Inauguration day: pro-Trump protests in state capitals were missed

In the days following the violent Trump-inspired insurgency on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the FBI warned all 50 states that similar “armed protests” were being planned by right-wing extremists around their capitals. But on the day of the inauguration, at least, these protests turned out to be complete failures.

Not only were there no incidents of violence in state capitals on Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET, but in many of them the number of MAGA protesters could be counted with one hand.

At the New York Capitol in Albany, Spectrum News reporter Morgan Mckay documented the presence of a single pro-Trump protester.

“He says he expected a few thousand people here and is disappointed,” Mckay tweeted. (Thanks to Elie Mystal from the Nation for his useful Twitter feed put the following tweets in the same place.)

A similar scene took place at the California Capitol in Sacramento, where a man in a Trump cap protested when President Joe Biden was sworn in, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. (Later in the day, larger protests took place around the California Capitol, but they were left-wing protests calling for the abolition of immigration and customs and for immigration reform. )

There were three times as many pro-Trump protesters in the New Hampshire capital – but that still represented just three of them. And a third of the group took off early, telling reporters “he was going skiing,” according to Dan Tuohy of New Hampshire Public Radio.

A dozen armed protesters marched at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, but BuzzFeed’s Ryan Mac said he remained peaceful.

And a pro-Trump protest some 700 miles north of there at the Nevada Capitol in Carson City was equally disappointing, according to Colton Lochhead of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

You get the drift. Local reporters also documented how the Biden inauguration protests failed in Kansas:

North Carolina:

Minnesota:

Missouri:

Texas:

And Tennessee:

Trump fans were also scarce in downtown Washington, DC, which is heavily militarized after the insurgency. In fact, Vice’s Tess Owen reported that Nickelback fans were better represented on the streets around the U.S. Capitol than Trump supporters.

Of course, just because Biden’s inauguration went off without a hitch in Washington and state capitals across the country, doesn’t mean the threat posed by right-wing extremists has passed. But it shows how Trump’s months-long campaign to overturn the election results turned from tragedy to farce in the weeks following the January 6 riot. It also hints at how the bans on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms of Trump and the right-wing conspirators and instigators in the wake of the Capitol uprising, which was largely staged online, are working. .

For his part, not only did Trump fail to attend Biden’s inauguration, he managed to leave DC without ever properly acknowledging the legitimacy of his loss or officially conceding. He took off for Florida on Wednesday morning after a final speech as president at Joint Base Andrews in which he told a modest crowd of his supporters: “We’ll be back in one form or another … let’s have a good life.”

Coming as he did exactly two weeks after giving birth a fiery speech which resulted in the deaths of five people in a riot on the United States Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn the election result, Trump’s resigned tone was remarkable. And, at least for a day, his supporters got it.