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Jim Newell, Slate’s senior political reporter, was inside the Capitol when the building was breached by pro-Trump rioters on Wednesday. His day started in the press gallery, watching Republicans attempt to object to the Electoral College tallies during a joint session of Congress. When I reached him Wednesday evening, he was hunkered down in a room in an undisclosed location on Capitol grounds, packed in with a bunch of other journalists. On Thursday’s episode of What Next, I talked to Jim about what it was like inside the Capitol siege and what he thinks could and should happen next. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Mary Harris: Jim, how are you?
Jim Newell: At this point, at 6:15 on Wednesday, I’ve actually been bored for a couple of hours. [laughs] You know, I was pretty much locked down at 2:30, and then I was sent to one undisclosed location and then escorted to a new undisclosed location. But there’s nothing to freaking do. I’m just sitting here, you know?
You said yesterday that you were kind of looking forward to going to the Capitol and seeing how the different groups interacted, seeing how this certification went down. But you immediately said, “I’m probably going to regret it, like, right away.” And I was thinking about that all day as we saw what played out.
Didn’t I say something like “Oh, I’m sure it’s not going to be that bad, the protests”? “Only a couple of thousand people and it will peter out.” I’ve been regretting saying that all day.
Take us back to the scene in the House before the breach.
You know, they made an agreement, the leaders, the day before that you would not have everyone on the floor, you would limit it to certain numbers of people who needed to be there to speak.
Because of COVID.
Because of COVID. And, sure enough, there’s probably 100-plus Republicans there.
And already they’re not really respecting the rules.
Yeah. And then Arizona comes, and Paul Gosar, who’s an Arizona member who’s nuts, objects and Cruz seconds him. There’s a big standing ovation for Cruz. And he has this look like he knows what he’s doing is ridiculous, but he has a very serious look on his face.
Afterward, when the Senate met separately to debate this objection, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got up and expressed his displeasure that his members had chosen to slow down the certification process.
From what I heard, there was a little bit of equivalence in there, like “Well, Democrats have objected before, they set this precedent.” But it sounded like the meat of his speech was aggressive and confrontational towards what Trump was doing and what his allies in Congress were doing, trying to have Congress overturn an election, and he did mention the election wasn’t even close. So I give some credit there to him. There are a lot of people around here trying to toe the line a little more carefully. I think [Florida Sen.] Rick Scott announced, like, “I will reject one state’s worth of electors” or something—that’s the kind of needle he’s trying to thread. And McConnell was pretty firm overall that this is an embarrassment.
It’s a little late to grow a backbone.
It’s a little late. It would’ve been nice if he hadn’t led him [Trump] on. But at least he did have a cutoff point, when the Electoral College voted. As we see now, probably a majority of House Republicans do not have a cutoff point. Maybe today was the cutoff point.
And shortly after McConnell gave his speech is when Congress was evacuated.
I looked outside. I started seeing reports about the west front of the Capitol and how they were breaching some barricades there and trying to get on the inaugural platform. And I looked out the window at the east front. It seemed like everything was fine there, so I figured this was an isolated incident. And then a little bit later, I walked by that same window, looking at the east front, and those barricades had been breached. And I saw people kind of flooding towards the building. Then a police officer came by and said, “OK, the Capitol itself is going to lock down now.” Then I watched the second-floor door, central in the Capitol, from the third floor. I saw a bunch of cops outside trying to protect it and a lot of noises—it sounded really like people were storming the barricades. And then eventually I saw someone break through and shatter the window on that door, which is bulletproof glass.
It’s a little bit like a horror movie, when you see a crowd of people rush up to something and break it down.
You don’t expect a building like the Capitol—it’s like if people rushed up and got to the West Wing and started smashing the glass there or something. I mean, you don’t see people do that. And that’s when it really snapped for me, like, OK, this is going to be an actual potentially violent situation that I don’t think the police were prepared for. And that’s when I was like, well, I better get out of here.
The staff there was like, “You need to get in now.” And so then I was locked up there for a few hours.
With a bunch of press?
Yeah. And that was a little nerve-wracking. There wasn’t, like, armed guards outside that door.
Could you hear things?
Oh, yeah. You could hear people running through the hall. You could hear some people start banging on the door, and we’d all quickly put our stuff—in case we had to make a run for it. I could smell traces of tear gas at some point. We didn’t quite know, and we were pretty grateful that the door lock was holding. But you kind of start to look around the room at the objects that are there in case they bust through it. But I think mostly they were just running around and just causing what trouble they could—you know, turning doorknobs, seeing where they can get into.
From the beginning of all this, there was a question of where’s the president? And around 4:30, when you were being moved, is when his video was released, video about a minute long, pretty strange, saying to the rioters, “we love you,” but please go home.
And within that he said, I understand the election was stolen, it was rigged. I can’t believe we’re allowing this to happen. And then he about half an hour ago tweeted out again, something like This is what happens when you steal an election but let’s be peaceful. That just leaves me speechless. I can’t think of something worse to do.
What happens now? Rep. Ilhan Omar has said she’s drafting articles of impeachment. Various folks have suggested we need to move fast, like within 24 hours, because what’s happened is so dangerous. You’ve seen some manufacturers submit a letter to the vice president saying you could invoke the 25th Amendment and take charge, saying Trump is incapacitated. I wonder where you think all that is going.
I don’t know if it’s going anywhere, but I’m at the point now where I’m not ruling it out. I personally think either of those should absolutely happen right now. I think playtime is over here. It really just doesn’t seem tenable even for two more weeks, right now. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen in the government of this country.
It stood out to me that Rep. Katherine Clark, who’s a member of leadership, was one of the people saying that impeachment was on the table. Hakeem Jeffries went on cable news and said they’re not ruling it out. And I thought, OK, this actually might happen.
I don’t know how far it would get and then, you know, a day will pass and I bet ultimately it doesn’t go anywhere, but I think it would be completely justified. And I don’t think it’s a radical idea really at all. But it’s something where if you spend a couple more days being like, “Ooh, we’re thinking about it,” then there’s not really any point to it.
You have to move fast.
Yeah. Do it, like, tonight or—
Do it while your Republican colleagues are freaked out.
Yeah.
I wonder if there’s any talk about consequences for members who support Trump. There was this kind of shocking photo of Josh Hawley walking into the building today where he saw some folks outside, Trump supporters, and he egged them on, he raised his fist. Obviously, the mood is quite different now. I mean, Cori Bush has raised the idea of possibly censuring her colleagues. Do you think that will get off the ground?
I don’t really know. What I really feel mostly is just anger at this whole situation and this feeling that there need to be consequences and not just another one of those things, like “What a wacky day in Washington, D.C.!” I don’t know exactly what they should be, but I feel like you can’t just let these people get away with this.
What would it take for there to be consequences?
I’m not sure. An overwhelming sense among Republicans that Trump is gone and they need to cut bait with him. If they’re so horrified by what they saw today that they need to put an end to this experiment. And maybe if they’re pissed off about Georgia, that’s another way that they might do it. But we haven’t seen in four years—I don’t really know how a member can defend what happened today and not feel as if they led this back on.
Everyone kind of has this moment—I guess for House members when they tell you you might need to use your gas mask, with reporters when you actually see a glass window being broken—it’s like this new breakthrough in sort of internet bullshit becoming real. And I think that was what was so frightening today, is you can see all of this just Trump tweeting nonsense, all these guys enabling him in the House, enabling this nonsense because it’s politically convenient. Going along because you don’t want him to tweet angrily at you and what that can kind of spiral into—and it can spiral into something real.
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