The last time I came to the Capitol I was tear-gassed in the lobby. This time was even worse

The last time I came to the U.S. Capitol was exactly four years ago.

I only made it as far as the outer lobby before a volley of tear gas forced me and a gang of rioters to retreat. I got only a brief glimpse of a grand chandelier and the famous ceiling murals before running into a giant column with my eyes closed.

On this January 6, I entered through that very same door and took a seat in the press gallery above the House Chamber to witness what was always supposed to be a solemn and procedural affair: the certification of the presidential election.

This time there was no QAnon Shaman, no Proud Boys, no priests chanting the Lord’s Prayer on the Ellipse, no tear gas, no zip ties, no gallows, and no raging president encouraging his supporters.

Instead, Vice President Kamala Harris, fresh off her election defeat, entered the room to polite applause from both sides. She walked past a beaming Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia and perhaps the biggest supporter of the mob that attacked this building four years ago. Laughing throughout, Taylor Greene appeared the happiest person in the room.

Harris stood alongside Speaker Mike Johnson as she announced the start of the count, and dutifully watched over the reading out of each state’s votes.

“Madam President, the certificate of the electoral vote of the State of Alabama seems to be regular in form and authentic, and it appears therefrom that Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida received nine votes for president,” and so on, fifty times over.

The process was a return to normalcy, but with the heart of the dispute unresolved — like an awkward Christmas dinner with parents who never went to therapy.

The count proceeded as it should have done four years ago, but there were plenty of reminders of that day.

The boxes containing the certified Electoral College vote tallies, with their distinctive leather straps, were placed at the Speaker’s podium waiting to be opened. Four years ago, those same boxes were hurried out of the chamber moments before the Capitol rioters reached these doors.

Reporters in the gallery shared memories of that day, pointing to the spot where they hid as the chamber doors were breached.

Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker who more than anyone channeled the rage felt by its members when she condemned Donald Trump that day, wore a pained smile throughout. Passing through the hall with a walker, she looked like a wounded warrior leaving the battlefield.

The biggest threat to proceedings this time around was the weather. In a fitting metaphor for the day, a brutal winter snow storm fell on the Capitol, covering everything underneath in a blanket of eerie silence.

A lifetime has passed in these last four years. When the dust settled on January 6, 2021, few could have imagined that the instigator of that historic attack on the US Capitol would be returning to the White House again.

Trump dispatched his mob in a speech of fire and brimstone, and a coded language so simple even a child could understand. He wanted them to disrupt the peaceful transition of power and interrupt the democratic process to remain in power.

The crowd was so sure of its task that it started to head for the Capitol before he had even finished talking. I followed that mob of thousands as they gathered on the lawn beneath the grand steps of the building, as militiamen forced their way to the front and eventually beat police out of the way. I was helped up over an outer wall by a large bearded man with a southern drawl who called me “brother” and thankfully was oblivious to me being a journalist. I watched as they stormed the building and did what they had been told to do.

The crowd read aloud the then-president’s rageful tweets calling Mike Pence a traitor. It spurred them on.

The attack was unique in American history, but familiar to countries around the world where democracy is faltering or nonexistent. In those places warlords don suits, history is rewritten, crimes are forgotten and buried and everyone has to adjust to the new reality.

That is what has happened here. In the years that followed, many Americans decided they were completely unmoved by it. No amount of lofty coverage about its gravity and meaning, or hours of footage showing how brutal it really was, could shift the country in any meaningful way. The attempted coup became a non-event to many, little more than a cudgel used by the Democrats to bash Trump.

Part of the reason, of course, was the full-force public relations campaign launched by Trump and the pliant right-wing media ecosystem that brought him to power. When it became clear that Trump would retain his grip on the Republican Party’s base, the party dutifully fell in line and disavowed their disavowals.

Even those who abhorred what happened that day took the wrong lesson from January 6. People like Mitch McConnell, who held in his hands the power to impeach Trump and bar him from ever taking office again, instead saw it as a near miss — a day when institutions withstood their strongest test. But the attack on the Capitol didn’t end that day. It continued in the months and years ahead as Trump refused to drop the lie that the election was stolen from him, and it continued when his party stopped disagreeing with him.

Over time, Trump’s attempt to steal an election was rebranded as a protest, a riot, or something in between.  He and his acolytes rewrote the events of that so successfully that not only is he returning to the White House, but he is also poised to pardon hundreds of the rioters who carried out his scheme.

Trump’s victory in the 2024 election settled the matter for good. The lesson of the Capitol attack would need to be relearned. To paraphrase the man himself: When you’re a president, they let you do it.