses, the homes of local politicians, and even Federal courthouses came under threat from riotous mobs last year. Remember the riot of Inauguration 2016? Dozens arrested, all charges dismissed, no consequences. 2020 was the summer of love, didn’t you hear? Not rioters, just mostly peaceful protesters.

There is a brokenness in our system, but our system was never perfect. We’re a people striving in the world’s first long-term experiment of democracy to form a more perfect Union. We’re blazing a trail, and there will be hiccups. It’s a mistake to believe that this is the darkest time in American history. The Civil War was pretty rough, so was December 1941. The Civil Rights movement did not succeed without enduring horrible violence. As we have before, our nation will prevail.

Here is the real dichotomy. If you went onto the websites of the legacy media, or choked yourself in the toxic environment of Facebook or Twitter yesterday, you would’ve thought that the Republic was over. But if you looked out the front window of your house yesterday afternoon, you would’ve seen just another January day. Thousands rioted in the Capitol, while hundreds of millions of Americans went about their lives, working, and raising their families. The picture of America broadcast on TV and re-tweeted throughout the internet is wholly disconnected from the real America.

A word about credibility. Politicians, never wasting an opportunity, jumped all over the news of yesterday. Many who decried the federal government’s deployment of officers to protect the US Courthouse in Portland last summer complained about the lack of an overwhelming police presence at the Capitol. Some spent months joining the chorus of “defund the police,” and yet who did they ask to save them as they took cover on the floor of the United States Congress? We all make mistakes and take positions, only to change them later based on new information. That’s a sign of maturity. I hope that all political figures understand that virtue signaling does lead to very real and devastating results for people.

Since November 2016, we’ve heard endless conspiracy theories about foreign influence, a special counsel that found nothing, an impeachment over maladministration, and daily cable news innuendo. A large group of political leaders cried wolf again and again, decimating their credibility on the topic of Trump. So yesterday, when the wolf was quite real, who was left to believe them? A cautionary tale to keep a firewall between policy debates and ad hominem attacks.

If you were to look at a list of policy achievements from the Trump Administration, it would be a fairly successful if not boilerplate conservative agenda. Unfortunately, the personality of the man ran rough shod over those achievements. While many have predicted the downfall of Trump since June 2015, and several attempts were made, in the end, it was only Trump that could bring down Trump.

Jeremy Beamon, writing today:

Trump, the disrupter, delivered in a bad way - Washington Examiner

We had only a hint of what Trump, chaos agent, meant until today. And his trespassing crusaders wrecking-balled his last shot at persuasion. I can only imagine that it really, truly ended today.

In two short months, Trump has managed to set the stage for a complete unraveling of his administration’s accomplishments and threw away any chance of his recapturing the presidency in the process. His temper tantrum resulted in double losses on Tuesday, loss of control of the Senate, and the cherry on top of it all was Wednesday’s violence. We have just witnessed the end of Trump as a national figure, a Greek tragedy played out on a national stage.

Misery is sure to ensue in the near-term, with more lockdowns, re-regulation, higher taxes, and a repeat of the anemic economic “recovery” of the early 2010s. But this is the beauty of the American system. Sometimes one party is in control, and at other times another. In the end, though, no one is in power long enough to completely trash the entire system. And for that, we owe a debt of gratitude to our Founding Fathers.