What has been clear to some of us for a long time — and what is becoming more difficult to deny every day — is that the events of January 6 were part of an attempted coup d’état, one that proceeded on two fronts: As the rioters occupied the Capitol and disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College votes, Trump’s legal minions sought madly for some pretext upon which to nullify the election. Meanwhile, Trump allies occupying several points on the far-right tail of the bell curve of glue-sniffing madness hatched all kinds of supplementary schemes, some of them involving the military.

A riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target.

It is true that some of the disorder of the past few years has had a distinctly political — revolutionary — character. The CHOP/CHAZ episode in Seattle is one example. But planting your flag on a Seattle sidewalk is a very different thing from having the president of the United States and his official allies make a serious effort at an autocoup — an effort that is, we should very much keep in mind, ongoing, with Trump-aligned Republicans working to take over election-management offices and to continue their effort to delegitimize the 2020 election through lies and conspiracy kookery.