As new and more graphic videos of the mayhem emerged on social media and TV, the enormity of what happened only deepened.
The live video of the Jan.6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was largely images from a distance: a sea of attackers seeping up the steps and through the entryways. It was like watching a malevolent tide slowly threaten to drown democracy. It could not possibly get worse than this. But it could. And it did, as more close-up and graphic videos of the American carnage that Trumpists unleashed in the Capitol emerged on social media and TV through the weekend. Wednesday’s insurrection was one of the rare live-TV atrocities that grew only more sickening, more terrifying, more infuriating as more days passed. What we remember of the 9/11 attacks, for instance, is largely what we saw in the first few hours: the planes hitting, the towers collapsing, the pedestrians fleeing. Terror attacks, mass shootings — the shock hits us up front, and then we process it. But last Wednesday seemed to last for days. New smartphone videos of violence came out one by one. The horror came in waves, the attack revealed with every image as more bloodthirsty and deplorable. Watching the stunning coverage on Wednesday, I kept noticing all the flags waving in the crowd. In a video that aired on CNN this weekend, the flag becomes a weapon. An assailant outside an entrance beats a prostrate police officer with the pole of an American flag while others hurl them at defenders like javelins, the kind of too-perfect metaphor that only reality can get away with. In another, the mob crushes a police officer in a door while he screams in pain. In another, rioters chant: “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” In another, attackers hammer at a door, then a gunshot fires — through the door, you see only the gun and the hand holding it — killing a woman in the crowd. In a video captured by Igor Bobic of the Huffington Post, an officer gets a rampaging crowd to turn to its left and chase him down a hallway, diverting it from the unguarded door of the Senate chamber.
