The weeks between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021 often feel like a blur. That was very much by the design of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators. At the time, Sidney Powell, Trump lawyer and fellow coup plotter, told the press, the strategy was to "release the kraken." The idea was that a frenzy of assaults on the election process would overwhelm the system so that it would break, allowing Trump to seize power illegally.
But even in the melee of lawsuits, attempts to disrupt election certification, and sweaty Rudy Giuliani press conferences, one moment stands out in my memory: The day after the election, when Giuliani and Eric Trump tried to stop the ballot counting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I live. Those two jackasses showed up at the convention center, where mail-in ballots were being processed, for a "press conference" that looked very much like an effort to gin up a MAGA crowd to storm the building. Similar efforts had already been launched, to varying degrees of success, in Michigan and Arizona. In Philly, it failed miserably, in no small part because hundreds of city residents turned out to stop them. I watched folks march and dance after running off the would-be fascist storm troopers, celebrating a successful defense of the ballots inside. After all, those were our ballots, the ones we had so carefully filled out and dropped off mere days before.
