Hope of redemption after this uncivil war

US president Donald Trump speaks to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. Picture: Brendan Smialowski/AFP)

The recruitment poster at the 23rd Street bus stop in Washington DC was a call to arms in bold red capitals. “Be one of us,” it entreated.

“Us” was the US Capitol Police and the words were stamped above a picture of the neoclassical building. Beside it stood a young Achilles dressed for battle. He wore a soldier’s greens, military helmet, ballistic glasses, black body armour and carried an assault rifle. He looked watchfully over his shoulder at the home of the US congress he was charged with protecting.

The advertisement echoed the famous Uncle Sam billboard used to recruit for two world wars. In it the personification of the American government pointed out of the banner and declared: “I want you for the US Army”.

But the call to join the ranks of the US Capitol Police wasn’t recruiting for a foreign crusade.

This looked like an American battalion being raised for a war with its own people.

There has already been a skirmish, on January 6, 2021. And, no matter how you choose to name it, five police who held the line against the mob that day died in the wake of the storming of congress as it sat to confirm the legitimate election of Joe Biden as the 46th President.

Five.

US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick had pepper spray shot in his face by a rioter and died of a stroke the next day. Washington’s chief medical examiner concluded he died of natural causes but added “all that transpired played a role in his condition”.

What also transpired four days after the assault was that officer Sicknick’s US Capitol Police colleague, Howard Liebengood, killed himself. Metropolitan Police officer Jeffrey Smith also committed suicide after the attack. By early August 2021 the number of suicides would rise to four as two other Metropolitan Police officers, Kyle deFreytag and Gunther Hashida, also took their own lives.

We can’t know what was in their hearts when their hope failed but we do know what Smith’s wife, Erin, thinks. “My husband died defending democracy,” she wrote in USA Today.

Lest we forget.

Let’s never forget that then president Donald Trump lied when he told the mob before the riot that the election had been stolen from him. And that he demanded vice-president Mike Pence, acting as president of the Senate, overturn the election by rejecting the electoral college votes.

We know what Pence thought of that because he made it plain in a speech to the Federalist Society in February 2022.

“President Trump is wrong,” Pence said. “Frankly there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

Trump watched on television as protesters stormed through the Capitol building and he said nothing to quell the mob, despite pleas to act from his children and advisers. Trump tweeted petrol into the raging fire when he posted this: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

Inside the Capitol building, rioters were filmed chanting “Hang Mike Pence”.

For 187 minutes Trump watched without acting. At 4.17pm he finally released a video, shot in the White House Rose Garden. In it he called the rioters “very special people” and said: “I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now.”

Of this, Republican Adam Kinzinger said: “President Trump didn’t fail to act. He chose not to act.”

Another shot was fired in America’s uncivil war last week when an assassin’s bullet barely missed Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. We should give thanks that the bullet missed because those who love democracy should always condemn violence as a weapon in what should be a battle of words and ideas.

The attempt on Trump’s life took me back to the bus stop recruitment poster because on the day I saw it I was on a pilgrimage.

Every time I go to Washington I make the same journey to the Lincoln Memorial at the western end of the National Mall. There the seated giant of Abraham Lincoln looks east towards the distant Capitol building.

It was from the steps of this memorial that Martin Luther King spoke of his dream that America would one day “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’.”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character,” King said.

Each time I visit the memorial I read the two Lincoln speeches etched in the walls of his temple, the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural address.

In the second inaugural address Lincoln ponders the tragedy of a war between countrymen who “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other.”

Lincoln muses that some might think it odd that slave owners “should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged”.

He wonders at God’s purpose in the civil war and if it might be that slavery was such an offence against him it demanded blood for blood.

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.”

He ends with a hope.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

A little over a month after Lincoln made this speech he was killed by an assassin’s bullet.

I am glad the assassin’s bullet missed Trump. I wish it had missed Lincoln. I wish it had missed John Kennedy. And his brother Robert. Above all, I wish it had missed King.

By his actions Trump has shown he is not fit to be mentioned in the same breath as these towering Americans. But he has been given a rare second chance: to redeem himself and his nation. Let us see if he takes it.