The Riot Against Reality
On reporting from January 6th and having Trump’s Twitter password.
I arrived in Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2021 around 3 p.m., about an hour after Trump supporters had breached the Capitol. I had come late for a simple reason: I didn’t want to go. I was sick of covering the beat.
In 2019, I had published a book on the ring of websites that had spawned QAnon, message boards like 4chan and 8chan. It was an unhappy subject. And afterwards, I had hoped the problem would fade into irrelevance. Instead, it became all I wrote about. And at that moment, there seemed little end in sight. QAnon followers were leading the charge into Congress.
I lived near the city and had been to a variety of far-right rallies over the past four years. But I had never seen the place like this. Trump supporters were everywhere. They stood out against the hyper-gentrified streets as if daubed by bright paint. It wasn't just the flags and hats. It was everything, their work boots, their vape pens, their seething frustration-- the tells were numerous, like spotting the tourists in Times Square.
The Capitol was shrouded in smoke. The president's supporters held the lawn and the parapets. They were even interwoven in the marble statues above my head. Loud booms resounded from the upper works, either from tear gas or fireworks as a thin line of neon-jacketed police officers wobbled against the massive crowd on the highest tiers of the building. As always on the mall, an ice cream truck was doing brisk business.
I tried to interview people, but there was little consistency. Each person I spoke to told me a totally different, loopy, treasured, internet conspiracy theory.
A 37-year-old Hispanic man from Illinois explained, "we all feel like it was fraud, with the evidence and everything. There's a lot of patriots here defending the Constitution and everyone's vote." He didn't watch any TV but read Facebook and Parler (a far-right Twitter alternative). "Getting information from other places," he explained, "opened my eyes."
A middle-aged lady from the Midwest walked me through an elaborate argument about voting irregularities in certain counties. She had driven all the way to D.C. She also got her news from social media.
It was all about "The Great Reset," two demonstrators told me. One said he owned a restaurant in Philadelphia. The other had a thick southern accent. When I asked them to explain, they were astonished.
"You've never heard of the Great Reset?" the southern man asked in disbelief.
"That's when we go to a one world currency." the other added. There were other details, about elites taking control, but I lost track.
Everyone got their news from different places. Had different grievances. Though the themes were the same. They were being lied to. The people at the top were cheating those on the bottom.
There was a gap between their beliefs and reality. The internet supplied the connecting circuit, a critical piece of missing information: an explanation for what had gone wrong, why things were getting worse. But that piece was unique, algorithmically crafted by social media.
It was noisy. I had to lean in to hear what people had to say. No one was wearing a mask except me.
There were lots of old people in the crowd. A geriatric man with a gamey leg passed me, supported by a long wobbly piece of PVC pipe, perhaps the remains of a Trump flag. He was descending the marbled steps with his elderly wife, gingerly, carefully. Someone was blasting, “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It had been surprisingly easy to find parking.
Except for maybe a subset of fascists, they were a new type of revolutionary. It was a new kind of history, accomplished by the deluded. As if the French peasants who stormed the Bastille believed they were freeing lizard people.
"Thank god," I thought, ascending the hill up to the Capitol. " I was afraid something much worse was going to happen."
People rarely write about the days leading up to the 6th, when Trump refused to admit defeat, and it appeared as if he might remain in office.
It's easy to forget this was the tail end of the pandemic. People were miserable, cooped up.
Earlier in 2020, there had been the George Floyd protests, the law-free "autonomous zone" in Seattle, the street battles in Portland. Military helicopters had zoomed over protesters in D.C. Crowds were tear-gassed as Trump toured the streets, holding a bible upside down, in the company of his top general. (The general later said he regretted the decision). But the question was in the air: would the military support Trump in whatever he did?
Being stuck inside made people feel powerless. Or heightened the already existing sentiment. And when I spoke to rioters, I recognized that undercurrent of frustration.
In fact, my spirits were high for the same reason I imagined so many other people around me were in a good mood: it felt great to finally get out of the house-- to be doing something, anything, than what we were told we should be doing, which was nothing. As everything, inarguably was going to hell in a handbasket. It was unseasonably warm. The air was quite temperate for winter, cool and fresh.
These days, Mike Pence is often remembered as a hero for his “courage” standing up to Trump on January 6th. But for weeks it was unclear whether he would certify the election of Joe Biden.
The vice president waited until the last possible moment, a few hours before the certification on the 6th, to say that he would.
We later learned that on January 5th Pence was still soliciting legal advice about what to do. Once again, his lawyers told him there was no legal way he could support Trump.
What if Pence had had different lawyers? Or been a different person?
Like so many others, I expected Trump to try and thwart the democratic transfer of power on January 6th, because that's what he said he wanted to do.
It was just unclear what form it would take. I expected something more formal. Perhaps there would be a tipping point on the 6th, a moment when Trump appeared to be winning, and others in power would then rush to his side.
Instead, the only people who heeded his call were his supporters.
The bulk of the crowd were credulous people, who had believed the president when he said the election had been stolen, that he needed their help to preserve democracy. Though the diversity of strange beliefs and subgroups was hard to overstate.
And it was full of violent people. The paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers, had stashed weapons in Virginia, but ultimately didn’t follow through on distributing them to the rioters. No one knows who planted the pipe bombs around The Capitol, but they ended up not going off. Up at the front, people were dying. I could see that on Twitter.
Nonetheless, it was evident: Trump’s final push to hold on to power would fail. And I felt relieved for another reason, one I’m now embarrassed to admit.
The stupid password.
As I interviewed the rioters, both Republicans and Democrats were pleading with Trump to tell his supporters to go home. Trump did end up tweeting several times, but the messages were muddled and loopy. Trump kept emphasizing the day was about "love" (presumably for him).
Well, I reminded myself, I could do it.
I had Trump's Twitter password.
It was Maga2024!
A few days earlier, a Canadian hacker named Aubrey Cottle had given it to me.
I had written about Aubrey Cottle for The Atlantic in 2020. He was an early member of the infamous hacktivist collective Anonymous.
He was also a troll, a maddening mix of aggrandizing and earnest. Nearly everything he told me was like that stupid password, crazy, nearly impossible to verify. Then after a little digging, just like his claims about being around for the early days of Anonymous, the tall tales rang maddeningly true. Ish.
So, the password existed in a state of quantum uncertainty. Was it real? The only way to know was to test it, which was illegal.
How had Aubrey gotten it? He had guessed. Earlier in the year, another hacker had discovered and published Trump’s old Twitter password: Maga2020! It seemed only logical to try a few variations.
In the days leading up to January, after Aubrey had given me the password, I had had bad dreams.
Each night, my late father, who had watched his American-style democracy in Czechoslovakia disintegrate under Hitler, then Stalin, came to me and berated me.
In the only one I can remember, we were a few blocks away from the Capitol, at our old haunt, the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington D.C., arguing about the definition of fascism. Then we were watching a play. One of the histories maybe, or Hamlet. Brave men doing great deeds. My father turned to me in his seat. His face was red. He was so livid he wouldn't speak to me. The condemnation stung.
If Trump seized power on the 6th, it felt wrong to do nothing.
Or it was all drama. A fiction.
The whole thing seemed ridiculous. Laughable.
The theatrics, the unreality, the storytelling, the fatuous absurdity, the threat of jail. They were all part of the new politics, in which online fiction surfaced in this dimension, the real one, into political power.
For example, Aubrey had a rival, though the rivalry was one sided. For the past few months, the Anonymous hacker had targeted the manager of the far-right message board, 8kun (formerly 8chan), a man named Ron Watkins.
I had recently reported on Watkins for the podcast Reply All. The story was about how Ron Watkins appeared to be posting as “QAnon,” the fictional online secret agent who had motivated so many Trump supporters. Ron had told me he wasn’t QAnon. But that a documentary would eventually reveal the truth. (When the documentary, Q: into the Storm, was released it reached the same conclusion: Ron was likely QAnon).
QAnon and the hacker group Anonymous are related. They were both spawned on the online message board, 4chan. And they use a similar playbook, trolling and spreading misinformation for political purposes. Aubrey felt he could re-unite Anonymous to out troll and hack the alt-right.
But at the moment, Ron was out trolling everyone. On the morning of the U.S. presidential election, before a clear winner could be determined, Watkins announced he was quitting 8kun. A few days later, Trump lost the election. And QAnon, who had promised a series of smashing victories for Trump, abruptly stopped posting.
To fill the void, Ron started writing similar content on his Twitter account, under his real name, to his vast audience of QAnon followers.
The transition was a wild success.
Soon, Ron had made his first ever public appearance, on the far-right “One America News Network,” where he billed himself as a "large systems analyst" and questioned the integrity of the voting machines in Georgia.
Donald Trump liked Ron’s segment on OAN. The president retweeted the interview repeatedly. Ron's follower count increased to over a half a million users. Emboldened, Ron issued new “drops” of misinformation that filled the void left by an absent QAnon. Ron also tweeted at Trump’s attorneys. And before long, he was contributing to Trump’s court filings challenging the election results.
On January 2nd, Trump retweeted Ron several times regarding the upcoming "Stop the Steal" protests on January 6th, including Ron's advice to "wear body cameras". The next day, January 3rd, Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to "find" him more votes. In the conversation, Trump echoed many conspiracy theories Ron had expressed, if not outright invented, on Twitter about Dominion voting machines.
A few days earlier, Ron had tweeted about Trump "crossing the Rubicon." Would Trump “become a legend” he asked, and like Caesar end the republic and ascend to dictator?
It was all so ridiculous. But it had real world effects.
Was I supposed to enter this drama?
Had Aubrey handed me the dagger and was I to play Brutus? Last doomed defender of the republic?
At the suggestion of my editor, I called Aubrey from the steps of the Capitol and asked him if he was going to use the password. “No man, that’s a one-way ticket to Gitmo.”
In the days leading up the 6th, I had thought about what I would do if I was going to tweet as Trump. Use a clean laptop and the anonymizing Tor network, bike to a library out of the way, connect to free public wifi.
Now in the crunch at the Capitol, I just had my phone. And none of it was necessary.
I had anticipated a nightmare scenario, in which Trump’s seizure of power felt like a fait d’accompli as others in the government sided with him and no real challenge came.
But instead, we got this January 6th.
In the end, the only people who answered Trump’s call to arms were his supporters, a confusing mix of the radical and susceptible. And they were going to lose. Already, the pumpkin was turning back into a carriage.
It took the form of a distant line of police officers, heavily armed, moving steadily forward. As I was filming the phenomenon, an old lady wandered by, in the wrong direction, towards the line, disoriented, “Has anyone seen my son?” she repeated before she was sucked into the crowd.