The Trumpist mob that descended on Washington to coerce lawmakers into illegally overturning an election in favor of its loser was shocked to meet resistance from police. Had they not been the ones waving Blue Lives Matter flags ever since Ferguson, the ones defending police every time an officer knelt on a Black neck, bodyslammed a Black teenage girl, shot a Black 12-year old boy dead on sight?
Yet on the night before the march, they found D.C. police unwilling to let them do as they like, and even skirmished with cops who blocked them from entering Black Lives Matter Plaza. Those cops seemed not to understand that MAGA were not the ones to be policed. “We don’t got your back no more!” one yelled. “We’re the business owners! We’re the veterans!”
On Wednesday afternoon, high on their own insurrectionary zeal, supplied by Donald Trump and re-upped by nationalists like Josh Hawley, they found encouraging signs. Once they reached the Capitol grounds, they encountered only flimsy-gated barricades, minimally manned by Capitol Police, and easily pushed past them. Few police they encountered on the Capitol steps, the final line of defense, were in riot gear. Some even took punches from MAGA demonstrators without returning them. There was no phalanx of armored cops forming a wall with riot shields, no unmarked federal agents stuffing MAGA rioters into vans for detention, none of the array that confronted left-wing demonstrators for Black lives this summer. What could have looked more like an invitation than such token resistance?
But as the hardest-core of the MAGA mob broke into the Capitol, and as rioters yelled“fuck the blue,” they found at least some cops who acted like they were indeed besieged by people capable of violence. Capitol Police shot Ashlii Babbitt, a QAnoner Air Force veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who joined in a push to break through a barricaded entranceway and who later died of her wounds. The rioters took a fire extinguisher and clubbed Capitol Policeman Brian Sicknick, an Air National Guard veteran of Afghanistan, who later died of his wounds.
As the sun began to set, hours into the occupation of the Capitol, reporter Andrew McCormack encountered a woman crying over what she had experienced. It was un-American, she told her comrades. “They’re shooting at us,” she lamented. “They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
Nothing could more perfectly summarize the meaning of Blue Lives Matter, from its emergence as a pro-cop antipode to Black Lives Matter in 2014 to its merging with the Trumpist movement in the years that followed. It encapsulates why people who riot against democracy while wrapped in the flag immediately drop the exhortations they give to Black people about complying with police if they don’t want to get hurt. The people who drape themselves in Blue Lives Matter flags have no experience of being policed. So they forgot the first rule of Cop Club, which is that what the police demand above all is that you obey. But MAGA is itself a politics of domination: you are to obey it. And so MAGA finds itself at something of an impasse with its closest, most essential allies.
It’s safe to say neither side feels comfortable being in this position. Video published on Friday by the Washington Post showed the scene ahead of the cops shooting Babbitt. Capitol Police officers stationed outside the Speaker’s chambers responded passively as a crush of MAGA punched the glass of the doorway they guarded before following the rioters’ instructions to walk away. It was the police on the other side of the doorway who shot Babbitt—after providing ample opportunity for the rioters to disperse. All that was in keeping with anecdotal videos and reports from the melee of Capitol Police taking selfies with the insurrections, helping them down the Capitol steps and stepping out of their way, as some of whom flashed badges identifying themselves as military servicemen and off-duty police—an unambiguous signal to the cops that they should get to do as they pleased. Trump began to urge his supporters to pull back only after tweets and videos circulated showing MAGA fighting with police.
Not all police see themselves as MAGA allies. Not all of them want to be, and some of them cringe when they see MAGA toting Blue Lives Matter flags and the American totenkopf known as the Punisher skull. “Police are not warriors,” Savannah cop Patrick Skinner urged this summer, “because we are not and must not be at war with our neighbors.”
But, in the wake of the riot, some cops said it wasn’t truly criminal for MAGA to storm the Capitol – especially the most politically powerful of them. That was the perspective of John Catanzara, the recently-elected president of the Chicago police union. “There was no arson, there was no burning of anything, there was no looting, there was very little destruction of property,” he told WBEZ. The Chicago police detain people incommunicado in warehouses for less, but never Catanzara’s type of people. “There’s no, obviously, violence in this crowd,” the police union president judged.
That perspective has been in evidence since the beta-test version of the Capitol Riot emerged in September 1992 on the steps of New York’s City Hall, when proto-Trump Rudy Giuliani helped direct a drunken police riot against the city’s first Black mayor. When outrage circulated over police yelling racial slurs, Giuliani made the cops the victims, saying that Dinkins “plays the racial card when he thinks it is to his advantage and then he condemns other people when he believes they’re doing it and that is very phony.” Trump applied Giuliani’s template of turning police into a base of political support and took it national. Giuliani taught Trump that “law and order” is a useful euphemism for the rule of law enforcement. Cops adored it, and their unions endorsed Trump as a savior of the republic. The NYPD unions say they have no regrets for their embrace of MAGA. Why should they?
Accordingly, the overlap between police unions and MAGA is too extensive for any real divide to emerge between them. Both are typically antidemocratic forces, as local politicians learn when police unions inform them how far police reform is allowed to go, and both target the same nonwhite and left-wing enemies. Yet MAGA demonstrated on Wednesday that its deference to police has its limits: police violated the tacit contract guaranteeing their impunity. On pro-Trump social media, Ashlii Babbitt is beginning an afterlife as Joan of MAGA. One post declared that “the only ‘violence’ that took place yesterday was a 14-year veteran being murdered by Capitol Police.”
MAGA has a ready move when confronted by unexpected friction from the security services. In 2016, FBI officials told me about how Trumpy their overwhelmingly-white colleagues were. But when Trump’s behavior grew too egregious not to investigate, none of that stopped Trump from labeling the FBI part of a treasonous Deep State. All the while Trump had no problem praising FBI agents as great people, much as he had told CIA officers right after his inauguration that they would love all the power he would give them. To MAGA, the difference between a hero and a Deep Stater is fealty.
As the Capitol siege showed, police are not used to being on the other side of that Trumpist line. They’re more accustomed to enforcing it. But with MAGA the question is always who will dominate who. Capitol Police Officer Sicknick, as it turned out, was himself MAGA. But in the end, not all blue lives mattered.
