For me, one of the most indelible images of yesterday’s Trumpist riot at the Capitol was the video of the (black) Capitol cop retreating back up flights of stairs as a pack of vandals — every reason to believe they were armed — pushed deeper and deeper into a supposedly high security government building. Clearly, that cop had every good reason to believe his safety, if not his life was in danger.

But he didn’t shoot. Not even a warning shot.

The contrast with the previous day’s decision in Kenosha, Wisconsin not to prosecute a (white) cop who pumped seven slugs into the back of black man … who was walking away from him, but later was discovered to have … a knife … and therefore acted in self-defense … is pretty damned stark. And it now fits much too perfectly with the attention DC cops are getting for doing, dare I say … fuck all … to impede TrumpNation from careening like feral pigs through Capitol chambers and offices.

Watching that feckless response, who among us didn’t recall Bob Kroll and dozens of Minneapolis cops rallying for Trump at the Target Center in October ’19? I’ve read in several places estimates that at least 60% of military personnel support(ed) Trump and that the percentage among American cops is even higher. (I apologize for not having links to that data. But I’m still looking.)

Despite the FBI telling Congress that white supremacists/nationalists are the primary terrorist threat to the “homeland” when push comes to sign-carrying protests only blacks get the full, tactile SWAT and “call-out-the-guard” treatment. (Remembering scenes from last June’s George Floyd/BLM protests in front of the White House, I kept wondering yesterday, “And where is the menacing helicopter blasting MAGA World with rotor wash to disperse them from the Capitol steps?”)

Everything about yesterday was disgusting. As obscene poetry it was, I guess, a fitting final scene for the Trump era. Rampaging mayhem. That is if, god help us, it really is the last atrocity he unleashes on us.

But I can’t say I was “shocked” by what happened. I wasn’t shocked by the flaccid response of the cops to a white mob. That’s the nature of the people who want to be cops and get hired to be cops. And I sure as hell wasn’t shocked that Trump and Rudy and Donny Jr. and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and the likes of Alabama’s new imbecile ex-football coach/senator Tommy Tuberville egged it all on, “inciting” being the legal term for the crime they committed.

It’s what’s been building and coming for years. It began well before Trump, as many have said. Trump merely exploited the ignorance and rage Republicans and their infotainment complex have been cultivating with reckless avidity since the early Clinton years.

In his famous book, “Explaining Hitler,” author Ron Rosenbaum (no connection to the deceased local lawyer), explored all the ways the “little people” with their liw information stew of fears and superstitions and greivances were cultivated for harvesting by a bizarre little man whose power lay in his willingness to tell the mob everything they wanted to hear. Mainly, that it was all someone else’s fault.

I often think of that when I reflect on the food chain of ordinary citizens “just doing a job” working, say, for a radio station spewing the noxious, self-serving bullshit of your Rush Limbaughs, Jason Lewises or Tom Emmers (before he rode radio power to a seat in the Trump caucus.) Unless you say those “little people” were too hapless and clueless to understand the effect of what they pushing out on the public, there’s responsibility and blame there for Trump and what happened yesterday.

I have no hope — zero — that yesterday’s riot will mark a sea change in American politics. Even if there is a mass prosecution of the selfie-taking, Facebook-posting vandals, it’s inconceivable that Trumpism will diminish enough that grifting sociopaths like Cruz and Hawley will shift course to some kind of neo-George H. W. Bush style of conservative politics. If not votes there’s simply too much easy money to be made off the mob raised up out of soil fertilized by FoxNews, NewsMax, talk radio and now, all the sewage of the internet.

Had that lone black cop in the famous video pulled out a gun and plugged some goon in a QAnon hoodie, or a maybe the guy carrying the “Trump/Jesus” flag, the “victim” would a hero on Limbaugh’s show ten minutes later and Hawley would be on the Senate floor railing against the “cancel culture” that shoots patriots for exercising their First Amendment rights … and encouraging everyone listening to send him a check.