"There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current."

"Everyone seemed to understand what was about to happen. The past nine weeks had been steadily building toward this moment. On November 7th, mere hours after Biden’s win was projected, I attended a protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol, in Harrisburg. Hundreds of Trump supporters, including heavily armed militia members, vowed to revolt. When I asked a man with an assault rifle—a 'combat-skills instructor' for a militia called the Pennsylvania Three Percent—how likely he considered the prospect of civil conflict, he told me, 'It’s coming.' Since then, Trump and his allies had done everything they could to spread and intensify this bitter aggrievement. On December 5th, Trump acknowledged, 'I’ve probably worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever have in my life.'... Militant pro-Trump outfits like the Proud Boys—a national organization dedicated to 'reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism' in America—had been openly gearing up for major violence. In early January, on Parler, an unfiltered social-media site favored by conservatives, Joe Biggs, a top Proud Boys leader, had written, 'Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung.' On the Mall, a makeshift wooden gallows, with stairs and a rope, had been constructed near a statue of Ulysses S. Grant.... I followed a group that broke off to advance on five policemen guarding a side corridor. 'Stand down,' a man in a maga hat commanded. 'You’re outnumbered. There’s a fucking million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump—your boss.' 'We can take you out,' a man beside him warned." 

From "Among the Insurrectionists/The Capitol was breached by Trump supporters who had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep the President in power. A chronicle of an attack foretold" by Luke Mogelson (The New Yorker).