I Had a Front-Row Seat When ‘Stop the Steal’ Became a Riot

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Getty

It was finally noon on January 6. Congress was about to start counting the votes, and we had to get our story up before then, so Daniel and I ducked into a Senate cafeteria to grab lunch and whip up our story illustrating the sorry state of the pro-Trump protesters we’d interviewed outside the U.S. Capitol. He sent his quotes to me and I dropped them in a Google document, the two of us tapping out descriptions and names at lightning speed while scarfing down sandwiches and chugging Snapples. Daniel went outside to get some more quotes while I wrapped things up, and was about to hit “send” when our editor sent me a message with a link: “Can you check this out? Looks like some people are trying to break into the Capitol.”

It was a tweet containing a video of several dozen people in orange hats bum-rushing the gates at the north entrance. I rolled my eyes. It was probably a bunch of meme-obsessed hooligans trying to Naruto-run past the guards, and nothing would come of it, because there was most certainly top-notch security at the Capitol that would take care of it. (There was, right?) But colorful details were colorful details, so I crammed the rest of my sandwich in my mouth and left the building.

“I’ll be able to get back inside in case things get crazy, right?” I asked a member of the Capitol Police as I exited the building.

“Oh, of course, miss,” he said with a textbook professional smile.

I’d become close with a war correspondent who’d given me drills about covering civil unrest and what to do if a crowd turned violent. It wasn’t impossible today. The pro-Trump congressmen had already seeded the idea that Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters would come to drown out and attack Trump-loving patriots—and those patriots had a right to self-defense. The Proud Boys, the right-wing street brawlers known for picking fights with leftists in the streets, would likely try to beat up counter-protesters under the pretense of protecting MAGA supporters. And the militias—

Wait, I thought. I’d never dealt with a militia up close before. What would militias do here? They can’t bring guns into D.C. So if they were to protest, where would they want to fight?

I texted Jared Holt, a researcher at the Atlantic Council who’d long tracked right-wing groups. “Is there a natural target for militia members, if things go south?”

“The Capitol for them. Militias do less street fighting,” he responded. “If big fights break out at the events we might see them act up, but generally their ire is at the government.”

Of course, I thought. The past year had proven that militias would confront police if they felt threatened, and that they had this mania for occupying state capitol buildings under the pretense that those places belonged to “We the People”—a phrase from the Constitution that had been warped into their declaration of entitlement. That summer, armed militia members had appeared at anti-COVID lockdown protests in front of state capitol buildings across the country. In recent months, they had started congregating around government buildings—courthouses, polling centers—in the states where the Steal needed to be Stopped.

“Makes sense that everyone is hoping that BLM or antifa show up,” I responded. “Because the cost of attacking the Capitol is too high.”

As I left the building, I kept running through the war correspondent’s lessons in my head. There were stupid things a journalist could do while covering civil unrest—he once saw a journalist put on a helmet before a tear gas mask, for instance—but the most important thing was to keep aware of the crowd’s mood.

“Is the crowd obeying the directive of law enforcement?”

Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Jon Cherry / Getty

Not really, I thought to myself, which is the equivalent of a no, as I stepped outside, running into a vastly larger crowd, gazing across the city as they awaited thousands of flag-waving demonstrators marching in their direction. Though the police were trying to gently guide the crowd away from the building and across the street, there were murmurs running through the people, wondering why the cops were keeping them away from their building.

“When does it make sense for you to be easily identifiable as press? When does it endanger you?”

I asked another police officer if I could reenter the building. The crowd might be unruly, but the Capitol was safe. “I’m with Politico,” I said, flashing my badge. He waved me through, but then another cop turned me back, saying they were no longer letting anyone on the Capitol grounds. Meanwhile, the people near me were getting amped about how awesome the guys who’d broken through the fence were, and increasingly getting enraged by the cops trying to get them, very nicely, to cross the street. “Just disobey!” one man said, to everyone’s glee.

“The most important thing: when you feel unsafe, you need to know when to leave. Stay near solid things if the crowd stampedes. Don’t be dumb.”

I turned around. Without any protective equipment on, the safest thing right now seemed to be getting away from the Capitol. “Put your badge away,” I hissed to Lippman. We walked toward the crowd, phones held out in front of us to shoot footage, blending in as well as we could: a tall white man in a blue dad hat incapable of expressing fear, and a tiny figure in a white parka of indeterminate ethnicity, looking for all the world like activists taking photos for social media.

There was supposed to be a rally stage set in front of the Capitol, though that seemed a moot point by now. I pulled up my Twitter feed for updates. “Well, shit,” I said, and showed my phone to Lippman. It was filled with images of MAGA fans storming through the Capitol Rotunda and upending desks—and suddenly, video footage of the Capitol Police inside the Senate chamber, blocking the doors inside and pointing guns at the entrance.

Lippman looked at it, puzzled. “That’s not good,” he said, then his head shot up. A Department of Homeland Security car was whizzing by him. “This is bad,” he said. “Homeland Security never comes out.”

He instantly sprinted away from me to tail the car, like a golden retriever chasing the news, back to the Capitol, and I chased after him, trying to run and text my sources who’d organized the rally at the same time. (The rally, I was told, was now called off.)

Lippman and I sprinted furiously past ranting men accusing the police of betrayal, old Asian grannies carrying South Vietnam flags and signs in Mandarin about the Chinese Communist Party’s chokehold on Joe and Hunter Biden, middle-aged women in sparkly pink MAGA hats, people bearing twenty-foot-high flagpoles with TRUMP 2020, people blaring “YMCA” on giant boom boxes. I started picking out the flags that I’d seen all over the internet in the past year: the Gadsden, the Thin Blue Line, Come and Take It, a big Q with the Stars and Stripes. “Everyone’s running to the Capitol!” I heard a man scream, clambered atop a statue honoring Ulysses S. Grant. There was, I suddenly felt, no difference between the militiamen in army surplus bulletproof vests and the MAGA troll men in the Party City American flag suits—they had the same aura of exhilaration, the same undercurrent of rage. They had mounted the security trucks I’d long avoided, up the staircases I’d frequently been shooed off, smashing the windows of offices I’d been forbidden to enter, even as a registered member of the press.

A member of the press. I stopped. Right. I’m here to report.

Soaking in everything around me, my thumbs flying, I began pouring words into my phone:

Hundreds of people—and soon thousands—started pressing forward, forward, forward, past the barricade, trampling over the abandoned structure erected for Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. They broke up and swarmed around the sides, where the Capitol police had been trying to keep out reporters, confronting officers who tried to hold them back. They fantasized about breaking into the building itself.

The small contingent of Capitol police—once cheerfully guarding the entrance and politely pointing Trump supporters to the bathrooms—was soon overwhelmed by waves of flag-bearing protesters. Though they’d earlier thanked the officers for their service, the crowd began to turn on the police. Crowds began gathering around officers, demanding that they let them into the streets, up the lawn, onto the balconies.

Angry rumors ripped through the protesters—several of them waving Blue Lives Matter flags—that the police had tear gas, which officers later deployed inside the Capitol rotunda. Outside, one tattooed man ripped his shirt off and told a small group of people that he had been hit in the head. “I don’t care who they were, but they got the badge,” he said resentfully.

I pressed the “send” button, hoping that there was enough reception for the text to go through to my editors. Around me, hundreds of people were screaming into their phones, streaming their location or calling their friends (“Everyone’s going into the Capitol!”); screaming at the police on-site, people “wearing the blue” who had hit them with gas canisters. I burrowed deeper into my parka, following Lippman as he plowed ahead closer to the Capitol. I wasn’t sure whether the Stop the Steal activists had planned for this—they’d stopped responding to my texts—and I had no idea if Trump was going to do anything about this.

My phone flashed—the first notification I’d gotten in nearly a half hour—and I pulled it up immediately. It was the war correspondent, who had somehow made his way to the Capitol balcony and was interviewing Trump supporters.

Supporter shot by plainclothes cop he said

Everyone here saying it

They are yelling at the cops and calling them traitors

I leaned into Lippman’s ear. “We’re leaving,” I told him quietly, as he looked up at the thousands of Trump supporters crawling over the stage that was supposed to host Biden’s inauguration in mere weeks, with thousands of tiny, dark figures off in the distance, stark against the white marble of the Capitol. From this vantage point, it looked like a swarm of termites were eating the building from the ground up.

“Well, I don’t feel so alarmist now,” Jared texted.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Handout

Excerpted from THE MAGA DIARIES published by One Signal/Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2024 by Tina Nguyen.

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