Police behaviour that made no effort at impartiality, denial of responsibility and the least guilt, almost laughable attempts to shift blame; the parallels have been noted already, though more keep coming to mind.
Resemblance to Paisleyism and Paisleyites blared out of the crude, dark farce that was Trumpites Take The Capitol.
Over-excited editorialising headlined this ‘carnage’, surely wrong. There would have been carnage, an armed police onslaught, if those who tried to derail Joe Biden’s inauguration had been black.
This white crowd ambled around like people at The Field on the Twelfth, an American academic already on the case reckoning they were mostly delighted to be validated by the president himself, told by him in person to head for the Capitol. And you could of course miss the nastiness in another part of the crowd, another cop-out familiar here over decades for those who lie to their consciences.
Watching the mob close in on a photographer must have reminded scores of older and not so old media-workers of 1985, 1995, at Holy Cross, during the flag protests. ‘You’re all biased, you only want to make us look bad, you never report properly’, snarled in 85, 86, 96, 98, while breaking a cameraman’s arm, wrestling tape-recorders away to smash them. RTE crews who made easy targets at Paisley rallies saw the man at the microphone point them out with his shark-toothed grin. He liked his twisted fun. At the White House before unleashing the crowd Trump ordered the media to show how big his crowd was: ‘Turn your cameras’.
He would be ‘walking with you,’ Trump told the crowd as he sent them off down Pennsylvania Avenue. He finished a whole 74 minutes of prepping them, full of ‘fight’ and ‘fighting’, and went back into the White House. Paisley used to find urgent business in America, notably in August 1986 - while ambitious deputy Peter Robinson headed by night across the border to Clontibret with some cudgel-wielders.
The best anyone can do for no-show Trump is an account that says he was told security would not allow him to walk with the crowd to the Capitol. You can see why someone with a shred of legal influence on him and a wish to avoid prosecution for conspiracy to commit treason might so decide.
There would have been no lawyering his way out of it, not that anyone could have imagined the entirety of the next few hours. It was not to be thought of, the long red tie flowing in the wind, lacquered hair blazing for the cameras, breaking into America’s legislature while the legislators set up the installation of his successor.
Instead it was home to the huge television screen and much later, after another wodge of videoed ‘We love you’, the sulky read of an autocued message that at last condemned but also conceded; that in just over a week there will be another president.
His followers must live with that. The most frenzied conspiracists have already denounced him, having first searched his words in vain for hidden messages.
Despite a brief 60s effort by Terence O’Neill, moderate, respectable unionism never pulled itself together and denounced, without qualification, the upwardly mobile extremist who was coming for them. There was no republican violence to blame for their cowardice. The IRA had not yet undermined the anti-unionist case.
By the time David Trimble became Ulster Unionist leader and had to face into negotiations about a settlement of some kind, mainstream unionism was distorted by playing to hardliners as well as trying to stay in with Westminster. Ulster Unionism’s equivalent, today’s American Republican Party, have left it too late for their own good, and the good of politics.
Paisleyism distorted what came after him as well as the politics around him. Today’s hollow, rattling DUP is a fitting memorial. Trump’s last stand is no credit to America’s cradle of democracy but apt monument to him.
