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Twelve Days in June is a work of speculative fiction. The Lodestar

magazine and Max Ezer are fictitious entities. Public figures and entities are
depicted in a fictitious context—their actions and statements are presented
hypothetically as satirical political commentary protected
under fair use and the First Amendment. All other characters are wholly
fictitious, and any resemblances to persons, living or dead, or events that
take place after the publication of this work are purely coincidental.

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The Lodestar

Twelve Days in June

The untold story of the American Spring
MAX EZER | MAY 2022 ISSUE | _U.S._

This is the fourth story in a five-part series on the greatest crisis in American democracy since the Civil

War, as it unfolded over just twelve days in June 2021. Drawing on newly available sources and

exhaustive research, Max Ezer recounts the gripping drama of those events from the perspectives of

key participants, and places the violence in the context of the political turmoil that preceded it. This

issue’s story, “Blackout,” sheds new light on the decision making processes that left many Americans

living in 2021 feeling as though the clock had rolled back to the late eighties. It reveals fresh details

about his dangerous bid to stir more violence in the streets, even as his administration unraveled

around him.

Part IV: Blackout

T
HE JOLT OF landing jarred David Cimino awake from an uneasy

dream. Opening the window shade, he squinted in the morning

light of Minneapolis. He’d slipped out his phone and switched it off
airplane mode before he remembered that it wouldn’t matter. Cimino, 36,
was a team lead with HIRT, the Hunt and Incident Response Team at CISA,
Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. A
little over four hours earlier, at 4:30 a.m. Eastern, he’d been sleeping next to
his wife Katherine at their Falls Church, Virginia apartment when the
emergency page came in. His manager at NCCIC, the National Cybersecurity
and Communications Integration Center, had terse instructions: he was

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being sent into the field for an urgent cyber operation, and should pack for
several days. Due to the civil disturbances, a car would pick him up in 30
minutes. Throwing his clothes on with no time to shower, he’d zipped up
toiletries, folded a second Macy’s-bought black suit into his roll-along, and
kissed Kat goodbye while the government SUV idled impatiently under a
streetlight outside.

He’d assumed that they were going to Dulles since Ronald Reagan was shut
down with throngs of protesters, but the driver was going in the opposite
direction. They were headed for Joint Base Andrews, he explained, and after
a detour-filled and phoneless 75-minute ride into Maryland, Cimino emerged
onto the noisy tarmac next to a Citation 550 twinjet where half a dozen
others stood waiting. An NCCIC analyst with a clipboard emerged to make
introductions and brief them on the mission. Because terror-linked groups
were using online communication to coordinate paralyzing actions targeting
airports and critical infrastructure, the president had decided to invoke
emergency powers and temporarily restrict the internet to high-priority
traffic. Internet service providers (ISPs) had already been ordered to install
software blocking access to most of their customers, but many were likely to
defy those demands, so they would have to physically seize the internet
exchange points (IXPs) and backbone data centers that route traffic between
those ISP-level networks. The team was going to Minneapolis to take control
of an IXP called MICE, the Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange.

Now, as they pulled suitcases toward a waiting Suburban, they heard the
distant wail of emergency warning sirens. In addition to Cimino as team lead,
there was another cyber operations analyst from NCCIC, two NSA technical
specialists, two private contractor employees, and one DHS lawyer. In

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addition to the software they would install, the senior NSA man carried a
locked metal briefcase containing one or more hardware elements to put in
place. Their precise nature remains top secret, but a panel of cybersecurity
experts later speculated in The Guardian that they were separate processor
units running software to thwart manipulation of whitelists on the IXPs’
route servers. After a 15-minute ride downtown, they arrived at the 511
Building, a 300,000-square foot brutalist technology center next to U.S.
Bank Stadium. A team of armed FBI agents was waiting for them in the
parking lot. They trooped up to the main entrance. It was exactly 8:00 a.m.
local time on Monday, June 21—the longest day of the year.

The agents flashed their badges to the security guards and were met in the
lobby by MICE chief manager Scott Groll, who’d gotten a knock on his door
by police in the still-dark morning and been driven to the facility in a squad
car. Cimino introduced himself, and the team’s lawyer handed over a three-
page document from Homeland Security claiming Section 606 authority to
take control of the IXP. Groll calmly informed them that MICE’s lawyers
were already preparing to file a suit challenging the legality of the seizure,
but he was in no position to resist.

Almost 1,400 miles and two time zones west in Seattle, citizen journalist
Kathryn Jorgenson was awakened shortly after 6:00 a.m. by her landline
ringing. It was her adult son Brandon calling from Chicago. “Turn on the
TV,” he said. “Trump just announced he’s shutting down the internet.” But
before she could, another call came in—this one from a neighborhood
character she knew as “Ant-Man.” Federal agents were about to seize the
Seattle Internet Exchange on 7th Avenue, and a big group of local activists
were going to try and stop them. She threw on sweats, slipped on her goggles

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and gas mask, loaded her backpack with extra memory cards and camera
batteries, and biked 11 blocks through the nearly deserted streets to the
address Ant-Man gave her.

As Jorgenson arrived, she saw about 150 protesters already there by the front
entrance of the high-rise with more streaming in from every direction. One
police cruiser was parked nearby with its lights on, but they weren’t
interfering. Jorgenson turned on her helmet-mounted GoPro and out of
habit tried to livestream—to her surprise, she could still get WiFi. Asking
several demonstrators how they found out about this, the answers were
varied: some had gotten calls via landline, others from friends knocking on
their doors. Many had gotten messages online at home, since broadband still
seemed to be working throughout the city. Jorgenson, 56, had activism in her
blood. Her Freedom Summer volunteer father had eloped with her CORE
organizer mother when interracial marriage was still illegal in the South.
Jorgenson had been documenting protests in Seattle since 1999, and had
been arrested twice during the city’s George Floyd demonstrations. She knew
the local progressive scene better than almost anybody. But she noticed that
many of those now gathered outside the SIX were unfamiliar faces—mixed in
with the usual leftists were clean-cut nerds, gamers in StarCraft t-shirts, and
Amazon employees still wearing company lanyards.

The doors opened, and two of the exchange’s operations staff came out: Chris
Caputo and Bianca Wu. They explained to the crowd what the government
was trying to do, and said that SIX regarded the Section 606 order as grossly
illegal. They would be resisting by every peaceful means possible. Protesters
flooded into the lobby, as others went to cover all the building’s secondary
entrances.

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Finally, at 6:37 a.m., a black SUV pulled up with its flashers on, and seven
men in dark suits emerged. Demonstrators locked arms in front of them,
blocking the way. Someone with a bullhorn shouted “When human rights are
under attack, what do we do?” and about half the crowd roared in unison
“Stand up, fight back!”

Jorgenson made her way to the front and recorded the scene. There were
probably 400 protesters around the building now, between those blocking
the entrances and those sitting down in the lobby. Two members of the
CRYSTAL SPIKE team flash FBI badges and command the demonstrators to
step aside. “This is a fuckin’ felony, tough guy,” one of the agents can be
heard yelling at a young man with a sharpied “Mark of the Beast = 606” sign.
In minutes, more Seattle PD interceptors pull up with sirens blaring. “This is
an unlawful demonstration,” one announces via bullhorn. “If you do not
disperse within five minutes, you will be arrested.”

But the crowd was well prepared. Many were handcuffing themselves to each
other. Others held up cameras to remind police that they would be
accountable for whatever they did. A SWAT team tried to lead the federal
agents into a side entrance but found it likewise blocked by dozens of
chanting demonstrators. All the while, hundreds more people were pouring
onto the street from all around downtown, delaying deployment of the civil
disturbance units that were being mobilized across the city. A chant began in
the lobby and made its way out to the sidewalk: “We will stand! We will fight!
Internet is a human right! We will stand! We will fight! Internet is a human
right!”

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Another fierce confrontation with police was underway outside AT&T’s
massive data center at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco—where the HIRT
team avoided hundreds of activists by entering via an adjacent building. Yet
although resistance was strong in liberal West Coast cities, by 10:00 a.m.
Eastern, a majority of the country had been plunged into the pre-internet age
as most of the 2,955 notified ISPs complied with Homeland Security’s order
and installed the CRYSTAL SPIKE software. For ordinary Americans in
Dallas, Detroit, and almost two dozen other metropolitan areas, the
combination of blocked web access and dark cell towers had wound the clock
back to about 1988.

Many older citizens had pined wistfully for a simpler time before screens and
smartphones dominated daily life. But instead of The Cosby Show on
television, they now saw fires in Atlanta and soldiers on city streets. Instead
of George Michael’s “Faith” on the radio, stations were broadcasting
emergency alerts and government reassurances that the nation’s food supply
would not be interrupted.

Inside Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’s palatial Kalorama home, Julia
and Gabby Glazer were playing Carnival Row Monopoly. They’d been there
since Sunday, when a right-wing forum doxxed their address and death
threats came gushing in. With police overstretched by the protests and their
Alexandria home hard to keep staffed with bodyguards due to all the
roadblocks, Bezos had personally invited them to stay. When the internet
went down, an Amazon employee had made them sandwiches and brought
out board games to take their minds off it. But as much as they tried to focus
on developing real estate in the Burgue, the sense of dread and isolation

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crept into their thoughts like smoke curling under a closed door. It felt like a
surreal nightmare.

J
UST AS NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone had anticipated, the crash

rollout of the whitelist sowed chaos from sea to shining sea. He’d
realized this shortly after the end of his videoconference with the
president the night before, and called Mar-a-Lago to say he refused to
authorize agency participation in the Section 606 operations, and if Trump
wouldn’t change his mind, he’d be sending his resignation letter in the
morning. On hearing of the ultimatum, Trump fired the decorated four-star
general over the phone. Federal agents came to the homes of NSA Deputy
Director Willis McTighe and U.S. Cyber Command Deputy Commander
Lieutenant General John Morrison Jr. to inform them that they were now
acting heads of their respective agency and command. McTighe, a close
friend of Nakasone, told the men at his door that he would also be resigning
in protest. On radioing to report the refusal, they were given a new address—
the Glen Burnie, Maryland home of NSA Executive Director Bob Vered, who
took the job around 2:30 a.m. in hopes, he later told investigators, of
preventing worse abuses if Trump kept firing people down the agency’s org
chart until he found a pliant stooge. At the NCCIC in Arlington, planning for
the operation had turned the watch floor into a blur of activity, but CISA
officials understood this was going to be an absolute train wreck.

Because there was essentially no time to update the draft whitelist sitting in
the NSA’s files, the internet was going dark not just to members of the public
but to hospitals, utilities, and law enforcement agencies that should have
been allowed by CRYSTAL SPIKE to stay online. Indeed, many of Homeland
Security’s own computers found themselves unable to access the web, or

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could only reach small parts of it. Switchboards at the Department of
Defense were overwhelmed with calls as military officers tried to reach
officials by phone to convey important national security information that
couldn’t get through by email.

At Joint Task Force headquarters in D.C., there was bedlam as

communications and logistics officers tried to prevent the flow of matériel
into the capital from collapsing. The JTF and units working in coordination
with it required a staggering 1,100 tons of supplies per day, internet or no
internet. The soldiers, marines, airmen, National Guard, local police, state
police, federal law enforcement, and civilian contractors all had to be fed, as
did the more than 14,000 detainees being held at several facilities around the
region. Units in the streets were expending thousands of “less-lethal”
munitions per day—from rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, to flashbang
and smoke grenades, to pepper spray and tear gas. Tens of thousands more
rounds of live ammunition had been ordered to have on hand, just in case.
Personal equipment, too, needed steady replacement: body armor, shields,
gas masks, radios, and countless other items. Over 100,000 pairs of flex cuffs
had been allocated, but there always seemed to be a shortage. Spare tires,
engine parts, gears, and other mechanical replacements were demanded by
the truckload. The thousands of vehicles and generators had an unslakable
thirst for gasoline and diesel, avgas, jet fuel, coolants, and lubricating oils.
The electronics were gobbling up dozens of kinds of batteries, and the police
horses needed fresh feed, shoes, and extra tack. The project of restricting
protesters’ movement required hundreds of miles of concertina wire, plastic
netting, wooden fencing, and concrete barriers. In total, the supply lists ran
to hundreds of pages, ranging from essential medicines to obscure drone
components, to the special infrared glint patches that troops can put on their

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helmets to make their positions visible from the air. Without the internet,
keeping track of consumption and deliveries was a cavalcade of horrors.

The challenge would have been great enough if all these supplies were
coming from a single depot somewhere, but instead everything had to be
sourced from a byzantine tangle of commands and agencies which were
receiving conflicting and confusing information from all directions. Under
normal conditions, the president would express his broad intentions to the
Secretary of Defense, whose civilian and military subordinates at the
Pentagon would liaise with the combatant commander at USNORTHCOM.
He, in turn, would provide whatever assets the JTF commander needed to
fulfill the law enforcement missions laid out by the senior civilian official on
scene—the SCRAG. Instead, Trump was using his cell phone to call the JTF
commander directly and make operational suggestions interspersed with
gossip about harebrained things he’d seen on OANN. He was then passing on
the general’s requests straight to the Pentagon, sometimes badly mangled
and intermixed with fake news. He’d told multiple people that they were in
charge of the same things, prompting his loyal Army Secretary Matt Caesar
to task his own staff with coordinating logistics—without notifying the proper
chain of command. Nobody felt clear on who bore ethical and legal
responsibility for what was going on. Confronted with an irredeemable
omnishambles among the senior decisionmakers, the career professionals
were trying against all odds to salvage some semblance of order.

Inside JFHQ-NCR, this responsibility fell to Clemens Diefenbach, a 69-year-

old former Army colonel whose organizational genius had kept him on the
job across three presidencies. Downstairs from the Joint Operations Center,
he presided over a warren of staff officers in an alphabet soup of directorates

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and sections—J-4, J-6, IOWG, OCSIC, JIACG, and more. Their work was
carried out through an almost impenetrable jargon: who has TACON,
forwarding an RFF, maintaining COMSEC, updating the JMEEL, calling
JECC, looping in the JIOC, adding functionality at JBAB. Dozens of agency
liaisons were there, too, sharing overtaxed phone and fax lines to keep their
parent organizations apprised of what was going on at headquarters.

Meanwhile at the Pentagon, cat-herding responsibility lay with Assistant

Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security (ASD
HD&GS) Kenneth Rapuano. As JTF-NCR asked USNORTHCOM for more
forces and supplies, planners there weighed those requests against
competing needs elsewhere and relayed amended requirements to Rapuano.
His staff then had to figure out which DoD organs, civilian agencies, or
private-sector actors were best able to fill those needs. As these plans came
together, Rapuano passed them on to his Joint Director of Military Support,
Brigadier General Christian Lanfort, for execution. As JTF-NCR’s manpower
requirements increased, it was Lanfort who coordinated with the National
Guard Bureau to prepare for more mobilizations, and worked with
Transportation Command and Army Material Command to ramp up
logistical capacity. When reports came in that D.C. residents were facing
critical shortages of groceries and pharmaceuticals, Lanfort worked with
FEMA Region III Federal Coordinating Officer Sean Buck and Defense
Coordinating Officer Colonel Dick Traylor to truck in food rations and staff
mobile pharmacies.

Because the Pentagon was so close to Washington D.C., all these efforts were
complicated not only by the internet blackout and presidential meddling but
also by the physical proximity of the demonstrations. With protesters

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choking the roads into the complex and access cut off to a trickle despite
aggressive police action, SCRAG Pete Zeller requested armor-led bus convoys
to get employees through the blockages. Meanwhile, Rapuano ordered
emergency arrangements to house as much of the 26,000-strong workforce
on site as possible until the crisis was over. Others were furloughed or
reassigned to other DoD facilities across the region. As subsequently detailed
by Ben Taub in The New Yorker, these disruptions significantly impaired
several ongoing counter-terror operations—and Navy officials believe they
likely contributed to the USS Carl Vinson accident that August.

Yet as messy as things were for the military and government, the public had
it worse. As the internet went dark, landline phone networks across the
country buckled under the strain—less from substitution offline of ordinary
communications than from worried Americans using the only reliable means
left for checking on friends and loved ones. Lines at gas stations stretched for
blocks as governors prepared to order rationing. Many credit card systems
and ATM networks had crashed, so barter and price gouging exploded into
the vacuum. In San Francisco, police arrested a Chevron franchisee who was
selling Regular Unleaded for over $9.99 a gallon.

Although most utilities operated over private networks not directly affected
by CRYSTAL SPIKE, they were not designed to weather a nationwide digital
blackout. The cell tower shutdowns had already knocked out many pieces of
key equipment that operate via wireless signals, and the central computers
controlling service were suddenly unable to access critical data from the
cloud. While most people’s utilities stayed functional, there were major
failures all over the United States. Dozens of communities experienced
electric blackouts as smart sensors went dark and power grids abruptly

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overloaded. In parts of Phoenix, fail-safes in natural gas distribution systems
tripped, cutting off the flow to citizens’ water heaters and stoves. Connection
outages at some sewage treatment plants and water pumping stations caused
machinery to start malfunctioning. Many adaptive traffic control systems
also broke down, worsening gridlock as panic-buyers went out for essentials.
With roughly 40 percent of Americans trying to work from home, the
shutdown’s prevention of telework also sidelined many of the people who
could have mitigated its other side effects.

Worst, precisely as Gen. Nakasone had warned Trump before being fired,
doctors in thousands of clinical settings unexpectedly lost access to vital
patient records. Hospitals couldn’t efficiently communicate with each other,
and couldn’t retrieve their own data from the cloud. Telemedicine—which
had grown by over 90 percent since the start of 2020—became virtually
impossible. While there is no way to reach a precise accounting, it is certain
that lives were lost.

Yet despite it all, GOP leadership remained in a bubble. When Senate

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had been informed of the shutdown first
thing that morning, he had raised no objection. Convening a call with senior
members of his conference about an hour later, he reportedly reassured them
that “this will be just like the virus lockdowns” and that “the country will
handle it just fine.” Promised by Mar-a-Lago that the impact of Section 606
would be endurable, they continued to stand behind the president in hopes
of crushing the protest movement.

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J
UST AFTER BREAKFAST time on the West Coast, Buzzfeed reporter

Noah Feldstein walked out of a high-rise courthouse and breathed

deeply. After his arrest Saturday morning, he’d been driven four
hours down the coast to the FBI’s San Diego field office, photographed,
fingerprinted, and brought to an interrogation room where agents showed
him copies of the threatening messages he’d apparently sent to Bureau
offices in L.A. and Washington. They soon claimed to have cracked his
iPhone and found incriminating evidence. Feldstein knew he hadn’t sent the
threats, and doubted they’d really gotten his data—otherwise they would
have shown it to him—so refused to answer any further questions without
counsel present. His editors sent a lawyer right away, but with all the protest
delays, she didn’t arrive until that night. They discussed strategy for a long
legal fight to prove Feldstein’s innocence, but at the pretrial hearing Monday
morning, prosecutors had unexpectedly withdrawn all charges and he was
released.

The experience was mystifying to Feldstein and his attorney at the time, but a
subsequent Wall Street Journal investigation published last month
uncovered details right out of a paperback espionage thriller. Feldstein had
been part of the “March 27 Circle” of journalists who published reporting
critical of the Trump administration and shared methods and tools for
avoiding government surveillance intended to intimidate them. One of its
other members was New York Times writer Ben Protess, who was contacted
on May 2, 2021 by an anonymous source pretending to leak anti-Trump info.
The overture turned out to be a highly sophisticated spear-phishing attack
that silently installed malware when Protess opened a link that appeared to
be a legitimate PDF. The malware appears to have turned his laptop

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microphone into a listening device, recording his activities and sending them
to unknown actors.

On June 8, the day after Michael Glazer’s fatal Washington Post piece was
published, Protess used a burner phone to make a secure call to Feldstein in
L.A.—making arrangements to send him story notes with the real identities
of leakers in case his home was raided. Then on June 18, FBI offices in Los
Angeles and Washington D.C. received emailed messages purportedly by
Feldstein saying that he was heavily armed and if police didn’t “stand down
immediately” from all Trump Out demonstrations, he was going to kill cops
in L.A. and then “violently eliminate” the “fascist pigs” guarding the White
House. After federal agents stormed his apartment early the next morning,
they scoured his electronics looking for evidence—and although they
belatedly concluded that the threats were a hoax, they seized the materials
Protess had sent, which have since been used to assist the criminal
prosecutions of several of his sources.

Knowing none of this, Feldstein got in the lawyer’s car and started the long
drive back up to Santa Monica. There was no signal for mobile internet so
they turned on AM radio to hear what was happening in the outside world. It
was partway through a live press conference from Mar-a-Lago. Robbed of
Twitter as a platform for communicating to the American people, Trump had
sent out Hogan Gidley in an attempt to reassure the nation that the situation
was well under control and that life and business would soon return to
normal. After an opening statement insisting that “the attempt to overthrow
the government has been defeated … has been defeated … it’s over,” and
bizarrely claiming that the “vast majority” of the population still had internet
access, Gidley took questions from reporters who’d spent the last six days

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staking out Palm Beach with no media avails or access to administration
officials.

When asked for an update on the situation in Atlanta, Gidley asserted that
“the city has been … fully restored to order,” even as quick-thinking cable
news producers pulled up live split-screens showing plumes of smoke rising
from the downtown. Pressed on the reasoning for the cell tower shutdowns,
Gidley wandered into an answer that seemed to suggest there might be
improvised explosive devices in major cities. Another correspondent asked
Gidley about when the president intended to lift martial law. “There is no
martial law,” the press secretary shot back. “That is a false misconception…
Our civilian courts are working, and our military is simply assisting the
police to restore order and protect citizens.”

After an hour on the road, Feldstein and his lawyer stopped at a Ralphs
market in San Clemente for bottled water and something to eat. It was a
shocking scene. The produce sections were bare as deliveries of fresh fruits
and vegetables had been interrupted. Customers had picked shelves clean,
stocking up on non-perishables in the face of persistent speculation on TV
that the country would be wracked by food shortages. And with reports that
utilities might fail without internet, there wasn’t a single bottle of water left
in the store. Shoppers traded fevered rumors in the aisles. Tabloids by the
cash registers bleated about celebrity scandals that seemed from a different
century. An associate in the deli section took pity on Feldstein and gave him
a Solo cup of filtered water from behind the counter.

Back on the freeway, the radio was thick with alarming news. With many
financial institutions unable get timely market information and execute

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electronic transactions on a level playing field, the SEC had voted to keep
trading suspended nationwide Monday, with daily reevaluations until it was
possible to get Wall Street up and running again. Overseas markets were
crashing on projections of business losses in America, and panicked investors
were fleeing U.S. Treasury bonds for German sovereign debt and other
alternative safe investments like gold. With petroleum production, refining,
and shipment in the world’s largest crude producer hobbled by domestic
upheaval, oil prices had shattered $100 a barrel and were rocketing skyward
as consumers bought up extra reserves in anticipation of even higher prices.
The United Nations Security Council had called an emergency meeting for
the following day to address the crisis.

Amidst these bulletins came audio from a statement released to the media in
which the president backed the bus up over poor Hogan Gidley: “I have
declared martial law, but the rebels, the protesters—whatever you want to
call them—are getting beaten very badly, they are going home right now,
almost all of them, and so we are going to be looking at that, as far as getting
everything back to normal very soon.” Feldstein found the administration’s
sudden change in tone striking. After a week of exaggerating the threat—
ginning up fear about terrorists, communist revolution, and people being
torn apart by crazed rioters—now they were claiming that it was no big deal
and almost over anyway. Following the March 27 Circle’s rule of thumb that
Trump’s statements usually conveyed the opposite of the truth, it seemed
that some tipping point had been reached. The administration seemed to be
running genuinely scared.

In the Hay-Adams Hotel at the heart of the Washington demonstration, the

Trump Out lead organizing team was coming to the same conclusion. As

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Sarah Turk and Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth had been telling the
other organizers all week, their best chance of success would be if Trump got
nervous and overplayed his hand. In her darker moments, Turk had feared
that this might involve a Tiananmen Square-style massacre of protesters—
but it appeared that trying to shut down the internet had done the trick
without bloodshed. Indeed, Trump had accomplished for them what the
general strike had not. Quite simply, the United States economy couldn’t
function if people couldn’t go online. Therefore, the powerful business
interests that wield immense behind-the-scenes political influence had a
compelling reason to pressure the president out of office.

The key, Turk argued to the L-team that afternoon, was convincing corporate
America that Trump Out was a safe horse to back. Some of the black bloc
types out on the Mall were on video calling for a dismantling of capitalism
and the radical redistribution of wealth. Turk acted out the scene in a
hypothetical Fortune 500 boardroom, her petite frame puffing up into a fat-
cat CEO and black curls jiggling with horror: “They’ll come for the Hamptons
place! And then they’ll rip out the Sub Zero! When this is over, people won’t
even be allowed to own toothbrushes!”

The problem was, the movement was sitting on a time bomb. In the
leadership elections currently set to close at 11:59 p.m., several extreme
leftist candidates were in the lead. If the L-team were suddenly infused with
the sorts of people who wore “Eat the Rich” t-shirts and demanded, in the
case of activist Tavon Harris, “disbanding the military immediately,” the
people who write the checks for GOP Senate races might decide it’s better to
stick with the devil they knew. Everyone in the room understood that.
Obliquely, Turk proposed that because the unprecedented Section 606

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shutdown had cut off Trump Out participants’ access to the app, it was only
fair that they receive extra time to vote. Several of them, like Daniela Saez
and Lucía Campos-Herrera, argued that another extension would alienate
the more progressive elements of the movement. Keeping those activists
locked out of any democratic say in the future of the demonstrations would
take away any leverage that the L-team had to keep them in line. But that
wouldn’t matter, Evan Vrabec countered—ever since Unified Area Command
had abandoned the informal truce and cordoned off the Mall, the black bloc
had been battling police anyway. Ultimately, they reached an uneasy
consensus to establish offline computer voting stations and keep the polls
open for another 48 hours.

O
UT IN LAFAYETTE Square, the crowd was adapting rapidly to the

loss of internet. Bulletin boards on rolling easels had been erected

as real-world proxies for the app’s communication features. With
an irrepressible ingenuity, organizers used every means at their disposal to
bring order to the chaos. Messengers on bikes and scooters flowed steadily in
and out of the Hay-Adams, as runners with walkie-talkies gave constant
status updates about what was happening around the protest zone.
Volunteers with satphones carried the L-team’s instructions and
announcements outside the cordon to the camps in Arlington, Rock Creek
Park, and the Arboretum. Here and there, demonstrators had set up
amplified radios under shade tents or in the backs of pickups where
demonstrators could gather around for updates from across the country. As
one graffito on the side of the Hirshhorn Museum put it, apparently quoting
Disney’s The Mandalorian, “We always find a way.”

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Despite not achieving formal representation among the movement’s
organizers, leftist groups formed their own islands of participatory
democracy. Often led by veterans of the Occupy protests a decade before,
they sought to practice consensus-based decision-making about the pressing
issues before them—allocating supplies, adjudicating disputes, or drafting
collective demands of either the leadership in the Hay-Adams or at Mar-a-
Lago.

“Mic check!” shouted a leader at one Monday afternoon assembly near the
Smithsonian Castle. “Mic check!” repeated the 300 or so activists nearby,
forming a human microphone of voice amplification. “I just heard someone
in this group… I just heard someone in this group… Say that 45 is ‘crazy’…
Say that 45 is ‘crazy’… It’s really important to remember… It’s really
important to remember… That that is ableist language… That that is ableist
language… It harms alternatively-abled people… It harms alternatively-
abled people… It’s hurtful… It’s hurtful… It’s not okay… It’s not okay… And it
needs to stop. And it needs to stop.” Many of those assembled wiggled their
fingers in in the up twinkles gesture—or snapped their fingers—to express
approval and agreement.

One Occupy-flavored group attracted controversy when it voted to “set aside”

a large tent as a space exclusively for Black and Indigenous protesters. A
Vietnamese-American man tried to stir up a confrontation over the right to
enter, and had managed to attract a few supporters before he was recognized
as right-wing journalist Andy Ngo and strong-armed away amidst a chorus of
boos.

21
Another counterculture movement influential among the demonstrators was
Burning Man—the annual self-expression festival where over 70,000 free
spirits camp out for a week on a remote playa in the Nevada desert. There
were hundreds of Burners within the crowd, and they sought to promote the
event’s ethos of self-reliance, gifting, and communal effort. At mealtimes,
hungry campers pooled ingredients to create original dishes like “swamp
scum”—vegetable broth with ramen, lentils, and dried seaweed. One group of
Silicon Valley transplants set up a “Human Carcass Wash”—a large tent in
East Potomac Park where hot, sticky protesters could strip down and be
soaped up by open-minded volunteers with filtered river water. Others set up
misting stations to keep protesters cool, gave out dollops of sunscreen, and
offered free hugs to anyone looking for a comforting physical connection.
The “Power Station” had a row of stationary bikes wired for generating
human-powered electricity. A large multicolored pavilion on the Ellipse
operated as a “Glam Workshop” where anyone could go to get their helmet,
facemask, or shield decorated. The designs were as individual as the
participants—a dizzying range from flag-wrapped patriotic themes, to pop
culture references, to bitingly satirical depictions of the 45th president. One
longtime Burner in the Glam Workshop was handing out facial recognition-
defeating bandanas emblazoned with hand-painted caricatures of Trump as
Jabba the Hutt.

But unlike Burning Man, spread out over a vast dusty salt pan, the Trump
Out demonstrators besieged on the Mall were several times as many people
stuffed into a much smaller urban space. Some people were getting panic
attacks from the claustrophobia. A widespread joke that you could walk at
night from the Hay-Adams to the Tidal Basin only stepping on people in
sleeping bags was not far from the truth. The L-team tried to space people

22
out as evenly as possible, but without the app, organizers had no reliable
census of how many people were still inside the cordoned-off protest zone.
It’s now clear that by late on June 21, a majority of those who had been on
the Mall when it was first sealed off on the 16th had departed—most of them
by the single checkpoint that was still allowing protesters to be photographed
and leave. According to the JTF-NCR after-action report, photographic
evidence suggests that there were around 360,000 demonstrators left inside
the cordon. Police estimates from the MPD are even lower—perhaps as few
as 250,000.

Outside the cordon, though, protest participation was still remarkably high—
around 1.2 million on Monday, per the JTF-NCR numbers. Elsewhere in D.C.
and across the river in Virginia, where people could go home at night or stay
with hosts, it was easier to keep up sustained demonstrations during the day.
Two other factors led the weekday protests to be relatively more active than
the similar movements in Ukraine, France, or Hong Kong: the proportion of
out-of-towners and youth participation. For example, during Kyiv’s
Euromaidan in December 2013, just over 50 percent of protesters came from
outside the capital, and about 38 percent were aged between 15 and 29. By
contrast, University of Maryland-College Park researchers surveying the
Trump Out demonstrators on June 21 found that 72 percent traveled from
elsewhere and 58 percent were 15 to 29. Because there were so many
students on summer vacation, Trump Out was able to maintain constant
pressure on the government through the week, as opposed to the weekend-
focused approach that had dragged on for weeks or months in other
countries.

23
Among those students out in the city Monday afternoon, Ohio sisters
Arianna and Gianna Marcus had been on the move for hours. Since arriving
at the enormous Rock Creek Park encampment on Saturday, they’d been
engaged with the protests almost every waking moment. The feeling of
singing, chanting, and marching in huge crowds was electric beyond
anything they’d ever experienced. The energy was football Saturdays at
OSU’s Horseshoe times ten. Lollapalooza times a hundred. And it was all the
more intense because everyone had been starved of communal experiences
on that scale ever since the pandemic hit. When hundreds of thousands of
voices lifted together, it was an almost druglike euphoria.

With the internet down, many D.C. residents had put TV screens in their
windows so passing protesters could follow what was going on around the
country. Arianna saw a CNN reporter interview Sarah Turk, who was calling
for more action in the streets around the Mall protest zone. Some of the
movement organizers had seemed angry and self-serious on television, but
Turk was bubbly, ironic, and winsome. Ari thought she had a “cool aunt”
vibe. The network also played an earlier clip from Fox News of Tucker
Carlson grilling Turk on Trump Out’s “busing in out-of-state agitators for … a
revolutionary Marxist agenda” and referring to her husband, Open Society
Foundations executive Ignacio Baro, as a “radical Soros operative.” It was
impressive how calmly and cleverly Turk parried Carlson’s attacks and put
him back on the defensive. Watching her, Arianna felt a desire to do more to
help relieve the siege.

Dante felt the same way. He and some of their other friends from Rock Creek
Park had gone on riskier night actions, and come back inspired to push the
envelope even further. Arianna was hesitant, but the passion that Dante

24
spoke with was incandescent. She had such a connection with him. Once or
twice she’d hoped they’d kiss, but they hadn’t had even a second of privacy.
So when Dante suggested they join an occupation of Dupont Circle, she
persuaded Gi to go along. The group was so big, she said, they’d be safe for
sure.

Dupont Circle was the principal traffic chokepoint northwest of the protest
zone. Roads radiate out from its large roundabout in 10 directions. Police
had erected wooden and chain link fencing around the tree-studded center of
the circle, but as a couple thousand people deluged down from the north, the
barriers quickly fell. Their presence would lock up redeployments all around
the area, and make it harder to arrest the smaller groups that were
blockading individual vehicle convoys. The planned occupation was to last
just until government forces mobilized a major response, and then they
would scatter back to Rock Creek Park.

As they took up an “I am not afraid! We are not afraid!” chant and flashed
their V-signs about 20 minutes in, Arianna could hear echoing booms from
below. Law enforcement was clearing activists from the road tunnel that runs
beneath the circle. The energy in the crowd suddenly shifted. People were
looking at each other nervously amidst the chant, as if to say shouldn’t we be
scattering by now? Without the app, people felt blind and exposed. On the
ground under her feet, Ari saw a graffito sprayed on one of the fallen
plywood barriers, roughly quoting comedian Dave Chappelle: “After this, it’s
just rat a tat tat tat.”

Finally, the scatter call came. On the way down, organizers had warned them
not to run—it was supposed to be an orderly withdrawal at a fast walk until

25
the crowd had broken up enough to jog. But the sound of flashbangs nearby
got them spooked, and before Arianna knew what was happening, she was
torn away from Gi and Dante by the crowd. She tried doubling around to
look for them, but had almost no control over where she was going. After a
lot of shoving and stumbling, she managed to make it back into the traffic
roundabout just as it was emptying out. She screamed for her sister. Walls of
bicycle cops were now blocking the other escape routes, and riot police were
hustling toward her at the double, snatching stragglers from the circle. She
turned back up the street, running to join the back of the retreating crowd.
People around her fell, hit by nonlethal rounds.

Her foot came down on someone’s shoe that had come off in the road,
twisting under her painfully. Arianna sprawled out on the pavement. She saw
a skirmish line of officers in gas masks advancing toward her, flex-cuffing
anyone they could get their hands on. She tried to rise, but felt a sharp pain
in her ankle. The hopeless realization hit that she was going to be arrested
and hauled away. And then a literal knight in shining armor saved her.

Arianna couldn’t believe what she was seeing. A gleaming figure on a horse
draped in orange cloth galloped up to her and dismounted with a graceful
leap. Paintballs and rubber pullets clanged off his full plate armor as he knelt
and shielded her with his body, checking her for injuries. She doesn’t
remember what he said, but in moments, he’d helped her up onto the front of
his saddle and cantered her off to safety.

Only later, reunited with Gi and Dante at the camp and struggling to explain
her experience, did she learn that he was a legendary character around the
protests. Multimillionaire tech entrepreneur and cosplayer Zach Singer had

26
brought his stallion and a $12,000 suit of custom-made armor to
Washington. He’d played polo at Cornell, and the surprisingly accomplished
equestrian would ride around all day rescuing the injured. Between the high-
vis jacket he wore over the armor, and his horse’s persimmon-colored
caparison, everyone just knew him as the Orange Knight.

Even cable news had discovered him, and coverage of the daily protests often
included dramatic footage of this pumpkin paladin scooping up the wounded
or shrugging off baton rounds like they were lobbed tennis balls. Back in
Alexandria, human rights lawyer Noor Shah saw footage of the Dupont Circle
action on MSNBC. She’d brought her 6-year-old daughter Annie to the
Arlington protests on Saturday afternoon. Those had ended peacefully. But
each morning since as she watched the demonstrations on TV, the violence
seemed to be worsening. Fewer families were in the crowds, and she saw
more armor and gas masks. Police were using force with less and less
restraint. Her mother begged her not to go. But she was no longer willing to
just stay home feeling regretful. So she called into the telephone number
onscreen for attorneys to volunteer remote legal aid—and offered to help the
arrested protesters however she could.

Millions around the country, in their own ways, were doing likewise. In the
absence of internet connections, they watched the news for updates, judged
the levels of risk their personal circumstances allowed, and adapted to
participate as much as they could. For those in the streets, there was an
ironclad refusal to allow the authorities to gain the upper hand as they had
the previous summer. Much more than for Black Lives Matter in 2020, the
lessons of previous protest movements abroad—both successful and
unsuccessful—had branded a clear imprint on the methods used by the

27
Trump Out demonstrators. The hit-and-run tactics of blocking roads but
scattering as soon as heavy response forces arrived were a clear echo of the
“be water” philosophy of the 2019 Hong Kong protesters. The use of mobile
barricades to frustrate police deployments took inspiration from France’s
Yellow Vests. Exhausting civil disturbance officers with all-night harassment,
and keeping children front-and-center in the crowd to deter excessive force
had both been used to great effect during the 2020 demonstrations in
Manila. Foreign countries, in turn, now saw large crowds gathering in
solidarity with U.S. activists. Tens of thousands marched in Paris, London,
Berlin, Toronto, and Sydney—many waving American flags, singing
American songs, and calling for an end to tyranny in American cities.

I
N DOWNTOWN SEATTLE, riot police still hadn’t been able to force their

way into the internet exchange by 1:00 p.m. More than 8,000
demonstrators had boiled into the streets around the SIX, blocking
roads, torching cars, and linking arms to surround law enforcement vehicles.
Scuffles with nonviolent protesters escalated to running battles as black bloc
groups arrived and the SPD and Washington National Guard fought to
disperse them. Near the main entrance of the high-rise housing the
exchange, Kathryn Jorgenson was livestreaming everything. On her video,
billowing clouds of tear gas waft over the crowd, turning the whole scene
gray except for the dull red-and-blue flash of police lights through the gloom.
Loud booms echo from around the corner, where flashbang grenades are
trying to force back a group of masked activists smashing an FBI vehicle with
clubs and baseball bats. All around, hundreds of voices chant, dogged as
hours before: “We will stand! We will fight! Internet is a human right!”

28
A phalanx of riot police in Robocop armor starts forming up in the parking
lot across from the entrance. An officer atop a nearby BearCat gives a final
warning over the LRAD loud-hailer: “If you do not disperse immediately, you
will be arrested.” The Robocops advance, rhythmically beating their batons
against their shields. They stop just a few yards from the demonstrators.

There are a few taunts and profanities from the crowd, staring down the
burly, gas mask-wearing figures in blue. Then, at a shouted command from
behind the line, the shield wall parts, and snatch squads charge forward to
begin ripping the demonstrators out of formation. There is immediate
scuffling, as officers holding a young man from under the arms try to wrench
him out of the grasp of the protesters hanging onto his legs. “You’re killing
him!” someone shouts. The Robocops jab aggressively with their batons to
break the resisters’ grips. Despite its best efforts, the crowd can’t hang on.
One by one, they are muscled loose, thrown to the ground, flex-cuffed, and
hauled off like limp rag dolls. Jorgenson backpedals as people just in front of
her get snatched.

After about 15 minutes, all that’s between the police and one of the entrances
is a tangled mass of about a dozen demonstrators shackled to each other on
the ground. People are still chanting in the lobby. Jorgenson retreats inside
the glass double doors just before a group of strong guys in motorcycle
helmets pulls them shut. Inside, a couple hundred protesters watch anxiously
as the cut teams go to work with power tools, methodically sawing through
the locks, chains, and handcuffs and sending flashes of sparks dribbling onto
the pavement. An activist with a walkie-talkie reports that demonstrators in
the parking garage and in the alley behind the building have just fended off
another two assaults there. The lobby fills with cheers.

29
Half an hour after the cut teams began, the demonstrators in front of the
main entrance have all been arrested, and the police are at the doors.
Robocops try to pull the outward-swinging doors open, but the crowd hangs
onto the long cross bars on the inside, and the doors don’t budge. There’s a
sharp crash and screams from out of frame. Jorgenson turns her head, and
sees a riot cop with a battering ram who’s just smashed a hole in one of the
full-length lobby windows. His partner flings three smoke grenades in one
after the other. Thick, choking white clouds fill the lobby. Activists rush
forward to smother the grenades with wet t-shirts and carry them toward
bathrooms where they can douse them in the toilets.

Out front, police run heavy chains between the door handles and the BearCat
that’s backing into position on the street. One of the guys in motorcycle
helmets tells those around him to hang onto the people holding the doors
shut and dig their heels in: “Brace! Brace! Brace!” The diesels rev once and
the doors swing open easily. Demonstrators tumble forward. Police throw a
flurry of stun grenades into the breach. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
The searing bright explosions are deafening in the enclosed space. Protesters
are screaming, crying, dazed, gasping for breath.

With a roar, a flying wedge of riot police crashes through the open doors and
plows into the crowd. People reel backward, trying to get away and avoid
being trampled. Jorgenson turns around, looking for a way out. But with all
the smoke and struggling bodies, she gets disoriented. The lobby is an all-out
melee now, as desperate protesters kick and punch at the officers, tearing at
their batons and trying to tackle them by the ankles. A large metal horse
statue has tipped over and pinned one of the cops. Jorgenson retreats toward

30
the elevators. Out of nowhere, an officer charges at her swinging a baton
from over his head—a banned technique—but Jorgenson ducks. Before she
can regain her balance, another Robocop bull-rushes right into her, knocking
her to the floor. The GoPro pops loose from her helmet, and captures
Jorgenson from the knees down as she’s dragged to her feet and arrested. It
keeps filming and streaming—although few could watch live—until the
CRYSTAL SPIKE team enters the building and seizes the IXP.

Meanwhile in the Midwest, National Guard units were finally mopping up

the last remaining resistance at the Memphis and Louisville airports.
Commanders had marshalled overwhelming force and gradually corralled
the activists still evading arrest into smaller and smaller areas. There weren’t
any ADS pain ray units on hand, but liberal application of high-pressure
water hoses was enough to bruise and batter many into submission. The
nights were too warm and muggy to give the soaked demonstrators
hypothermia, but by Monday afternoon the wetness and sleep deprivation
were taking their toll. In Memphis, protesters managed to cause several
million dollars of superficial damage to three of the FedEx planes, and in
Louisville they started a fire in a hangar, but the shield walls eventually
surrounded them all—troopers pinned them to the ground with shields,
trussed them, and hauled them off to waiting buses. At UPS Worldport, a
police cut team sliced into a man’s arm trying to extricate him from the
concrete-filled drum anchoring a sleeping dragon formation on one of the
runways—but a Kentucky court ruled in February that the injury was self-
inflicted.

Just as Secretary of Defense J.J. Jack called Mar-a-Lago to pass on

USNORTHCOM’s report that the airports had been retaken, word came in

31
from SCRAG Zeller that the major assault on the Mall that had been
postponed repeatedly throughout the day was scheduled to finally begin at
1900 hours. Accounts differ on the substance of this conversation. In August,
Luke Harding cited a pair of anonymous sources in The Guardian claiming
that Trump ordered Zeller to use lethal force against the demonstrators if
they wouldn’t retreat, but Zeller denied this under oath, and in September
Philip Rucker reported in the Washington Post that three officials who’d
seen the JOC’s transcript insisted that there was no mention of lethal force at
this time. Following that call, Trump retreated to his bedroom at around 5:45
p.m., during which time he appears to have had a roughly 90-minute
conversation with Sean Hannity.

Unaware that an assault was brewing, protesters on the Mall were busy
cooking dinner and trying to pass the time without their phones. As self-
appointed camp chefs ladled out steaming cups of “swamp scum,” Trump
Out logistics volunteers assessed supplies of fuel and food inside the cordon
to assist the L-team in making rationing decisions. Electricity demands had
been greater than expected, and there were barely 1,200 gallons left available
for the generators, which would last just a couple hours at full capacity. So
they’d have no choice but to keep almost all the lights out at night. At current
numbers, the crowd would run out of food by late Tuesday, so organizers
sent out word that anyone not medically at risk should cut back to one meal a
day. The water situation was even worse—the heat had made tight water
rationing too dangerous, and the numbers on a whiteboard in the Hay-
Adams war room suggested that they’d be nearly out by morning. The
Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool did hold about 6,750,000 gallons, but it
wasn’t potable. They’d had an engineering team down there trying to set up a
large-scale filtration system since Sunday morning, but they hadn’t

32
succeeded yet. So strict word was sent out: absolutely no water was to be
used for personal hygiene. Wet wipes or hand sanitizer were the best ways to
stay clean.

Although drones had been useful for smuggling in small amounts of supplies
from the outside, they couldn’t possibly meet the bulk demands of a city’s
worth of people, and government forces had gotten very good now at
shooting down anything that tried to cross their lines. The Secret Service had
by this time downed and destroyed at least 11 drones near the White House,
and military helicopters now flew in and out of the grounds with impunity.

For the besieged demonstrators not caught up in the logistical worries,

though, Monday evening is largely remembered for its sense of camaraderie
in the face of growing physical privation. Anyone could spontaneously shout
“We stay!” and dozens or hundreds all around would cheer “He goes!” in
response. Participants also recall striking up conversations with strangers
they might never have spoken to in daily life and feeling an immediate sense
of connection. Retired Philadelphia cop Ed Bock offered a water bottle to a
young African-American man in an “I’m so gay I can’t even think straight” t-
shirt, and a few moments of chit-chat bloomed into a conversation that
revealed they shared the same niche hobby—assembling and painting
miniature “Space Marines” from a tabletop game called Warhammer
40,000. They were inseparable for the rest of the demonstration. Princeton
student Judy Nguyen—who was sporting bright teal hair at the time—
complimented an older guy in one of the tough-looking biker groups on his
tattoo and they got to talking. It turned out that as a medic in Vietnam he’d
saved her grandfather’s life on the battlefield. Jett Tomlinson, a teenager

33
who has Down syndrome, roamed the Mall making new friends, and
eventually amassed selfies with 6,983 of his fellow protesters.

People found that even though united in a cause, everyone had their own
personal reasons for coming and staying. Cleveland math teacher Sherri
Stokes had come to D.C. in memory of her dad Bill Nelson, a lifelong
environmentalist who’d protested against Trump every weekend until his
death in 2019. She became fast friends with Mohammad Qaderi, an Afghan
translator for the U.S. Army whose brother had been refused asylum under
the Trump administration and killed by the Taliban. Both bonded with
Daniel Soriano, a Filipino student who’d been beaten by Duterte’s goons in
the streets of Manila in 2020, and was now studying at American University
and risking his visa by taking part in the protest. Soriano’s brother Rafael
had been lynched during his country’s drug war, so he felt an immediate
kinship with the man he saw carrying a sign proclaiming “The White
Supremacist who shot my son was incited by Donald Trump.”

One of the most beloved figures around the Mall was 97-year-old Melvin
Graham, a decorated Army veteran who spoke several times in front of the
White House to rapt audiences. He walked up and down the square—without
even a cane—introducing himself to anyone and everyone, and impressing all
with his natty collection of bow ties. The L-team had arranged to put him and
his daughter up at the Hay-Adams, and featured him prominently on Trump
Out’s social media before the internet went down. On Sunday, Graham had
been driven out to the front lines near the World War II Memorial. He’d
fought with the 82nd Airborne at the Battle of the Bulge, and called out with a
bullhorn to the shield wall of his latter-day division-mates opposite the
concertina wire. “You are citizens first,” Graham implored them. “Your

34
commanders have no right to order you to hurt … peaceful protesters.” The
next morning, Graham had received a rousing ovation as he passed through
the checkpoint and left the protest after coming down with bronchitis.

And nothing could bring people together quite like live music. Forward!
Marching Band, a red-garbed activist ensemble that had arrived from
Wisconsin on Wednesday entertained the crowd in Lafayette Square with a
brassy rendition of “There Is Power in a Union”—and was drowned by cheers
at the fist-pumping ad lib “down with the Donald, all people unite.” Among
the tens of thousands of high school and college students on the Mall,
enough had the requisite experience and instruments that several
astonishingly good drumline groups had formed. With just a few days’
practice, 22 young men and women calling themselves Unbeatable marched
right up to the National Guard barricades near the Capitol and put on a
dazzling show of synchronized percussion right in the faces of the stony-
faced soldiers. When it was over, some of the guardsmen broke into applause
in spite of their orders.

A
S THE SUN dipped lower in the sky, the L-team realized that major

forces were gathering near the Mall, but they couldn’t stop the
buildup. The demonstrators had carried out a well-coordinated set
of “whack-a-mole” actions to divide, obstruct, and harass JTF-NCR units
from Arlington to the Arboretum—and had succeeded in delaying the
planned morning assault all day. But gradually, SCRAG Zeller managed to
impose his will on the city, and commanders finally had a mobile force of
about 3,200 police, National Guard, and paratroopers marshalled within
blocks of the cordon.

35
At 6:35 p.m., a line of armored vehicles pulled into view of the protesters
near Franklin Square at the northeast corner of the protest zone. Not only
were there BearCats and lumbering Iraq War-vintage MRAPs, but—at
Zeller’s explicit request—two enormous Abrams tanks that chewed up the
pavement despite the protective rubber inserts in their treads. A National
Guard shield wall formed up in front of them, hundreds strong. To complete
the show of force, drones buzzed overhead with wailing klaxons and recorded
warnings to vacate the square immediately. Some veered down to eye level,
trying to taunt people into attacking the drones—which could be used to
justify more a forceful government response.

All across the Mall, the warnings went out by satellite phones and runners.
Protesters surged up toward Franklin Square, geared up for heavy
punishment. Inside the square, demonstrators overturned cars and a
chartered bus to act as barricades. Some carried fake explosive devices into
position so the advance would be forced to slow as the bomb squad dealt with
them. Volunteers passed out foil-coated umbrellas to block the pain rays.
Dozens of activists sat down just inside the cordon’s concertina wire and
linked themselves into sleeping dragons to block the tanks’ path. Masked
figures on surrounding rooftops sent lasers knifing down into the
guardsmen’s eyes. This time, the crowd would be ready.

At 1900 hours exactly, BearCats suddenly appeared down on the south side
of the Mall at Jefferson Drive and 14th Street—near the mostly-evacuated
headquarters of the Department of Agriculture. With no warning, the small
number of protesters there faced a hail of flashbang grenades and tear gas.

36
They had few barricades to defend here, with the main protection coming
from a gauntlet of cars that had been parked broadside across 14th to prevent
government vehicles from driving up the roadway as it cut across the Mall.
Between these were bricks superglued to the asphalt and a scattering of
improvised caltrops—nail-studded spike traps common during the Middle
Ages.

But these barriers had been put in place with the hope of obstructing the
MPD cruisers and Humvees that had been parked along the cordon. Now,
police officers parted the concertina wire and a pair of bulldozers rumbled
through the breach, scooping up the bricks and smashing aside
demonstrators’ cars to clear the way for the BearCats. Behind them came a
shield wall of Falcon Brigade paratroopers, throwing pyrotechnics to keep
protesters back from the ‘dozers.

Brig. Gen. Wood had impressed upon his commanders the need to maximize
the “shock” and “forcefulness” of the initial assault, and the armored
spearhead now penetrated the Mall faster than the demonstrators could
react. There was no time to put up barricades or form sleeping dragons.
Those who rushed to block the advance were battered with LRADs and
rubber bullets before crashing harmlessly against the shield wall. More
troops followed behind the BearCats, unfurling bales of concertina wire to
prevent protesters from swarming back onto 14th Street. In just nine minutes,
the soldiers of the 82nd had made it almost a quarter mile up to Constitution
Avenue and linked up with the MPD cops manning the cordon there. They
had split the protest zone roughly in half.

37
At first, the officials in the JOC watching by drone got the impression that
the fighting had been much heavier than it was. The aerial feeds showed lots
of sparks and smoke, and a low-angle live shot projected onto the front of the
ops bay showed half a dozen police carrying a wounded officer from the fray
in the shadow of the National Museum of African American History and
Culture. But the pyrotechnics were mainly for intimidation, and the casualty
count was light. Once the fog of war lifted, JTF headquarters saw that only
three cops and one paratrooper had been injured badly enough to need
medical attention. On the other side, probably just 25-30 protesters had been
significantly hurt in the assault. Now, the armored column sat athwart the
long axis of the Mall, fortifying its position and preparing for a follow-on
push eastward toward the Capitol after the late summer nightfall. Zeller and
Wood called Mar-a-Lago to report the good news.

As reported in The Endgame, Trump had been anxious and irritable for most
of the afternoon and evening, as cable news brought news of the nationwide
backlash against his invocation of Section 606. He summoned a rotation of
advisors to his private quarters, pumping them for their opinions and
forecasts. Many got the sense that he was beginning to feel he may have
made a grave mistake. Others remember his mood as confident and defiant.
He likely teetered between the two extremes. But when the SCRAG
announced over the phone that Wood’s feint had split the demonstration in
two, the commander-in-chief noticeably brightened. He started telling aides
again that it would all be over the next morning. Someone brought in
McDonald’s, and he was holding court in his living room when White House
Counsel Rob Bennett called deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just after
9:00 p.m. with word of an outrageous development from California.

38
All day, opponents of the Section 606 order had been mounting furious legal
challenges in the courts—despite the nationwide logistical chaos. California
Governor Gavin Newsom and his attorney general Xavier Becerra had filed a
federal lawsuit that morning challenging the constitutionality of the
shutdowns—and seeking a temporary injunction to force the Trump
administration to turn the internet and cell towers back on until the matter
could be settled judicially.

At an emergency hearing that evening in a San Francisco federal court, the

state’s lawyers argued that the SOP 303 order violated the First Amendment
and Equal Protection Clause because it targeted many peaceful anti-Trump
demonstrations without any plausible security justification. Further, they
argued that the internet exchange point seizures violated the Fifth
Amendment and fell outside the intended meaning of the
Telecommunications Act. The hapless Justice Department attorney opposite
insisted that the shutdowns were aimed at thwarting “imminent” foreign-
backed terrorism—evidence for which he said the government was not
obliged to present—and therefore were national security operations
authorized by Congress under the AFEO Act and the post-9/11 Authorization
for the Use of Military Force. Article II of the Constitution, he argued, vested
the president with “unrestricted … plenary authority” over the conduct of
such operations, which was “unreviewable” by the courts. Further, the
attorney said, protesters’ use of social media to coordinate riotous activity fell
under the “imminent lawless action” exception to the First Amendment, so
stopping such communications could not be unconstitutional.

Judge Lucy Koh was gobsmacked. “Are you actually suggesting that the
government claims the authority to shut down all online communications in

39
the United States if some people on the internet are advocating that other
people go and riot?” Visibly wincing, the DOJ attorney stammered
apologetically, finally settling on “That’s… That… We… That is what the
government’s position is, yes.” Koh, famous in the federal judiciary for her
sharp tongue, stared him down incredulously from the bench: “Are you high
right now?”

It came as little surprise to anyone in the courtroom that Koh was ultimately
unpersuaded by the administration’s arguments, and granted a nationwide
temporary restraining order (TRO) at 5:45 p.m. Pacific. The Trump
administration was ordered to relinquish control of IXPs and data centers
and restore cellular service across the country immediately. When Rob
Bennett called Stephen Miller to break the news, Miller huddled with
National Security Advisor Sebastian Gorka, social media director Dan
Scavino, and NSC official Todd Sexton to figure out how to tell the boss.
According to Sexton’s subsequent congressional testimony, they decided that
Koh was too radical and too low-ranking to bind the President of the United
States during such a crisis. So they would advise Trump to ignore Koh’s TRO
while the administration petitioned the Ninth Circuit for an immediate stay
of the order until there was time for the appeals court—or, if necessary, the
Supreme Court—to hear arguments and make a definitive ruling. Miller and
chief of staff Rudy Giuliani interrupted the president’s living room rah-rah
session to make their recommendation at around 9:20 p.m.

After a brief discussion, Trump approved their course of action, instructing

Miller to convey his orders to Chad Wolf and Acting NSA Director Bob
Vered: the radical order is about to be overturned and should be ignored.
Later that night, Rob Bennett issued a memorandum asserting that Koh’s

40
ruling was facially invalid and that the district court lacked jurisdiction over
the president’s conduct of emergency national security operations under
valid war powers (as Kayleigh McEnany explained the next morning on CNN,
“It would be like if some judge in San Francisco decided on the morning of
9/11 that President Bush couldn’t scramble fighters to protect Washington
because it might offend Muslim sensitivities”). The White House circulated
the memo immediately, with Miller and his staff assuring senior officials
throughout the administration that they had the full backing of the president.
If they faced any legal consequences for defying Koh’s order, several later
told the Romney-Porter Committee, it was implied that they could expect
total pardons. Anyone who instead resisted the president’s lawful authority,
it was made clear, would be immediately fired and replaced with someone
who would. That was the message that reached HIRT team lead David
Cimino when NCCIC reached him by phone before midnight at the
Milwaukee Holiday Inn where his team was staying. Around the same time,
the National Coordinating Center (NCC) warned telecom companies that if
they turned cell towers back on without DHS’s explicit permission, the
towers would be seized by force.

Shortly after Koh’s order was announced on the prime time newscasts,
Trump started getting calls from alarmed supporters. Kayleigh had been
shielding the president as best she could all day, but she couldn’t control
access by the select intimates who had his personal cell phone number.
Business leaders like billionaire oilman Harold Hamm were howling. The
606 shutdown was proving vastly more damaging and disruptive than the
general strike ever could have hoped to be, and every hour that the country
stayed offline, corporate America would be awash in a sea of red ink. So one
by one, the captains of industry begged the commander-in-chief to abide by

41
the court order. According to several CEOs who spoke with Trump that night,
he argued that backing down would cause a violent, perhaps communist,
revolution. Regardless, they said, the ongoing chaos was absolutely killing
the economy—he needed to either find a way to suppress the demonstrations
and turn the internet back on, or step aside for the good of the country and
resign.

Aides recall the president stalking from room to room with a hunted look,
seeking reassurance from staffers who all seemed to be ducking around
corners and avoiding his gaze. Junior NSC official Harry Katsouros had been
summoned to Trump’s wing to help Seb Gorka brief Trump on potential
terrorist connections of the Atlanta rioters. Katsouros had spent the past five
days mostly on the periphery—summarizing reports for Gorka and
occasionally seeing the president at a distance, but with little access to the
inner circle that was increasingly cloistered away from the estate’s public
spaces. He’d watched with growing unease as televisions in the club showed
Army units deploying to major cities and patrolling tear gas-shrouded streets
in Humvees and MRAPs. A couple times, Mar-a-Lago members approached
him and said they hoped the president would start shooting people soon.
That sounded extreme, but he’d heard about DHS proving that there were
terrorists in the D.C. crowd, and reasoned to himself that military
intervention was demanded by the extraordinary situation. When SOP 303
was activated on Sunday, he’d emailed his 25-year-old sister in Brooklyn,
telling her to take the train to their parents’ home up in White Plains in case
things got worse. But when he called his father Monday afternoon after the
internet went down, she still hadn’t arrived, and since she didn’t have a
landline, they didn’t have any way of reaching her.

42
Now, Katsouros was sitting across from the president in his living room,
explaining what it meant that a Syrian national arrested near Mercedes-Benz
Stadium had received a Venmo payment in 2020 from someone on the No
Fly List. “The media won’t cover this!” Trump raged. “Kayleigh is trying very
hard and they’re not covering this.” He was bewildered by the loss of his
unfiltered access to the American people. According to then-White House
political director Brendan Daniels in Crisis and Conscience, Trump had
fundamentally misunderstood the implications of the Section 606 order—
apparently believing that people would still be able to read his tweets even if
they could not post their own. Others like Homeland Security Advisor Bob
Francis vigorously dispute this, insisting that the president knew in advance
that he would lose access to Twitter. Whatever the case, he was growing
frustrated and confused as the briefing wore on, telling Gorka and Katsouros
again and again that they had to find a way to get this information out
despite the media’s attempts to overthrow him.

In the midst of the harangue, Stephen Miller came in with two faxed pages,
looking sourer than usual. Veterans Affairs Secretary Jeff Miller (no relation)
and Agriculture Secretary Butch Otter had both resigned effective
immediately, having gotten wind of the impending constitutional crisis and
deciding to distance themselves from what they feared would be violent and
illegal crackdowns in the days ahead. Katsouros was surprised by the
president’s reaction. In the space of what seemed like 30 seconds, he moved
from sullen, wounded shock to profane jabs at the defectors’ intelligence and
appearance to insistence that he barely knew them and they never did
anything anyway and it didn’t matter because they’d been losers from the
beginning.

43
Indeed, Trump wasn’t the only one that night questioning the loyalty of his
cabinet. At least a dozen business leaders and GOP powerbrokers had started
making discreet calls to cabinet members they thought might be
disillusioned and looking for an exit strategy. Out of fifteen, they needed
eight votes to trigger the 25th Amendment—removing Trump from power and
temporarily elevating Vice President Pence until Congress could sort
everything out. Trump’s estranged former ambassadors Nikki Haley and Jon
Huntsman Jr. spent the night counting noses, and guessed that they might
have six or seven votes. Energy Secretary Matt Bevin and Labor Secretary
James Comer Jr. were very likely on board, and it looked like Secretary of
State Martha McSally and Treasury Secretary Tom Barrack would back
Trump’s removal if they felt it would be successful. The acting secretaries at
Agriculture, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs—Stephen Censky, Joel
Szabat, and James Hutton, respectively—had little to lose and were all
considered probable yeses. At the Pentagon, J.J. Jack had confided to friends
that Trump was getting dangerously unstable, but when former Republican
senator Rob Portman called to see where he stood, the retired general
seemed frosty and noncommittal. Five were considered Trump diehards:
Chad Wolf at DHS, Acting AG Ian Gallup, Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Ben
Carson at HUD, and Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education. That left
two question marks: Bobby Jindal at Health and Human Services and newly-
confirmed Secretary of the Interior Cynthia Lummis.

Jindal and Lummis were lobbied through the wee hours by Haley,
Huntsman, and Fox tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who had finally seen the
economic harm caused by Trump’s overreaction, hit a brick wall trying to
convince him to reverse the shutdown orders, and decided to cut bait. In the
end, Jindal and Lummis were both sympathetic, but worried that Mike Pence

44
was too loyal to Trump to go along with the plan—even if it would mean his
own ascension to power. The wavering secretaries said they’d need
assurances before lending their support.

The problem was that the cabinet faced huge risks signing onto a removal
attempt if Pence wouldn’t cooperate, but the conspirators judged that Pence
wouldn’t even entertain oblique discussions about it unless he was sure it
already had the votes to succeed. So they had been making extremely delicate
overtures to the vice president, trying to make him see that this was the only
way to rescue the country from economic disaster. The lights were burning
late at Number One Observatory Circle when an unmarked SUV arrived after
1:00 a.m. Tuesday and dropped off a lone visitor. Dan Coats, his longtime
Indiana friend, slipped discreetly into the mansion and met with Pence for
approximately an hour. According to two Republican senators who’d spoken
with Coats beforehand, the former DNI was charged with conveying a
pointed message from dissenting conservatives in Congress: if you refuse to
help us bring the country back to normal quickly, we’ll join Democrats in
impeaching you, too. Per The Endgame, Coats had come armed with a list of
slights by Trump against the Pences and other faithful Christian
conservatives.

But as Coats tried to talk Pence into the most significant political stab-in-the
back in American history, the intended target was blissfully asleep at Mar-a-
Lago. Shortly after midnight, as Trump stewed over the latest betrayals and
vowed revenge for future ones, Kayleigh McEnany had come in to play the
president a video clip she had just seen from earlier in the day—and it turned
his spirits around on a dime. On The 700 Club that morning, Pat Robertson
told his largely white, evangelical audience that “We are in a spiritual battle

45
with the Devil, but President Trump is the Lion of God.” Christians, he said,
must support their president “no matter what” because “revolting against
Trump is revolting against God.” The inconveniences of missed email or no
Amazon Prime were small burdens to bear, Robertson assured viewers,
because the stakes were so high. “If they win,” he said, “we are going to
become a communist country… If [you are a Christian] they’ll take your
children away.” The 91-year-old televangelist’s final words were directed
right at Trump: “Real Americans are with you, Mr. President … and we will
follow you to the gates of hell.”

O
N THE STREET outside the Four Seasons Hotel northwest of the

Mall, about a dozen of the “Real Americans” Robertson spoke of

had just finished a boozy night of toasting to “President for Life
Donald J. Trump, Defender of the Faith.” They were a semi-facetious
drinking society who called themselves the Harambe Martyrs Brigade, and
were mainly twentysomething young men working in right-wing politics.
Among them were self-styled “memelords,” “Kekistanis,” and “Catholic
Groypers”—frolicking in the blurry zone between ironic trolling and actual
white nationalism. From their fifth-floor suite, they had seen black-clad
activists going by, and decided it was punch-a-commie-o’-clock. They spilled
out of the lobby in blazers and khakis, pulled open a gap in the orange crowd
control netting along the sidewalk, and wandered into the deserted
intersection, spoiling for a fight. One of them spotted a few hooded figures
down the block, and they all gave chase.

Due to the internet shutdown, surveillance footage was not preserved. But
witnesses saw the Martyrs corner one of them and start throwing punches.
Then a knife flashed, and 22-year-old conservative activist James Bolling

46
collapsed with a severed groin artery. Without cell service, his friends
couldn’t reach 9-1-1 right away, and by the time an ambulance reached him,
he was dead. The killing was reported to JTF-NCR as an act of Antifa
terrorism, and commanders quickly mobilized hundreds of additional police
and Guard personnel to seal off the area.

Around one in the morning, street medic Margaret Chen had been taping the
ankle of an injured activist when the neighborhood exploded in sirens. When
she’d first arrived in D.C., she would have panicked at the sound, but now
she steadily reassured the woman with the sprain and shouted for volunteers
to help her walk to safety. Margaret’s confidence had grown immeasurably
over the last few days. She’d spent Sunday moving westward across the city,
helping out at the larger daytime demonstrations, trying to link up with the
med school classmate who was her normal buddy-system partner. The
morning crowds had been full of older adults and folks from all walks of life.
She helped people with asthma attacks, low blood sugar, LRAD-caused
migraines, and a drug overdose. Despite her elite education, she’d learned to
trust the experience of veteran activist medics who generally lacked formal
training—and in turn, they’d come to respect her as a solid pro who didn’t act
like her fancy school made her, as they would say, “hot shit.”

When the cell tower shutdown went into effect, she’d been amazed to see
how quickly the protesters adapted. Without working app alerts, people
relayed calls for medics by voice, and volunteers on mopeds and pedicabs
would bring them quickly to the injured. After the sun went down and the
curfew sirens sounded, the demonstrators trended younger and more radical.
But they were still far from the anarchist mob Fox News claimed. A couple
hardcore Marxists complained to her that since Portland, Antifa had been co-

47
opted by neoliberal college kids. And most of the nighttime activists Chen
encountered didn’t even describe themselves as Antifa. They were just fed
up. Her safe house Sunday night was an Adams Morgan apartment shared by
some young Hill staffers, and she spent most of Monday resting inside so
she’d have the energy to stay on the streets until dawn. After a beans-and-
rice dinner with her hosts, they found a spare gas mask for her along with a
heavy jacket and better kneepads. Out into the dark she went, patching up
the wounded during hours of street battles between Kalorama and
Georgetown. Now, she tried to stay calm as riot police and SWAT teams
swarmed in from all over the city.

They were on a quiet tree-lined street where the historic three-story

townhomes went for $2+ million. As a line of BORTAC agents started
advancing up the block firing rubber bullets, masked activists took cover
behind parked BMWs and Teslas. Someone came racing up on a scooter and
reported that the escape route was clear—and several dozen demonstrators
fell back at a run.

They soon reached the commercial district on Wisconsin Avenue, which was
a scene of urban warfare, lit in flickering orange. The corner CVS was on fire,
and a couple hundred demonstrators were holding their ground against MPD
shield walls that were slowly closing in from both sides. To the south, they’d
flipped a pickup onto its side across the roadway and set it ablaze. To the
north, they’d sent a couple dumpsters of burning trash rolling toward the
police. A few were throwing rocks or lit road flares at them. Officers
responded with a volley of tear gas grenades, but the people were ready for it.
Following the example of the 2019 Hong Kong protesters, they placed traffic
cones over the fume-spewing grenades and doused them with bottled water.

48
Others used leaf blowers to push the stinging clouds back toward the cops.
Some aimed large fireworks at the advancing formations, which exploded in
huge showers of winking gold and green stars. One guy charged forward with
a Captain America shield to provide cover for a street medic as he dragged a
concussed woman out of the line of fire. Rubber bullets pelted the round red-
silver-and-blue steel, ringing it like a gong. And a towering man with a forked
blue beard paced helmetless between the two sides with a saxophone, playing
virtuosic pop covers as pyrotechnics skipped off the pavement all around
him.

Margaret stayed in the thickest mass of demonstrators, where people had

formed a wall of overlapping umbrellas to ward off the incoming gas and
nonlethal rounds. Some shined powerful lasers at police to throw off their
aim. Others had phones out and were filming the assault. Unlike earlier days,
almost all had hard hats or skateboard helmets, and some had bulletproof
vests—so there were few serious injuries from the barrage. Australian
reporter Kate Fisher, in the same gas mask and body armor she’d worn
reporting from Syria, asked Chen on camera whether the uses of force that
night had felt proportionate. “Not at all,” she said through her own mask.
“People have been shot out here [inaudible] no warning, no reason.”

The demonstrators were catching on to the anti-riot force’s tactics. The

nonlethal weapon gunners were staying safe behind the shield wall. When
one was getting ready to fire, he or she would tap the shoulder of the shield-
carrying officer in front of them. The shield-bearer would then take a knee,
and the gunner would fire over their head. Now, an MPD grenadier was seen
tapping the shoulder of the man in front of him. “Third guy! Third guy!”
yelled one of the protesters, pointing at the officer who was about to drop

49
down. An activist with a 1000 mW laser followed the cue, and just as Officer
Ben Lum raised his 40 mm launcher, the wicked green beam bore directly
into his eye—leaving him with permanent blindness. Police immediately
realized that this was vastly more intense than the other lasers, and they
surged the line forward amidst a squall of flashbangs. A squad of olive drab
DEA agents in sunglasses and tactical armor rushed forward to arrest the
man who’d aimed it.

They yanked the perpetrator out of the crowd, and hauled him back toward
the shield wall. A group of demonstrators rushed at them with fists, fire
extinguishers, and the points of folded umbrellas—trying to rip the man from
the agents’ grasp and “de-arrest” him. The agents turned and fired nonlethal
weapons at point-blank range. Kate Fisher was closely following the
skirmish, and a rubber bullet shattered one lens of her gas mask—driving
shards of plastic deep into her eyeball. She screamed, stumbling back half-
blind toward the crowd, where people helped her to the rear.

Margaret ran over and removed the stricken reporter’s mask. It was a grisly
injury, and she could immediately tell that this was beyond anything medics
could treat on the street. Fisher needed real EMTs and a hospital. But
without working phones, they couldn’t summon help, and the police were
closing in fast now. As backup arrived, they began mass arrests, tackling and
flex-cuffing the demonstrators one by one. Even street medics in clearly-
marked insignia were torn off their patients and dragged away. Margaret
knew she faced the same treatment, but refused to leave Fisher’s side. She
rinsed away the blood and taped gauze over the eye, then held her hand for
comfort.

50
And then, deliverance. The red-and-yellow flashers of an ambulance pulling
up to treat a cop who’d been knocked unconscious in the fighting. Chen
hoisted Fisher up, and waving a t-shirt as a white flag, led her through the
fray to the paramedics. As soon as she was safe, Margaret took off running
back to the collapsing pocket of demonstrators before anyone could grab her.
A resident living above the shops had opened their entrance door, and were
beckoning trapped protesters inside. For a moment, they were blocked by the
crowd control netting, but someone slashed through, and Chen followed
them up the stairs, and out down a fire escape. A taller guy helped her over a
fence, and they scattered through a school and back into a another
residential area. As she ran, her mind weirdly fixated on the metaphorical
literalism of the battle: an eye for an eye.

When Chen pulled up winded and cramping, she looked around and there
were only a couple other demonstrators with her. “Where should we go
now?” someone asked. The orange netting penned them onto the street
where they were visible and vulnerable. And they could see blue flashers
approaching in the distance. Overhead, a helicopter was circling with its
white spotlight pointing down at fleeing curfew-breakers. Without with app,
they couldn’t find any safe houses. They tried screaming for help. Some of
the lights were on around them. They could see wary faces in the windows.
Surely someone would come down, cut the netting, and let them in. But no
doors opened.

Another trio of demonstrators came running by. “Come on!” one shouted.
“We’re going to Forty’s place.” Margaret wanted to ask who “Forty” was, but
she was too out of breath, the lens of her mask was fogged up, and it was all

51
she could do to keep up. They panted another couple blocks to the promised
refuge, slipped through a gash in the netting and banged on the door.

They stepped into an opulent four-story townhouse, furnished in grand Louis

XV style and crammed with dozens of exhausted activists. Forty, it turned
out, was Xenophon Lim—a Georgetown sophomore and the son of a
Singaporean retail magnate. He was sauntering from room to room in a
velvet smoking jacket, greeting his guests individually in an impossibly
plummy English boarding school accent: “How do you do? … Oh dear, you’ve
been tear gassed as well, have you? … I find Trump simply monstrous, don’t
you?” When he saw the crosses on Margaret’s gear, he said both of the
medics he was expecting that night were believed to have been arrested, and
asked her to set up an improvised clinic in his basement.

Soon, protesters who’d been bleeding all over Forty’s antique carpets were
streaming down to her aid station for attention. Everyone was convinced that
his whole persona was an act, and a couple openly sneered at him as a rich
poseur. But the activists who’d spent the last few days around the
neighborhood said he’d been a solid, if eccentric, ally. He was risking his visa
by helping them, after all. With each new laceration and chemical burn,
Margaret’s bag supplies were dwindling, and by around three in the morning,
Forty was doling out posh dinner napkins to cut into bandages. At one point,
two women helped their guy friend down the stairs—his pantleg was red, and
she saw that they’d tourniqueted his thigh with a bandana after he’d fallen
onto a shard of glass. She explained that she couldn’t safely release a
tourniquet. He needed an ER, or he might lose the limb. The man was pale
and panicked, begging that he didn’t want to be arrested, or get the safe
house discovered. But she firmly told his friends this was not optional. He

52
needs an ER, now. So they called an ambulance from a landline, and the
friends agreed to walk him outside and wait with him on the corner.

Margaret had been sure the police would find them anyway. All the way until
dawn, she was bracing for the boom of breachers overhead as SWAT raiders
poured into the mansion. But whether law enforcement was just
overstretched, or tony neighborhoods played by different rules, or it was just
dumb luck, no heavy boots ever came to Forty’s door.

I
T WAS ALREADY hot and stuffy in the fourth-floor hallway of the Hay-

Adams when Lucía Campos-Herrera woke up in her sleeping bag and

looked around on the morning of Tuesday, June 22. Her room had
been given to a dozen older or injured protesters who needed a more
comfortable place to sleep, so she and most of the other organizers were
reduced to bunking on any bare patch of carpeted floor they could find. With
its power and utilities off for the third straight day, the hotel’s interior was
dark, humid, and foul-smelling. The stench of rotting garbage, backed up
toilets, and hundreds of sweaty, unshowered protesters was nauseating.
Someone who’d experienced the infamous 2013 “Poop Cruise” liner accident
said the smell was just as bad as aboard the stricken Carnival Triumph.

Campos-Herrera went down to the lobby, where she took breakfast from a
tray of granola bars cut in half, under a sharpied sign “1 per meal ONLY”—
and then headed to the war room at about 7:15 a.m. Peter Balakrishnan was
briefing members of the L-team on the past eight hours of developments, and
the outlook was poor. During the night, JTF-NCR had built up heavy forces
on the strip of 14th Street it had seized cutting across the Mall. While
Homeland Security drones buzzed overhead with klaxons to keep

53
demonstrators awake, the shield walls and pain rays had methodically forced
them back along the Mall’s full width, making hundreds more arrests and
driving eastward hour by hour toward the Capitol. Two more activists had
self-immolated in an attempt to halt the advance, but both had been rushed
to hospitals and were expected to survive. By first light, Falcon Brigade had
made it almost halfway, and set up new concertina wire penning somewhere
between 250,000 and 300,000 protesters into the remaining space. And
now, in an attempt to strangle the demonstrations outside the protest zone,
SCRAG Zeller had expanded the nightly curfew to an all-day citywide
lockdown—confining everyone to their homes except diplomats, health care
workers, government employees, and people traveling directly to buy food or
medicine.

CNN was on mute in a corner of the room, but someone listening with
earbuds shouted for everybody to turn the sound on and listen. Washington
Post reporter Philip Rucker was on New Day announcing a major scoop. It
had been posted to Twitter via the paper’s London bureau, but with most
Americans lacking web access, print journalists were being forced to break
stories on television. “The piece is online for viewers who still have internet
access,” Rucker said. “But I can confirm from two sources directly involved in
these discussions that over the last 24 hours, a number of very senior current
and former political figures have been having backchannel talks with
members of the cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment and removing
President Trump from office.” Asked by John Berman about the motivation
and timing, Rucker said: “I’m told that cabinet members have grown
increasingly alarmed by the president’s erratic behavior over the last eight
days or so … and consider that he may no longer be fit to command the
military.” According to Rucker, “the belief is that much of the cabinet has

54
now agreed in principle to support removal, and that if Vice President Pence
agrees to proceed, they would hold a vote as early as tonight.”

Donald Trump, still in bed at Mar-a-Lago, was flipping between Fox &
Friends and CNN and caught the live interview, too. Without Twitter, we lack
a contemporaneous and unfiltered window into his thoughts, but we know he
summoned Stephen Miller and Rudy Giuliani for an urgent meeting in his
private rooms, and that they were alone together for about half an hour.
During this time, Miller telephoned Matt Bevin and Tom Barrack to inform
them that they had been fired, effective immediately. In Arlington, Secretary
McSally was sick in bed and jolted awake by federal agents pounding on her
door to announce her termination as the nation’s top diplomat—her deputy
Jacob Santos was considered similarly unreliable and had been axed by
phone minutes before. Seemingly confident that the turncoats had been
purged, Trump directed his office to release a statement that the sacked
cabinet members had been “caught red-handed in a treasonous and seditious
plot to overthrow the United States government and its duly-elected
President… This failed coup had no chance of succeeding and President
Trump’s support within the Cabinet and among loyal Americans is stronger
than ever.”

The Fox & Friends hosts read the faxed-in statement aloud on the air at 8:46
a.m. in the midst of their protest coverage—their faces registering mounting
dismay with each new sentence. Steve Doocy set the paper down took a
moment to compose himself. “We know Secretary McSally,” he said. “She’s a
friend of the show. We know Matt Bevin. He is a patriotic American... Mr.
President, these are not traitors.” With Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade
watching in stunned silence, Doocy launched into a three-minute defense of

55
the firees against treason accusations that he called “outrageous” and
“extremely harmful” to the country. “We have supported you,” he told the
president, looking straight into the camera, “but right now you are dividing
us, not uniting us.” Earhardt and Kilmeade nodded along. “Mr. President,”
Doocy concluded, “do what’s best for the country, sir, and resign.”

Almost four miles to the south in Lower Manhattan, the Federal Reserve’s
New York Trading Desk was working frantically to avert a complete systemic
meltdown. With U.S. stock exchanges closed again for the third consecutive
business day, financial institutions were facing monstrous losses—and many
banks were barely staying solvent as panicked consumers without online
banking were mobbing their local branches to withdraw cash. As the Fed
pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the system to prop up large
institutional balance sheets, the Treasury Department raced to distribute
emergency cash and avert bank closures. With Secretary Barrack suddenly
out—and no guidance coming from the White House—his deputy Justin
Bogie acted on his own initiative to coordinate Treasury’s response. As paper
money reserves were hauled out of vaults and trucked to endangered lenders
across the country, the department sent out statements to television and
radio news outlets reassuring the public that their deposits were secure and
warning citizens against hoarding cash unnecessarily. Meanwhile, banking
industry employees were scrambling to switch critical operations back to pre-
internet technologies—communicating by phone and fax to ensure that
transactions could continue.

Yet even as the internet blackout paralyzed the nation, the web was
amazingly already beginning to revive. Resourceful citizens started breaking
dusty dial-up modems out of storage, creating new networks and networks of

56
networks that gradually restored limited online communications over
America’s thick crisscross of phone lines. Larger institutions—from Google,
Facebook, and Amazon to the Wikimedia Foundation and Stanford
University—established more extensive dial-up web services as the day wore
on. Lists of access telephone numbers were faxed to public libraries and in
some neighborhoods passed around by runners and bike messengers. There
was something delightfully subversive about it all. One such list, for example,
featured an image of Trump as Emperor Palpatine, captioned “Execute Order
606.” Many TV news outlets put the numbers up on screen, too, along with
instructions for connecting and installing ancient modems. In Silicon Valley,
engineers worked nonstop to enable an improvised compatibility between
fast, demanding modern computers and dusty ‘90s-era internet hardware.
Twitter and Google partnered on a service that let people call a landline and
leave a voicemail that would be analyzed by speech-to-text and posted as a
tweet.

In addition, emboldened by Judge Koh’s TRO, hundreds of internet service

providers across the country—mainly the smaller ones but soon some major
players—began unilaterally disabling the NSA’s whitelisting software and
restoring broadband access to their customers. In invoking Section 606,
President Trump had greatly underestimated the natural resilience of such a
highly decentralized and redundant system. The service that returned wasn’t
fast, and it wasn’t complete, but it was something—and getting better every
hour. Like a boxer stunned by a punch and groggily waking up on the canvas,
America’s internet was gradually flickering back to life.

In his tiny cubicle in Mar-a-Lago’s grand ballroom, Harry Katsouros was able
to log back into his Gmail for the first time around 9:45 a.m. Although IP

57
addresses associated with the president’s estate had all been whitelisted by
Monday night, so many of Google’s own servers were blocked that the service
had been inaccessible. When his inbox finally refreshed, Katsouros saw there
was still no word from his sister. He knew she was probably fine—the New
York protests had been massive but mostly peaceful—but he couldn’t shake
the worry that something had happened to her. She definitely would have
gone home to White Plains by now. She would have found a way to call their
parents to let them know she was okay. Katsouros scanned through his
contacts, looking for a friend in the city who had a landline phone. He found
only one, a family friend on the Upper East Side, and just got a busy signal.

There was a knock on the cubicle frame. Katsouros pulled the privacy tarp
aside. It was the Oval Office operations director’s assistant, Katy Busch: “Dr.
Gorka wants you.” He followed her up to a spacious private room in the main
club, where there was a stack of news updates the National Security Advisor
needed to digest before briefing the president. As they got to work, Gorka
reclined on the bed in a suit and tie, periodically rumbling questions at his
young staffer or telling him that a certain story didn’t matter and to go on to
the next one. There was one story that he simply didn’t get. Katsouros tried
summarizing the news clippings about ISPs uninstalling the CRYSTAL
SPIKE software, but Gorka kept misunderstanding the technical details of
what was happening and what it meant. “I’d like you to brief the president
with me and explain it yourself, Harry,” he said, letting out a long sigh. It
would be his first time attending the Presidential Daily Brief. At around
10:30 a.m., they went down to the arched entrance of Trump’s wing, where
Bob Francis, Director of National Intelligence Jim Jordan, and two or three
other briefers from the intelligence community were waiting.

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The president’s body man, Rory Freylinger, came out to tell them all that the
commander-in-chief was feeling under the weather and would be late to the
meeting. There was some awkward small talk as the assembled briefers
exchanged bits of information from the outside world. Did you see Doocy’s
rant? Is the Pentagon off lockdown yet? Is it true that Peter Thiel fled to New
Zealand on a private jet? Read that article yet? Bob Francis had a copy of the
Palm Beach Post on him and read some of it aloud. The 782-word unsigned
editorial, titled “President Trump Must Resign,” had been jointly published
that morning by an unprecedented 489 newspapers across the country. In
many places, distribution of print issues had been badly disrupted, but
hundreds of volunteers had shown up at newsroom offices and printing
plants offering to hand out copies, or at least faxed versions, of the editorial.
Even some very conservative papers had printed it. It felt like the walls were
closing in.

Katsouros noticed that DNI Jordan—normally one of Trump’s most ardent

boosters—looked especially shaken. Gorka asked what was wrong. “He’s
acting really fucking paranoid right now,” Jordan snapped. Katsouros got the
sense this was referring to some recent incident he wasn’t privy to. Freylinger
came out again apologetically to stall for time. At one point, they could hear a
commotion from behind closed doors and muffled shouting. They exchanged
nervous looks. It was the unmistakable grating timbre of Trump’s voice when
he was angry. They couldn’t tell what he was saying, but some of the short
words sounded like profanities. It kept going. The briefers kneaded their
palms and looked at their shoes. It reminded Katsouros of the famous bunker
scene from Der Untergang where Adolf Hitler’s horrified aides hear him
raging at senior generals through a vault door.

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It was after 11:00 a.m. when the doors finally opened and the briefers were
ushered into Trump’s living room. He was surly and rumpled. Instead of the
obsessively styled combover, his hair looked wet and was scrunched under a
red MAGA hat. The TV was on with the sound off, and as the meeting began,
Katsouros noticed the president’s eyes flicking compulsively toward the
screen. At one point, a CIA briefer was talking Trump through the details of a
particularly sensitive national security issue—the specifics of which remain
classified—when Jordan noticed that the commander-in-chief was zoned out.
He snarled at Trump to pay attention. Accounts of the exchange differ.
Katsouros remembers the DNI as using several expletives, but in Jordan’s
subsequent congressional testimony, he simply told the president “Hey,
we’ve got to stay focused.” Both agree that Trump became incensed and
shouted a string of insults at his spymaster that included calling Jordan a
“sick pedo” or “pedo sicko.” The former wrestling champion got to his feet
menacingly, and for an instant, Katsouros thought there might be a physical
altercation. But Bob Francis stood up and firmly coaxed Jordan back into his
chair. Rounding on Trump, he defended the DNI against the outrageous
insults, which only provoked the president to taunt him as a “loser” and
mock his baldness. The confrontation was only broken by the president’s cell
phone ringing.

It was Don Jr., and the elder Trump interrupted the briefing to talk to him. It
seems Junior informed him of the joint statement that had just been put out
by Speaker of the House Tim Ryan and Senate President Pro Tem Chuck
Grassley calling on the president to resign and threatening immediate
impeachment and removal if he did not. 271 representatives and 65 senators
had signed. Trump howled bilious curses into the phone, but soon realized
that that was still two senators short of removal. Then he was punching the

60
air defiantly again. After he hung up, Trump lamented to the briefers that the
Secret Service wanted to keep Don Jr., Eric, and their families laying low in
the Hamptons for security reasons. Melania and Barron were virtual
prisoners in Trump Tower, and even Tiffany was in London. He felt isolated
without them—especially his older sons. Summoning the head of his detail
Mike Monaghan, he announced that he didn’t care what worries the Secret
Service had—they were to figure out a plan to get both boys to Mar-a-Lago
right away.

With tempers cooled, the briefing resumed, and eventually Katsouros got to
explain to the president how ISPs were defying his orders and turning the
internet back on. Trump seemed more distracted than ever, and asked
several questions—Katsouros can’t remember precisely what they were—that
suggested that his comprehension of how the internet works was extremely
primitive. Twice more, Trump interrupted the meeting for incoming phone
calls: first former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, and
then Tom Cotton, one of his staunchest allies in the Senate. Both advised him
that the Section 606 order had simply been too damaging, and his enemies
now had the upper hand. Better to resign now on his own terms than face
imminent impeachment and removal.

After hanging up with Cotton, Trump asked his senior advisors what they
thought—how could he turn the situation around? Bob Francis pointed out
that Democrats were out for blood and would try to prosecute him if he were
forced out of office. Further, he observed, many on the left were pushing to
impeach the vice president as well for his very tangential role in the anti-
protester crackdowns—and Republicans in Congress weren’t standing up to
them hard enough. If he considered stepping aside in favor of Pence, Francis

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said, it would defang the opposition and the VP could ensure that Trump and
his family were fully immunized by pardons from subsequent liberal
vengeance. Before the Homeland Security Advisor could finish his sentence,
the president erupted in a storm of abuse that ultimately provoked Francis to
use the word “dumb” in relation to something Trump said. With that, the
cornered leader jabbed an index finger at his advisor’s bearded face and
delivered the line that had made him a television star. “You’re fired!”

T
HERE WAS A long line of flatbed trucks, city buses, and police vans

winding its way toward FedExField as Brig. Gen. Galen Wood and
his aides pulled up in their Humvee just after noon. Major Kirby
Williams of the Maryland Army National Guard was there to greet him, and
read prisoner intake and processing statistics updates from a clipboard as the
gaggle of officers strode across the concourse toward the stadium. On the
way, they passed two soldiers carrying an octorotor drone over their
shoulders like hunters with a boar carcass. “Is that one of ours?” Wood
asked. No, Williams answered proudly. It was a civilian intruder that his
guardsmen had just knocked out of the sky with their electronic weapons.
Wood stopped in his tracks and looked up into the sky. “Where was it when
they shot it down?” Right near the scoreboard, Williams said. The general
rounded on him in a way that made the Annapolis paralegal instantly realize
that was the wrong answer.

Wood barked at the soldiers to bring the drone over so he could get a closer
look at the undercarriage. Sure enough: a high definition camera. That
wasn’t just a PR nightmare, he roared, red-faced—but a security risk. It could
be scoping the area for a breakout attempt, or doing recon for a bomb drone.
He wanted patrols sent out to find whoever the operator was—and the anti-

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drone pickets needed to be posted around the perimeter of the complex. If
anything flew inside that wasn’t supposed to, Williams’s ass would be on the
line. By the end of the chewing-out, Williams was almost cowering. He felt
like he’d personally endangered the entire mission and risked hundreds of
lives.

Adjacent to the entrance, a whole village of yellow decontamination tents had

been erected to serve as processing stations. As detainees were offloaded
from arriving vehicles and formed up into lines, Guard officers assessed who
needed urgent medical attention or immediate law enforcement
investigation. Those with obvious, serious injuries were sent to the aid
station. Some, based on criteria that were never clear, were ordered into
semi-private partitions to be strip searched. Masked, visored guardsmen
with infrared thermometers checked everyone’s temperature, and those
suspected to have COVID-19 or another infectious disease were segregated in
a tented area on the far edge of one of the parking lots. The rest were frisked,
but not immediately processed. Wood asked why not. Detainee arrivals often
overwhelmed the intake facilities, Maj. Williams explained. Because they
didn’t want thousands of totally unscreened prisoners standing around
outside, it was better to get them into holding pens first, and then process
them gradually 24/7.

As they entered the stadium, Wood surveyed the field and asked pointed
questions about capacity. The Washington Football Team’s home field was
without its familiar in-season gridiron, and large razor-wire enclosures had
been erected on the turf to accommodate several thousand flex-cuffed
detainees. Maryland guardsmen in riot gear patrolled the grass—the same
grass that a carousel of quarterbacks had been sacked on without fans

63
present the previous fall. Near one pair of goalposts, they had set up a raised
platform where men with assault rifles looked warily down on the crowded
prisoners below. Up in the stands, several sections had been closed off with
more razor wire. Well-behaved demonstrators who’d been there long enough
to get processed and have their cuffs cut off had been herded into those seats
under armed guard—warned that any attempts to escape or assault the
troops would be met with lethal force.

Brig. Gen. Wood had a problem. According to the latest count, there were
over 18,500 detainees being held at the stadium. Wood’s forces on the Mall
had penned in around a quarter of a million—and he expected that JTF-NCR
would soon overrun them all. There was no way to arrest, process, house,
and feed such a vast number of people. But when they’d tried letting
detainees go, many had gone right back to protesting. Some had been caught
and released as many as four times in one day. At a bare minimum, then,
they would need to keep the hardcore activists in custody until the
overwhelmed legal system could deal with them. The logistical challenges of
doing this were formidable.

Unlike Maj. Gen. Beagle—who’d been fired at the president’s insistence—

Wood had no experience with complex multiservice, multiagency domestic
security operations. He was in charge of Operation SILVER WIND, JTF-
NCR’s mission to provide “domestic support to civil authorities,” but had
only a rudimentary, learned-on-the-fly understanding of the needs and
constraints those authorities faced. To his credit, Wood recognized these
deficiencies. So he went to the stadium’s command post and placed a call to
Gen. Glen VanHerck at USNORTHCOM in Colorado. The four-star had
personally authorized the creation of the stadium detention centers, and

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Wood hoped he would offer some guidance on their use. But VanHerck was
in a videoconference with Secretary Jack, and the duty officer said he might
not be able to call back for an hour. For a paratrooper used to seizing the
initiative with high-tempo operations, that was too long to wait.

Guard logistics specialists and military police officers estimated that the
stadium could safely hold about 35,000 hostile detainees—much fewer than
the 100,000+ Wood might have guessed from the raw seating capacity and
field space. And even if they could cram people together more tightly, they
were already facing food and medicine shortages with just 18,500 in custody.
The Pentagon had allocated backup supplies to D.C., but someone on Wood’s
staff at JFHQ-NCR had said they weren’t needed, so they’d been loaded onto
pallets and flown to Major General Xavier Brunson in Chicago, to provide for
the much smaller number of arrestees that JTF-CHI was keeping at Soldier
Field. Wood was livid when he found out, but it was too late.

Without the flexibility to hold huge crowds even if he’d wanted to, Wood
called back to his headquarters at Fort McNair and gave his decision to the
officers planning the afternoon’s assault. Anyone who violently resisted
arrest would be taken to FedExField—along with males who appeared to be
black bloc members. Everyone else would be flex-cuffed and herded on foot
southward out of the city and over the Frederick Douglass Bridge, where they
would be photographed and warned that returning to the demonstrations or
engaging in any further civil disobedience would be prosecuted as felonies.
SCRAG Zeller suggested having the soldiers falsely claim to have been given
shoot-to-kill orders, but one of the JAG officers in the JOC talked him out of
it.

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As Wood’s Humvee passed back out through the stadium complex’s machine
gun-guarded entrance, some of the journalists gathered outside the
perimeter recognized him through the windshield. He had strictly forbidden
all press access, and they wanted answers about what was going on inside. As
cameras rolled, Wood held a map up to cover his face as the vehicle sped
past.

Back in the stands near what would have been the 50-yard line, Caleb
Broadlie was sitting next to a Columbia professor with a black-and-blue face,
listening to his stories of what life had been like inside the cordon on the
Mall. Broadlie—the Georgetown law student who’d been arrested outside the
cordon near Union Station on Friday afternoon—listened with a strange sort
of envy. Those protesting elsewhere around the city and sleeping indoors at
night widely regarded the folks who’d thrown up barricades and occupied the
space around the White House as the hardcore vanguard of the movement.
To many, especially the teens and twentysomethings new to activism, there
seemed something glamorous about the shared misery of it all. Hearing of
the protesters skinny dipping in the Reflecting Pool after getting stink
bombed by Coast Guard helicopters, and of the impromptu dance battles
between demonstrators and police across the cordon at Franklin Square,
Broadlie felt left out. His heart swelled to hear about the “I am not afraid”
chants breaking out on the Ellipse as people took their masks off in front of
the hovering DHS drones and either made V-signs or flipped off the face
recognition cameras. It all seemed much more meaningful than hustling
around the city day after day blocking traffic and getting tear gassed.

But as he listened to Jasper Rice Sullivan speak, Broadlie came to

understand that both groups were essential to each other—without the

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occupation, the administration could have just waited the protests out, and
without the other activists disrupting law enforcement operations all across
the District, the Army would have been able to assault and overrun the
occupation. Broadlie asked Sullivan how he’d been arrested most recently.
Monday, he said. A unit of FBI SWAT had crossed onto the Mall to arrest a
young woman who’d seemingly done nothing wrong. He’d led a group of
demonstrators trying to free her, gotten swarmed by the officers, and been
hauled off. Sullivan had spent a cold, uncomfortable night flex-cuffed in one
of the holding pens down on the field before being processed, biometrically
scanned, and led up into the sex-segregated accommodations in the stands.

Broadlie’s own detention experience had been similar—and now he’d been
up in the stands for three days straight. They’d been fed gross MREs and
given two hot, plasticky-tasting bottles of water a day, but most everyone was
too hungry and thirsty to complain. The guards were supposed to escort
them to the stadium bathrooms when needed, but they were so slow that
many had taken to peeing in bottles. One guy a section over had flung his
urine at a guardsman and been tased in the genitals in retaliation. During the
hot afternoons, the stench was unbearable—between unshowered, stink-
bombed protesters, post-tear gas vomit, and sun-baked urea. At night, it was
chilly and damp. FEMA had brought in blankets, but these were in short
supply and Broadlie had to share. Army doctors took a few people away after
they became acutely ill or hypothermic, but many with injuries ranging from
cuts and bruises to broken fingers couldn’t get any medical attention. There
was a worsening shortage of menstrual supplies, and some of the female
detainees were left bleeding through their clothes.

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Whenever an officer came near, Broadlie demanded to see a lawyer and to go
before a judge. Sometimes they ignored him, but the others just said he’d
have to wait. “I know my rights!” he bawled at them on several occasions,
knowing even as he said it that this train wreck was way above their pay
grade. Once, a guardsman Broadlie believes was an officer told him that he
wouldn’t get to see a judge because President Trump had suspended habeas
corpus. Although this was just a rumor, everyone had had their phones
confiscated, so for a time Broadlie believed it. At any rate, the overwhelming
number of detainees had created what amounted to a de facto suspension of
the cherished writ anyway.

Now, as Tuesday afternoon wore on with no end in sight for the largest mass
arrests in American history, Caleb Broadlie and Jasper Rice Sullivan found
themselves getting caught up in a competitive cheer between two adjacent
sections in the stands. The other guys—about 400 strong—would roar
“Trump!” and they would reply even louder “Out!” Pretty soon, they were
shouting themselves hoarse and splitting their chapped lips trying to top
each other: “Trump! … Out! … Trump! … Out! … Trump! … Out!” At some
point, the chant morphed: “Fuck! … Trump! … Fuck! … Trump! … “Fuck! …
Trump!” The guardsmen patrolling between them didn’t quite know how to
react. Some seemed surly and annoyed, but others gave them looks that
seemed to say: if I weren’t wearing this uniform, I’d be joining right in.

Eventually, the chanting died down, and one of the women’s sections tried to
get a song going all across the stadium. But the median age of the detainees
was just 24, so it was hard to find something that most everyone knew the
words to. Some of the older activists started on “The Times They Are A-
Changin’,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and “This Little Light of Mine,” but the

68
lyrics were largely lost on Generation Z and the Millennials. The football
chant “Seven Nation Army” had the opposite problem. But finally someone
thought of the stomp-stomp-clap of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and
FedExField rumbled as they joined by the thousands.

As the brash refrain echoed around the stadium, someone pointed up into
the air. A pair of drones was flying overhead. Judging by the alarmed
reactions of the soldiers and the sight of several guardsmen training their
assault rifles skyward, it seemed like they were friendlies.

A
LL ACROSS WASHINGTON, the demonstrators were going on the

offensive again. By the time Brig. Gen. Wood got back to the JOC
at about 1530 hours to quarterback the assault on the eastern side
of the Mall, there were at least a dozen major hotspots of violence or civil
disobedience flaring around the city. Watching on live drone feeds, the Joint
Task Force staff could see thousands upon thousands of people on foot
streaming southward from the huge protest camps in Rock Creek Park and
the Arboretum. Countless thousands more were pouring out of the
apartments, townhouses, and upscale homes where they either lived or had
been crashing with welcoming residents.

The success of the previous day’s satphone-coordinated whack-a-mole

actions had clearly inspired more of the same, and Wood still didn’t have an
answer for it. Because the activist groups were so decentralized physically,
there was simply no way for the troops and police to establish secure arteries
to move around their forces as needed. Again and again, civilians with
gardening shears, pocket knives, or box cutters had hacked through crowd
control netting along the sidewalks and streamed out by the hundreds to

69
block the roadways. So just as one of Wood’s units was dispatched to break
up a black bloc action in one part of town, they would find their route choked
with more peaceful protesters than they could arrest. Or after making a mass
arrest elsewhere, a unit would find its way back to base cut off—and lack the
tear gas and flex cuffs to take anyone else into custody. In some cases,
fugitives were escaping via the tunnels of the closed Metro system, only to
come charging out of another barricaded station and take JTF detachments
by surprise. Several police contingents were reporting that their radios were
being jammed—Virginia state troopers trying to report a blockade action
near Lincoln Park were drowned out by the blaring synths of Weird Al’s
“White & Nerdy” on their tactical channel.

At least in the short term, the manpower situation was going to get worse,
not better. That morning, President Trump had called up an additional
110,000 National Guard troops nationwide under Title 10, along with about
120,000 from the Army’s Selected Reserve and Individual Ready Reserve—
but it would be days before any of those could get to D.C., and several weeks
before full mobilization even under the most optimistic assumptions. As it
was, one of the administration’s political appointees at the Pentagon told
SCRAG Zeller by phone that the DoD’s communications and logistics were a
“shit show,” and that J.J. Jack and Ken Rapuano were “in bed with the
Democrats” and were going to slow-walk the call-up so the president couldn’t
restore order.

In the meantime, the police serving in Washington were pressing ever more
urgently to throttle down their anti-demonstration commitments. For more
than a week, cops from surrounding states had been pulling brutal hours and
sleeping in high school gymnasiums—even as word came in from home that

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ordinary criminals were having a field day on unpatrolled streets. Several
chiefs reported scattered but worrying cases of unauthorized absenteeism,
and there was a fear that discipline was on the verge of cracking under the
strain. Following reports of a triple homicide in Brightwood, MPD Chief
Peter Newsham confronted Zeller in the JOC and flatly informed him that his
department would be pulling 350 officers off the protests that night to
combat fatigue and better protect the rest of the city.

Even as Newsham spoke, the boom of flashbangs echoed outside. A couple

hundred demonstrators had massed outside the gates of Fort McNair. Some
were lying in the road to block the exit, and some were hurling bricks or foul
liquids at the guard post, but a few were trying to scale the fence. Normally,
base defense would fall to the 289th Military Police Company’s SWAT-like
Special Reaction Team, but the SRT was deployed near the Mall trying to
keep the streets clear for Falcon Brigade. So it fell to the Commander-in-
Chief’s Guard, one of the Army’s premier ceremonial units, to trade in
bicorne hats for riot helmets, powdered wigs for body armor, and muskets
for batons—and beat back the intruders. With even his own command center
nearly under siege, Wood had no choice but to push the Mall assault back by
another few hours.

Word of the delay came as a relief to PFC Kevin Diaz, who was patrolling
with his squad on O Street, in a well-kept leafy neighborhood about 10 blocks
northeast of the White House. They had spent all morning drilling for the
assault and getting fired up by the senior NCOs, and it had been
disappointing to hear that they would be far away from all the action when
things got serious. So when they got the update from their lieutenant over the
radio, some of the guys had brayed in triumph.

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Now, they walked down the deserted street in open formation—M4 assault
rifles at the ready and scanning windows and doorways for any sign of
trouble. Old tear gas still hung on the humid air, and their eyes watered and
throats stung. Broken glass crunched under their boots, and the debris-
strewn asphalt was spattered with scorch marks from flashbangs. Some of
the cars parked along the curb had been smashed up, but Diaz couldn’t tell if
it was from looters or the battles with demonstrators. Off to the right, he saw
the blackened carcass of a burnt out city bus, lying on its side in an alleyway
where an Army bulldozer had previously shoved it for lack of a better place to
put it. The sidewalks were netted off, but the paratroopers noted a few places
where the orange meshwork had been partly or wholly slashed through, and
Staff Sergeant Danny Chick the squad leader noted the grid coordinates for a
subsequent repair unit.

The guys were cranky. They usually got Subway or McDonald’s for lunch at
RFK Stadium, but then a bunch of special forces guys staying at the
Homewood Suites downtown got sick. Someone put rat poison in the hotel’s
soft-serve ice cream machine, and Green Berets from the Florida and North
Carolina Guard started spattering horrific nosebleeds. Seven went to the
hospital, and JTF-NCR had banned all troops from eating civilian food for
fear of further sabotage. So the paratroopers had been stuck with MREs. Diaz
had been looking forward to a spicy Italian sub or a Big Mac—and instead
wound up with a disgusting packet called “Vegetable Crumbles with Pasta in
Taco Sauce.” So they were all looking for someone to vent their frustration
on.

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“Hey! Show me your hands!” Diaz snapped his head around and saw PFC
Trimble pointing his carbine at a guy in a hoodie. He’d been crouching near a
garbage bin outside a two-story redbrick. The man slowly eased his hands
into the hair. Trimble steadied his aim. “Don’t fucking move, asshole!”

Chick barked at Diaz and PFC Lynch to go check him out. They climbed
through one of the gashes in the netting and charged down the sidewalk.
While Diaz kept his rifle on him, Lynch spun the man around and frisked
him. It was a Black guy, maybe 25. Diaz could see that he looked scared—but
if he resented camouflaged soldiers in body armor working him over like this
was Baghdad, he made no complaint. When Lynch called out that the man
was clean, SSG Chick came jogging up and started asking rapid-fire
questions. Where did he live? What was he doing out? Had he participated in
any protests? What was in the garbage bin? None of his answers raised red
flags. He did seem a little shifty, but maybe that was just nerves from having
a gun in his face.

Across the street, a few doors and windows were opening as wary neighbors
craned their necks out to see what was happening. Some were recording with
phone cameras. Diaz heard a harsh voice from Specialist Eli Wack in the
road: “Get the fuck inside! Get inside right now or you’ll get shot!” While still
pointing his weapon steadily at the suspect’s chest, Diaz realized that he’d
chambered a round by mistake in his excitement. Since the Sgt. Yale shooting
and (later unsubstantiated) reports that National Guard units in D.C. had
come under sniper fire, foot patrols had been ordered to keep loaded
magazines in their weapons, but with empty chambers as a safeguard against
unintended escalation. Diaz ejected the bullet discreetly, and no one called
him on it.

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The radio squawked. New orders. Someone was believed to have landed an
illegal drone just around the corner, and platoon was converging on the
scene to find it. The soldiers admonished Mr. Hoodie to get back inside, then
took off at a run toward their new objective.

When they arrived, the lieutenant was already calling out orders. Apparently,
the MPD helicopter had seen a big octorotor drone land atop a block of six
semi-detached townhouses, but they didn’t know which one the operator
lived in. The old two-story buildings were narrow but long, and went back
out to an alley with multiple routes of escape. So two squads were setting up
a perimeter all around, and Chick’s guys would go in and be the door-
knockers.

They’d done a few hours of house-to-house searches the day before pursuing
people with weapons or pyrotechnics, so the drill was familiar. They’d stack
up outside the door, loudly identify themselves—the Insurrection Act
effectively obviated the need for warrants—and if nobody answered right
away, enter by force. They’d barged through the apartments of a few old folks
or families with wailing toddlers, but also arrested a guy making Molotov
cocktails and seized almost 200 pounds of guns, ammunition, and fireworks.
Nobody had put up a serious fight, and nobody had gotten hurt.

But the weapons discoveries had left everyone on edge. They’d been hearing
rumors ever since they landed about planned Antifa ambushes and Black
Panther kill-houses. And stories kept flying around on the radio that several
guardsmen had been shot earlier in the day. So Diaz felt a lump in his throat
as the squad formed up down the first unit’s front steps and back onto the

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sidewalk. He trained his rifle on a second-story window as the breacher loped
up with his portable battering ram. “U.S. Army!” he heard SSG Chick yell,
pounding on the door. “U.S. Army, open up!” A muffled voice from within
asked if they had a warrant. “We don’t need one,” Chick answered. “Open up
or we’re gonna knock your door off the hinges.” When the reply was more
mumbling and questions, the staff sergeant gave a signal to the breacher—
and the ram sent the door flying open with a crash. The paratroopers
stormed inside.

Diaz followed his squadmates into a living room crowded with probably two
dozen people, mainly curled up on the furniture or lying on the floor. He
found himself stepping over sleeping bags and piles of clothing. The sharp
smell of tear gas was overwhelming. It seemed obvious that they were
protesters. The squad pushed deeper into the building, moving quickly from
room to room with guns raised and ready to engage anyone who dared. The
inhabitants’ cries of fear and outrage mixed with the clipped shouts from the
soldiers as they swept rooms for danger: “Clear! … Clear! … Clear!” The rest
of the townhouse was packed with people, too. They were of all different
races, and many of them seemed to be Diaz’s age or younger. He saw Trimble
shove a heavyset Latino kid out of the way to get at a wardrobe—but there
was no drone inside. SSG Chick was shouting questions at anyone he could
make eye contact with: “Does anyone here have a drone? … Are there any
drones in here?” The soldiers flung open cabinets, upturned mattresses, and
pulled back the shower curtain, but eventually Chick had to concede that
maybe they had the wrong house.

On the way out, Diaz felt a tug at his pantleg. The kid Trimble had pushed
was on the floor, white as a sheet and eyes wide with terror. He was

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trembling all over, and his legs were jerking around strangely. Diaz had seen
people having seizures on TV, and thought that might be what was
happening. He turned to call out to his squadmates, but struggled to get any
words out. After a few moments, he somehow got Chick’s attention, and told
him that they had to get the kid to a hospital. Maybe he was dying. Chick
knelt down beside the boy and looked him over. “He’s just having a panic
attack,” the squad leader said. “We’ve got to go.” He shouted for one of the
other people in the house to bring the boy something to drink. Diaz tried to
reason with him. No, this isn’t a panic attack. His mind was racing. He
thought maybe the kid had hit his head and gotten a brain injury. If they
didn’t get him to a hospital, he would die, and it would be their fault. He
found himself almost in tears, begging Chick to get the kid help.

Next thing he remembers, Diaz was outside on the stoop, gulping from his
canteen and breathing heavily. Chick dapped him up and smacked the back
of his helmet encouragingly. “You good now, bro? It’s all good. You just got a
little freaked out in there.” Diaz nodded. The square-jawed staff sergeant
smiled. “Good. Now come on, we’ve got another house to hit.”

PFC Kevin Diaz and his squad raided five more townhouses that afternoon.
They found cowering mothers, a blind old dog, and more protesters. They
even found some smoke bombs and a few pairs of garden shears. But they
never found anybody with a drone.

M
EDIC MARGARET CHEN was back on the streets that afternoon

after a few hours’ sleep in the lavish townhouse of Singaporean

bon vivant Xenophon Lim. In appreciation of her care for the
protesters he’d taken in, Forty had given her a spare bulletproof vest, a

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ballistic helmet with a GoPro, and a satellite phone—with a request to call
him if she needed anything. She’d said she would. Although the lockdown
was now in force at all hours, the daytime crowds were simply too large to
overwhelm and hunt down like those at night. Margaret joined huge peaceful
demonstrations across Georgetown and was marching toward Observatory
Circle when a messenger on a Vespa told everyone to hurry toward
Washington National Cathedral, about a mile to the north.

Apparently, a pair of activists had scaled the 662-foot WRC-TV transmitting

tower and hung a “TRUMP OUT” banner overlooking Homeland Security
headquarters. Several hundred demonstrators had blocked surrounding
roads to allow them to escape, but an even larger number of National Guard
and federal police had struck swiftly, scattering them through the streets and
making mass arrests. A couple dozen had made it over a mile on foot to the
cathedral, and were claiming sanctuary even as government forces
surrounded the historic house of worship. While DHS Special Response
Teams formed a perimeter around the grounds, Bishop of Washington the
Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde and two of her fellow clerics came out onto
the front steps to protest the invasion. As SRT officers argued that the
fugitives were violent Antifa terrorists, Budde and her colleagues warned that
sending armed men into the nave of America’s Church would be a historic
disgrace and a moral stain on those who carried it out. As the standoff
continued, Margaret Chen and several thousand demonstrators marched
north to demand an end to the siege.

Within about 20 minutes, the streets outside the cathedral were choked with
protesters, even as BearCats and MRAPs pulled up and discharged
government reinforcements. The crowd began to chant: “Let them go! Let

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them go!” As Chen looked for other medics to coordinate with, she saw that it
was just her and two others with minimal experience. At peak that past
Saturday, there had been well over 2,000 medics around D.C., ranging from
off-duty physicians and EMTs, to teens who’d trained themselves on
YouTube, to black bloc activists who’d been doing this since Seattle ’99. But
the authorities had made a point of targeting medics for arrest, and there
were now too few to keep everyone safe.

A SWAT truck pulled up and out climbed a Bureau of Prisons SORT team—a
unit trained for subduing rioting Bloods and Crips on the yard, not peaceful
protesters. Acting Attorney General Gallup was now scraping the bottom of
the barrel now to find SCRAG Zeller more manpower. They looked to Chen
like Delta Force rejects. A lot of the DHS and FBI SWAT operators she’d seen
looked like they stepped off the set of a Hollywood movie. But these guys
wore baggy navy-and-olive uniforms and many seemed chunky and out of
shape. This particular unit was also on edge because one of their members
had taken a brick to the head earlier in the day. So when demonstrators
along the cathedral’s sidewalk got in their faces, they responded with an
immediate barrage of tear gas and Stinger rounds.

At first, it was the usual drill. On Chen’s GoPro footage, people run up with
orange cones to douse the gas, and a couple demonstrators go down from the
Stinger impacts. She quickly assessed them and found that one had been
badly concussed. Calling over the other two medics, she directed them with
authority: “Lift on three. One, two, three.” They got the guy to safety. Then
another casualty couldn’t understand English. She passed the word through
the crowd by word of mouth: we need a Tagalog speaker. They found one no

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sweat. Margaret was feeling more in command of her situation than ever
before.

Then a man in all black charged out of the crowd toward the part of the
police line where the SORT team was. A Molotov cocktail flickered in his
hand. At almost the same instant, three officers with submachine guns
opened fire—and the man fell dead. Margaret never saw him, but felt bullets
snap around her, tinkling on the ricochet into parked cars behind. She looked
up and saw that shooters had just fired live rounds into the crowd.

Everyone took off running at once. Margaret made it several blocks before
the lack of follow-up shots began to suggest that there was no massacre afoot.
Demonstrators started flowing back toward the cathedral, eager to press
their case even more passionately than before. She was going to follow them
when she heard a voice calling “Medic! Please, medic!” A young Arab man in
a Big Bang Theory t-shirt was hobbling up to her, clutching his quad. “I’m
shot, Miss,” he said. With no sidewalk netting this far north, she was able to
help him off the street and behind some hedges in a house’s front yard.

She cut his pants open with her trauma shears, and found a neat little hole in
the back of his thigh. Margaret asked his name. It was Saad. “Okay, Saad,”
she said, getting to work on him. “You have a gunshot wound on the back of
your leg here, but you’re going to be alright, okay? I’m going to stop your
bleeding, and then we’ll get you to a hospital.”

Saad protested. They were watching the hospitals, he said. He didn’t want
any hospital, please. “Just take the bullet out here. I can take the pain.”

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Chen fell back on the firm tone of authority she’d honed many times over the
past five days. “Listen, Saad. You need to be treated at the emergency room.
I’m going to get help at one of these houses, and I’m going to wait with you
until an ambulance gets here, okay?”

Saad’s eyes grew wide with terror. “Please, Miss,” he said. “I am from Saudi.
They will deport me. I will die.” He was gay, he haltingly explained, and had
overstayed his visa to escape oppression at home. If he went to a hospital, he
would be arrested, and people on the street were saying that Homeland
Security was making a list of deportables to send back. Homosexuality was
still punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. Margaret’s heart broke. She wished
she could tell him it wasn’t true—that there was no way he’d be sent back if
he sought medical treatment. But she couldn’t look this frightened young
man in the face and tell him to gamble his life on what she hoped was still
true of her country. There had to be another way.

She packed his wound with the last of her sterile gauze, bandaged it with
dinner napkins, and called Forty on the satphone. “Margaret, my dear!” he
chirped after a few seconds. “You are well, I hope?” She said she had a
gunshot patient and asked if he knew of any doctors in the city who could
treat him off the books somewhere. “I have just the person!” he said with the
tone of a chandelier polisher recommendation. She asked where. “No, no.
She’ll come to you. Say, give me your address, would you?” Without GPS, she
couldn’t tell. Margaret jogged down the block to find a sign and told him
where she was. “Splendid,” he said. “I’m sure she’ll be along shortly.”

About four minutes later, a black Mercedes van with diplomatic plates pulled
up outside the yard and out popped a girl in a ponytail and sweats who

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looked maybe 12. Hala Alireza, 19, was Forty’s Georgetown classmate and the
daughter of the Bahraini ambassador. After her parents were evacuated by
the embassy, she’d stayed behind in the capital and opened their sprawling
Spring Valley home to desperate protesters—aggressively using her
diplomatic immunity to keep out police. With security staff holding down the
fort, she drove the streets day and night rescuing hurt or fugitive activists.
After the SOP 303 shutdown, she routed around the city with a satphone and
a printed map. In all, she’d saved almost a hundred people.

Now, Alireza helped load Saad into the back of the van, where a few other
casualties were already lying. She gunned it north out of the District on
deserted roads. Police cruisers going the other way ignored them, and the
National Guard roadblock at the Maryland border waved them through for
“diplomatic business” after Hala showed her ID. Within half an hour,
Margaret helped Saad into a Rockville emergency room—and only left his
side after getting the attending’s word that police weren’t arresting patients
there.

Back in D.C., satphone-armed messengers had spread word of the cathedral

shooting to protests in Columbia Heights, where Arianna and Gianna Marcus
had joined a crowd sitting down in the road to block a fuel convoy. When a
Trump Out volunteer with a bullhorn announced that a protester had been
pronounced dead, the demonstrators started hurling abuse at the line of riot-
armored Guard troops facing opposite. There in the shadow of a midrise
public housing block, they chanted that the camouflaged enforcers were
invaders, killers, and worse. For the Marcus sisters, this was their first
vehicle blockade action—a couple days before, they wouldn’t have imagined
themselves seated arm-in-arm across the path of an Army tanker truck.

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They’d always stuck to big crowds and stayed off the streets during the
curfew. But seeing their new friends get arrested and hurt by police had
made them mad. They’d marched with more vulnerable people—poor folks,
essential workers, single parents—and heard about the risks they were
taking. It felt awful entitled to stay camped up in Rock Creek Park with all
the college-bound Zoomers when they could be making a difference.

Dante had come with them, and now sat next to Arianna, cool and steady.
The tanker’s big tan armored cab stared down at them with an angular face
like a Transformer. The idling diesels grumbled loudly, and her thoughts
couldn’t help turning to the BearCat ramming in Lafayette Square. Dante
must have seen fear in her face. “You got this, Ari,” he said with an earnest
up-nod. And she instantly felt like she did.

They heard a clatter behind them, and turned to see SWAT and BORTAC
officers in gas masks blocking their retreat. They’d come racing up without
sirens to catch the demonstrators by surprise. The woman on the bullhorn
called out: “Scatter! Scatter! Scatter!” Dozens of people scrambled to their
feet and looked for an escape route. Shield walls were forming in the
intersection ahead of them. Robocops with batons were waiting on the
sidewalk to tackle any protesters who cut through the netting. Arianna was
limping on her still-sore ankle.

There was no way out. A cop on an LRAD barked at everyone to stop and lie
down on the street. Dante put his hands up and knelt on the pavement.
Following his lead, Arianna and Gianna did the same. “You! On your faces!”
boomed the LRAD. They went prone. Ari reached for Dante’s hand, but she
heard him scream and looked up to see him being flex-cuffed and carried

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away. She never saw him again, and JTF-NCR arrest records provided to The
Lodestar under the Freedom of Information Act do not include anyone
matching his first name and age range.

Seconds after Dante’s arrest, an activist down the street got up and pulled a
laser pointer from his pocket to blind the cops. An officer in the BORTAC
skirmish line thought it was a gun and fired two shots from his M4 carbine
before realizing his mistake. Both missed. One high-velocity round lodged
harmlessly in the man’s backpack. The other traveled another 140 feet and
cut Gianna Marcus’s spine as she lay facedown on 14th Street.

Arianna’s memory of the following moments is hazy. She never heard

gunshots, but remembers hearing her sister cry out in pain, and asking Gi
what was wrong. Then she remembers seeing SWAT officers giving her first
aid, and being allowed to ride along after civilian paramedics arrived and
loaded her on a gurney into an ambulance. After Gianna came out of surgery
at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, both sisters were arrested on felony
riot charges—only dropped after footage of the incident emerged. And
although Gianna remains paralyzed from the waist down, her family has
refused a settlement, and their $32 million federal lawsuit will likely go to
jury trial later in 2022.

O
VERSEAS, THERE WAS growing confusion and incredulity at the

news leaking out of the United States. Although most Americans

still couldn’t get online, from the few who were able to access the
internet, photos and descriptions of the spiraling crisis went out freely to the
rest of the world and gripped public attention in virtually every country.
Paradoxically, even as people in Boise or Baton Rouge remained in the dark

83
about much of what was going on, those in São Paolo, Stockholm, and
Sydney could follow along almost in real time. Thus, American families
huddling around their televisions often had their domestic news relayed via
foreign bureaus—and U.S. anchors found themselves reading faxes from
London of printouts of tweets posted to European servers via speech-to-text
from international phone calls from landlines in the Lower 48. Information
was taking dizzying paths, but the simple fact was that Trump couldn’t stop
it. He was, in the words of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “trying to hold back
the tide with a mailed fist.”

At Mar-a-Lago, the president was glued to the coverage, sourer and more
depressed than ever. He was so hurt to see Fox News and even One America
News Network personalities criticizing him that he was now spending hours
watching the “lamestream media” he so despised. According to The
Endgame, at 3:55 p.m. he told aides he wouldn’t take an incoming call from
SCRAG Zeller, but Ivanka was on hand, and she persuaded her father to get
on the line.

Trump asked Zeller how the assault had gone—was the eastern side of the
Mall back in government hands? The SCRAG replied that there had been no
assault. There was still too much chaos around the city, and they hadn’t been
able to deploy the massive forces that would be needed to overrun the
demonstrators and oversee the mass arrests and crowd control that would
follow. Reality began sinking in. But surely, Trump said, the reserves he’d
called up would get the situation stabilized in a few hours. No, Zeller
explained, according to witnesses in the JOC: Secretary Jack and Gen.
VanHerck were dragging their feet to deliberately delay mobilization. The

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president exploded in a hurricane of profanity. It was treason, he said.
Rebellion. The wouldn’t get away with this—that much he promised.

Minutes later, DNI Jordan was ushered in for his scheduled 4:00 p.m.
briefing on the latest developments. But Trump was in no state of mind to
discuss foreign intelligence. He raved to Jordan that everyone around him
was working against him, even the Secretary of Defense. They had to have
J.J. Jack arrested for treason, he ranted, per the DNI’s subsequent
testimony. Then his ire fell on Jack’s underling Ken Rapuano, Gen.
VanHerck, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley. Soon, he was
insulting the soldiers themselves. The military was disloyal he said, overrun
with “communists,” and needed to be purged. According to Jordan, he tried
to defend the honor of the armed forces, but to no avail. The president’s state
of mind was so alarming that he immediately decided he had no choice but to
resign. Returning to his bedroom on the estate, he dashed out two
documents in longhand: a perfunctory two-sentence resignation letter
addressed to President Trump, and a set of instructions for his principal
deputy Patrick Shell, warning him to avoid enabling any drastic action by
POTUS. Then he got in a staffer’s car and slipped out of Palm Beach for the
Miami airport, and thence home in Ohio, before his boss was any the wiser.

Just before Jordan had walked into his meeting with Trump, at 1:00 p.m. on
the West Coast, the Ninth Circuit had denied the administration’s request for
an immediate stay on Judge Koh’s order, and set deadlines for the
government motion and state’s response on Wednesday and Thursday. That
meant that for the time being, the TRO was the law of the land—requiring
that the internet and cell towers be turned back on. Although the NCCIC and
NCC had complied with the president’s order the day before to disregard a

85
lowly federal judge’s ruling pending review by a higher court, the Ninth
Circuit carried more weight. Even political appointees throughout DHS
realized that things were looking bad for Trump, and decided that they didn’t
want their obituaries to open with their role signing off on a constitutional
crisis for a doomed cause.

So at around 3:45 p.m. in Minneapolis, HIRT team lead David Cimino got a
call at the hotel where they were sitting around watching TV and waiting for
further instructions. They were to head back out to MICE and remove the
CRYSTAL SPIKE whitelist hardware immediately. The NCCIC listed three
more IXPs across the Upper Midwest that they were to bring back online
before midnight. Across the country, 21 other teams received similar orders.
The reversal came as a relief. Cimino had been deeply uneasy about defying
the TRO, and he’d been tipped off by the Minnesota State Patrol that radical
activists planned to violently oppose any further attempts to tamper with
communications centers. The HIRT team packed up its gear, and within half
an hour had restored normal service at the exchange.

At Mar-a-Lago, the first sign that Trump was losing control of the federal
agencies was that more websites were suddenly accessible from the estate’s
WiFi. Shortly thereafter, someone in government tipped off Stephen Miller
that CISA had begun complying with the court order. He summoned
Secretary Wolf, who placed several furious calls to subordinates at DHS,
trying to make contact with the duty officers in the relevant ops rooms. But
many weren’t answering their phones, and others made excuses about
communications being down. Finally, someone relayed a message from the
NCCIC back to the secretary: they would comply with the TRO barring
judicial instructions to the contrary. Miller, Wolf, and Gorka, who had by

86
then joined them in the estate’s secure room, deliberated, and—Wolf later
told prosecutors—determined that firing the duty officers wouldn’t do any
good unless they had a headcount of who was still loyal and a way to
physically take back control of the ops centers. So instead, Miller conveyed a
message back: the White House promised full presidential pardons for any
criminal liability they might incur, as long as they got CRYSTAL SPIKE
reactivated.

Less than 20 minutes after the deputy chief of staff extended this offer, ABC
News reported that President Trump had illegally promised prospective
pardons to any DHS officers willing to flout the court order.

Trump—who appears to have known nothing of Miller’s latest gambit—had

been on a long phone call with one of his supporters, and apparently missed
the initial news reports that Homeland Security had begun complying with
the TRO. When he got back to his TV, the story hit him all at once. If the
internet was back on, he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Out came
the iPhone.

Most Americans couldn’t see it yet, but Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and his war
room in San Francisco watched the tweet come up live: “Traitors in our
government are attempting to stage a COUP, happening RIGHT NOW. have
been warning of this for years. Defend your President! If they want violence,
they’re going to get it. — @realdonaldtrump, [6:12 PM Eastern] - 22 Jun 2021.”
At long last, it was the final straw. For six years, Twitter had bent over
backwards to justify leaving Trump’s account up. Its leadership insisted that
this was for reasons of free speech and public interest, while cynics saw a
struggling company grasping for relevance and the ad revenue that the troll-

87
in-chief brought to the platform. Even after Michael Glazer’s murder, as
Dorsey and senior executives came under fierce criticism for not banning
Trump then, they believed the president’s statements during the crisis were
too newsworthy to censor. But none of those rationales could be maintained.
General counsel Asha Gupta advised that this latest tweet was a clear
violation of Brandenburg v. Ohio’s “imminent lawless action” exception to the
First Amendment. They could either ban him for good, or bear responsibility
for whatever mayhem he incited. Just 14 minutes after his final post, users
still able to access Twitter who attempted to view Trump’s profile saw an
error message: “This account doesn’t exist.”

To the president’s diehard followers, the Twitter ban only confirmed what
many had long believed. Liberal tech elites, working in concert with the Deep
State, had conspired to wrest control of the country from the lawful
government. Ardently pro-Trump commentator Mark Levin, who got the
news while broadcasting his nightly radio show, told his listeners that there
was “a putsch in progress in Washington D.C.,” that had “already been
proven [to be] connected to foreign terrorists … this is their endgame.” Of the
DHS officials sandbagging the duly elected president, tech executives
endangering national security, and members of Congress allying with the
violent rebels in the capital, Levin said “arrest them all.” He repeated the
exhortation several times. “Lincoln did it. General Order Number 38. Arrest
them all, Mr. President, before it is too late.” The extreme circumstances, he
argued, called for “nationwide martial law … what may be the only way of
saving this great republic.” Later that evening, an even more extreme
Trumpist pundit named Bryce Ethan Tapp opened his Newsmax TV show
what a dire warning that “this will have to come to bloodshed … unless we
want to lose our country.”

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At 8:34 p.m., after every major television news outlet rejected airing it,
President Trump posted a 94-second video to his Facebook page—which by
that time would have been accessible to nearly half of U.S. users. Looking
straight into a cell phone camera from inside Mar-a-Lago’s secure room, his
eyes looked hounded and bloodshot under the brim of a red USA cap. “The
armed rebels in Washington,” he said, “have joined with Democrats and
traitors in the Deep State to take down our government.” The coup, Trump
alleged, was “backed by foreign terrorists, and enemy nations who we have
identified and will be announcing very soon.” Their ultimate goal, he argued,
was not just removal of a president, but destruction of the American way of
life. “They’re not after me. They’re after you,” Trump said, repeating one of
his stock 2020 slogans. “I’m just in the way.” He concluded with a call for
loyal citizens “take back our streets and our cities by any means necessary.”

With those desperate, inflammatory words, the country teetered closer to

civil war than at any time since Appomattox. But—miraculously—Donald
Trump’s intended counterrevolution never manifested. According to the FBI,
at least 189 armed militia groups across the nation mobilized in some form
on Tuesday night, but they had little opportunity to join the struggle. Their
members were overwhelmingly rural, and in the quiet towns of the
Appalachian South and Mountain West, agents of the Deep State were scarce
targets. One organization calling itself the New Templar Knights reportedly
set up an ambush in a vacant Missouri field, training AR-15s skyward in
anticipation of a rumored assault by Department of Energy paratroopers that
never came. Another, known as the 13th Free Patriot Ranger Regiment, piled
its 16 assault rifle-toting members into two pickup trucks and drove back and
forth through downtown Albertville, Alabama “keeping the peace” until local

89
police politely told them to go home. Several dozen other small communities
saw similar public shows of force.

Yet Washington D.C. was many hours’ drive away for most of them, and the
routes into other major cities were swarming with National Guard and state
troopers, who intercepted and turned back anyone with visions of mowing
down Antifa in urban warfare. In addition, as a December report by the
Southern Poverty Law Center argues, most militia groups had greatly
exaggerated their willingness to go to war. Since Trump’s election, there had
been much giddy talk online about the impending “Boogaloo”—a vague
concept implying something like a civil war or armed white supremacist
insurgency. But with law enforcement still functional and no direct threats to
their own communities, they had little motivation to actually start killing
their fellow Americans.

Trump’s words also had the potential to incite a wave of lone wolf domestic
terror attacks, but here again, the violence was much less severe than
expected. At the Amway Center in Orlando, OPD officers found and defused
a truck bomb nearly as powerful as that used in the Oklahoma City bombing.
In Oakland, an alert off-duty cop noticed a former Proud Boy as he
approached a large Trump Out demonstration and wrestled a fully automatic
assault rifle from his grasp before he could commit a massacre. Nationwide,
police or heroic citizens thwarted at least five other mass shootings that night
before anyone could be killed. There were just four tragic fatalities.
Newlyweds Drew and Madison Rodeen were among 11 people shot by QAnon
believer Bryce Jacob Stevens at a Eugene, Oregon rally. Houston biology
teacher Karen McChord died after MAGA hat-wearing community college
student Dane Mueller opened fire on a protest crowd outside the Toyota

90
Center. And single mom Victoria Ball was one of 17 victims when a rising
high school senior rammed his Prius into a Trump Out march in Sacramento.

As sociologist Vincenzo Gal argued last month in New York magazine, the
muted effects of Trump’s June 22 incitement may suggest a “cliff” in the
readiness of the president’s followers to engage in violence. According to this
theory, most people genuinely apt to commit such crimes had already done
so over the preceding four years, and it would have taken something much
more severe than an incendiary video to drive the much larger population of
his less extreme supporters to actually take up arms. This may help explain,
too, why Tuesday night’s attempted attacks came exclusively from lone
wolves instead of large militias—with one notable exception.

I
T WAS AN unusually cool, pleasant evening in Quitman, Mississippi,

and Sheriff Wade Brock was sipping an iced tea on his porch, watching
the sun crawl down westward and listening to the breeze sigh through
the big ash tree in his yard. Quitman is a quiet town of 2,077 built along the
Chickasawhay River near the Alabama border. It was burned by General
Sherman’s troops during the Civil War, and a towering monument of a
Confederate soldier still stands sentinel on the lawn in front of the
courthouse. But Brock was the first to say there was no hate in their
community, and the majority-Black population generally enjoyed racial
harmony. His broad, ruddy face and booming laugh were ever-present
fixtures around town, from pancake breakfasts to Panther football games,
and he prided himself that citizens of any color could approach him and
share their concerns. He’d been elected Clarke County Sheriff in a 2020
special election after 29 years as a deputy sheriff, both roles he saw as strictly
apolitical. Although a registered Republican who voted for Trump twice, he

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was friendly with most of the local Democrats, and was glad they knew better
than cause trouble about politics in Washington. The weeklong protests and
counter-protests at the courthouse had been perfectly peaceful. Yes, they’d
had to arrest one wingnut at the Monday demonstration, but he saw no
reason to believe that the dramatic images on the nightly TV would trouble
the easy, relaxed way of life in Quitman. Then his cell phone rang.

It was one of his deputies at the county jail. He was panicked and gasping for
breath. Armed men had forced their way in, freed one of the prisoners, and
taken several deputies as hostages. They had heavy weapons. He’d evaded
capture, he said, and escaped to a nearby home to summon help.

Brock raced into the house, giving his wife Janette a hurried explanation as
he grabbed his gun and extra magazines before tearing out of their driveway
in his cruiser. Radioing for backup, he sped down Church Street, siren
wailing. But as he slowed to make a left onto Archusa Avenue in front of the
courthouse, Brock saw a squad of armed men on the lawn. They wore Army-
style camouflage and body armor, and for a moment, he thought they were
National Guard troops responding to the call about the county jail.

He was already turning through the intersection when he saw the camo-
painted pickup parked broadside across the street and realized this wasn’t
the U.S. military. Brock saw muzzle flashes from masked figures standing
behind the truck, and slammed on his brakes as high-velocity rounds glanced
off the asphalt in front of him. Ducking his head down, he threw the cruiser
into reverse and floored it backward around the corner.

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The men firing at Sheriff Brock were a splinter group of the III% Security
Force militia called the Mississippi Delta Security Force. Led by a man who
went by “General Steel Raven,” since 2020 they had become one of the state’s
most radical militant organizations, with about 30 members who trained
every weekend in the arts of war—marksmanship, demolitions, small-unit
tactics, close-quarters battle, and wilderness survival. Two of them were
Marine veterans who’d fought in Iraq, and lent their invaluable experience to
increasing the MDSF’s competence as a fighting force. Another of their
members was Eric Eckert, known as “1LT CoyotEE,” who lived near
Quitman.

On Monday, Eckert had been arrested for threatening anti-Trump

demonstrators outside the courthouse with an AR-style assault rifle, and
taken to Clarke County Jail to await a hearing. On learning of his arrest,
General Steel Raven became convinced that law enforcement in Quitman had
indeed been co-opted by radical leftist forces. So he resolved to punch back.
As the FBI later concluded, the MDSF had been contemplating an offensive
anti-Antifa action for several months, but the planning had been inchoate
and lacked urgency. When President Trump was forced to flee the White
House on June 14, their thinking had become much more serious. They knew
they wanted to seize a government facility run by seditious officials, and were
already actively looking for a target. At first, they had planned to strike the
courthouse during Eckert’s bail hearing, but with all the logistical disruption
from the internet shutdown, it had been postponed to Wednesday morning.
Yet Steel Raven didn’t want to wait any longer.

That afternoon, 22 MDSF members drove up from their muster camp in the
De Soto National Forest, rolling northward in three heavy pickup trucks. On

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the outskirts of Quitman at around 4:30 p.m., they stormed into the National
Guard armory, forced two Mississippi guardsmen at gunpoint to disable the
alarm systems, and used a thermal lance to break into the weapons vault.
The gun racks were unsecured, and they stole three M249 light machine
guns, a dozen replacement barrels, and a crew-served M2 .50 caliber heavy
machine gun. There was almost no ammunition stored on site, but they had
already legally purchased several thousand rounds of belted ammo, so had
what they needed. They hogtied the guardsmen, and at around 5:30 p.m.
drove a little over a mile on to the Clarke County Jail.

Parking out of sight behind the building, a small group of them had come
right in the front door claiming to be federal agents. One of the deputies saw
their facemasks and Punisher patches and attempted to lock them out of the
inner part of the jail, but they moved too quickly, and had a gun to his head
before he could act. The other deputies were no match for the assaulters, who
quickly gained full control of the facility. After freeing 1LT CoyotEE and
stealing some handcuffs, radios, and small arms, they opened the gates for
the trucks and loaded up three bound, gagged deputies before driving calmly
back up the road. No emergency calls had been made yet, and nobody had
fired a shot. It was just after 6:00 p.m.

Minutes later, Quitman police officer Doug Hope was standing outside the
courthouse talking on his phone when he saw a camo-painted GMC Sierra
jump the curb and roar up onto the lawn. A squad of armed figures sprang
out with assault rifles raised. Like the deputy at the jail entrance, he thought
at first that they must be military. They saw him, and started screaming
something about “federal” and ordering him to put his hands up. Hope was
about to comply, but something wasn’t right. He also worked as a gun

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instructor, and recognized that some of their weapons were decorated and
modified in ways that military or law enforcement equipment never would
be. On instinct, he ducked behind a pillar and out of their line of sight, then
sprinted for the entrance.

Locking the doors behind him, he screamed for the few remaining
courthouse workers to run out the back—and took a defensive position with
his pistol trained on the entrance. As the militiamen stacked outside and
prepared to breach, one of them saw Officer Hope through the glass of the
doors, and fired two shots, hitting him in the abdomen.

A shotgun blast sent the doors flying open, and the MDSF fanned out
through the building—which was fortunately nearly empty after the end of
the business day. Another Quitman PD officer Rich Groome was out in the
parking lot and heard the shots. He entered the courthouse and exchanged
fire with the militiamen, but was hopelessly outgunned. Wounded in the
hand, arm, and shin, he was tackled by one of the masked assaulters and zip-
tied bleeding on a hallway floor. Two civilians managed to escape out the
back, but a janitor was caught and bound as well. The hostage deputies from
the jail were hustled inside, and General Steel Raven was on the lawn
directing supply unloading when Sheriff Brock wailed up in his cruiser.

Heart pounding, Brock radioed for responding units to form a perimeter

around the courthouse at a safe distance. Calls went out to off-duty law
enforcement across Clarke County, and soon he could hear more sirens
approaching. He backed up down Church Street into a parking lot a block
away, got out, and tried to get his bearings. Quitman residents were running
on foot away from the scene, screaming. He heard more high-velocity

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gunshots from the direction of Main Street, and ran in that direction. The
front of the courthouse looks right down Main, and when Brock peeked
around a corner to get a better view, he could see two of his deputies further
up the street taking cover behind their cruiser. About 250 feet beyond them,
the militia truck was parked with a perfect line of fire.

A local teacher showed up with an AR-15, and together they zigzagged

between parked cars, keeping their heads down until they reached the
stricken cruiser. As the teacher laid down suppressing fire from behind the
police car’s engine block, Brock and his men were able to dart to safety down
a side street. That’s when they heard over the radio: two officers were down
inside the courthouse.

More sharp cracks from up ahead. Soon, another two responding deputies
were pinned down behind the Great Southern Bank, an officer near the
funeral home was taking fire from third-story windows, and Quitman police
chief Bobby Lean was taking fire in front of City Hall. The imposing 1913
courthouse gave the militia commanding views over everything within two
blocks, and they vastly overmatched the small-town police responding with
pistols and shotguns—some middle-aged, some overweight, and none even
wearing body armor.

Normally, this would be the sort of situation where local law enforcement
would just sit tight, and a big-city SWAT team would ride to the rescue. But
the anti-Trump unrest in urban centers had already stretched security
services in Mississippi to the limit. After remaining peaceful for the first
week, demonstrations in heavily-Democratic Jackson had exploded into
violence on Monday night after a police shooting—and with all available

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National Guard units deployed in or deploying to Atlanta, that left only the
skeletal Mississippi State Guard and state highway patrol officers to assist
municipal authorities in restoring order in The City with Soul. Due to the
crisis, even police departments in smaller cities had been pressed to lend as
many personnel as they could spare. And with the FBI SWAT teams based in
Jackson and Gulfport already deployed to Atlanta and New Orleans
respectively, that left virtually no quick reaction forces immediately available
in the Magnolia State. Sheriff Brock knew that outside help would be limited,
but at the time he didn’t even imagine how little aid he could count on. What
he did know, though, was that there were two officers down in the
courthouse, and he didn’t have time to wait.

Entering via a back door, he made his way to a second-floor window across
the street from the courthouse and called out to the militiamen over a
bullhorn. He asked about the condition of the fallen men and the other
hostages believed to be inside the building. Another bullhorn answered back:
the officers had been wounded, but were receiving first aid from trained
medics. They had four more hostages, and would execute them all if
authorities tried to retake the courthouse. They’d wired the whole place with
explosives, the voice said, and were not afraid to die. Not allowing himself to
be rattled by the threat, Brock asked to speak with the injured officers to
prove they were alive. In a few moments, and garbled across a walkie-talkie
and a bullhorn, he heard a few brief words from Hope and Groome—in pain,
but strong and coherent.

Over the next hour, law enforcement agencies from around the region
responded as best they could to the desperate summons from Quitman. In
addition to 21 local officers and deputies, the Waynesboro PD got six officers

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on scene, along with 10 officers from Meridian, and a combined 18 deputies
from the sheriff’s departments of Newton, Jasper, Wayne, and Lauderdale
counties—including five SWAT officers based in Meridian. They were fiercely
brave, but lacked the numbers or equipment to assault such a strongly
defended position. As they were beginning to realize, it was the largest militia
standoff since the 2016 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation.

While promises came in over the radio that the larger Hattiesburg SWAT
team would be redeploying from Jackson, Sheriff Brock tried to keep the
militiamen talking. They had no demands, they said. They had liberated
Quitman from a government that was in rebellion against the United States
of America, and were prepared to hold their position until relieved by loyal
U.S. military forces acting under lawful orders of the president. He asked
who they were, and they identified themselves as the Mississippi Delta
Security Force. Then he asked to speak with Hope and Groome again. Both
sounded weaker, but Hope seemed to be in especially rough shape, gasping
and mumbling before the MDSF cut the connection. Brock asked them to let
the wounded officers go to receive treatment, and when they refused, he
demanded to speak with their leader. After a pause, General Steel Raven
came on the megaphone.

Brock immediately recognized the voice. Mark Beauman was a 39-year-old

former machinist whose mother was from Quitman. She’d gone to high
school with him. Brock knew Mark as an outgoing young man who’d gotten
into strange politics as an adult but still came into town a few times a year to
see family. The sheriff called out to him by his real name: “Mark, why are you
doing this?” The voice gruffly answered that his name was General Steel
Raven. But Brock wasn’t going to humor him. “Mark,” he said, “I need you to

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listen. You let those boys go so they can get to a hospital. You do that, and we
can talk about all the other stuff.” Steel Raven repeated that this was an
occupation with no demands. The hostages were simply being kept to ensure
the local authorities didn’t try an assault.

A small crowd of citizens with shotguns and semiautomatic rifles had formed
downtown, and every now and then, a shot would ring out from an upper
floor of the courthouse as one of them strayed too close. Some of them,
including Officer Hope’s brother-in-law, wanted to go in and try to save the
wounded men. But that would be suicide. Officers over on the street behind
the judicial annex, out of sight of the snipers, briefly had to physically
restrain two citizens from trying to come in the back and fight their way in.

Then on the radio: Hattiesburg SWAT wasn’t even on the way yet. Brock
ordered his deputies to drive their patrol cars on loops through town with
their sirens on only on the way in, so as to create the impression of more
reinforcements steadily pouring into Quitman. He kept talking with
Beauman via bullhorn (Steel Raven had a complicated and paranoid reason
for refusing phone calls), trying to build trust and rapport. Brock said he
knew he was a good man, and it would be much easier to convince people of
the rightness of the MDSF’s cause if they showed mercy toward the wounded
officers. Repeatedly, he stressed that there was no need for anyone to lose
their lives over this. At around 7:45 p.m., they put him on with Groome
again, but wouldn’t let him talk to Hope. That was a bad sign.

The FBI field office in Jackson called to say that a Bureau hostage negotiator
would arrive by 8:30 p.m., and that Hattiesburg SWAT was en route with a
BearCat and should show up half an hour after that. But a doctor on scene

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advised Sheriff Brock and Chief Lean that they likely didn’t have that long to
wait. They quickly talked over their options, and the sheriff volunteered the
only viable plan he could think of.

“Mark,” Brock called as the lengthening shadows plunged the scene into
twilight. “I need to talk to you.” The militia leader asked what he wanted. “If
you’ll let those boys go, I am willing to offer myself as a hostage in their
place… That’ll free up your medics, and having the sheriff as a hostage will be
even better for you.”

There was a long pause. Then General Steel Raven gave his answer:
“Agreed… But here are my conditions.”

Following his instructions, four volunteers with EMT training presented

themselves on the lawn and were frisked by militiamen before bringing their
stretchers into the lobby. A few minutes later, they emerged carrying the
blood-soaked officers, and were held at gunpoint while Sheriff Brock made
the long walk across the street. He held his hands calmly in the air as
Punisher-masked figures lunged out from behind one of the trucks and
patted him down. “Now turn around and walk backward,” Steel Raven
ordered from somewhere overhead. At the top of the steps, he felt the cold
steel of a gun barrel press into the base of his skull. As someone zip-tied
Brock’s hands behind his back, the EMTs were released, and he saw them
carrying Officer Hope and Officer Groome toward the waiting ambulance.
Then the hood smothered him in darkness.

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T
HE VIOLENCE THAT the president’s supporters had unleashed in tiny

Quitman—which would have been one of the top stories of a saner

year—did not make a single national newscast on the night of
Tuesday, June 22. But the peril it represented now dominated the thoughts
of the men and woman charged with keeping American cities safe. A
paradoxical effect of Trump’s incitement was that the oppositional dynamic
that had often prevailed between protesters and police had now been defused
by the new threat of attacks carried out in his name. At around 8:45 p.m.
Eastern, Chief Newsham and a multiagency group of law enforcement
officials faced down Brig. Gen. Wood in the JOC. These latest words from the
commander-in-chief, they said, could only be interpreted as a call to civil
insurrection. As such, their departments’ first priorities had to be ensuring
the security of the demonstrations. Combined with growing absenteeism
among their officers, this left them unable to continue further cooperation
with any assault on the Mall. Wood thought their concerns were overblown,
but he had no authority to compel them. His own troops were exhausted
from the street fighting that had dragged all through the afternoon and
evening—leaving 37 military personnel and several hundred protesters
injured. That left JFHQ with no choice but to order a pause and go on the
defensive.

On the eastern side of the Mall, over 200,000 people had been crammed
together all day in increasing privation. In the National Gallery of Art,
hundreds of occupiers were camped under the coffered dome of the West
Building, sweltering without air conditioning amidst Renaissance art and
lush floral displays. Thousands of others were streaming in, jostling for
coveted indoor space in exhibit wings, bathrooms, and janitorial closets. On
the wall of the rotunda, someone had sprayed a quote from Hamilton in big

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letters: “I wrote my way out of hell, I wrote my way to revolution.” In the I.M.
Pei-designed East Building, two busloads of fresh-faced high schoolers had
spread out their sleeping bags inside an exhibit of garish and grotesque
Philip Guston paintings. Out in the Art Sculpture Garden, one of their
classmates had placed a papier-mache Donald Trump head atop Spider, the
15-foot bronze arachnid by Louise Bourgeois that loomed creepily over the
spent protesters napping below. Demonstrators had been sharing toiletries
and scraps of food just to get by, and cable news cameras set up at the Grant
Memorial captured people filtering the Capitol Reflecting Pool into 55-gallon
drums for drinking water.

When MPD units manning the cordon along Constitution Avenue abruptly
pulled back just after the nightly casserole, the crowd surged forward across
police lines and flooded across several more square blocks to the north. With
the cell towers and Trump Out app active again, word of the authorities’
weakness spread like branching lightning. Most of the streets around the
protest zone had been controlled block-by-block with movable vehicle
barriers, but as the cops withdrew, activists based at Gallaudet University
were able to find a clear route to demonstrator-controlled territory—trucking
in fresh food and supplies for about 20 minutes before National Guard
reinforcements could block their path. Even then, though, the guardsmen
were content to simply contain the protest, and as deep blue summer twilight
descended and the golden lights of the city twinkled on, a quiet stalemate
settled over the nation’s capital.

As the 274th Military Police Company rotated into holding positions along D
Street, Captain Brian Davis felt his executive officer approach for a discreet
word. 1st Lieutenant Christopher France-Jabbar was a CPA and father of five.

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Davis could see he was troubled. “This is really getting to them,” the XO said.
Guardsmen had been coming to him all week, talking about seeing friends,
family, and neighbors in the protest crowds. Some yelled at them, or asked
them to cross over to the other side. In their riot gear and camouflage, they
felt like occupiers. It was especially difficult for soldiers of color—and many
had come to worry they were betraying their communities. They just wanted
to know that they were doing the right thing. France-Jabbar had tried to
reassure them that their role was not a political one, but they could see the
truth with their own eyes. “It feels like I’m lying to them,” he told Davis. “And
just now, I saw some BORTAC dudes beating up on a guy and didn’t do
anything.”

As company commander, Davis had advised his officers and NCOs on how to
counsel racially-diverse guardsmen about the strains of opposing
demonstrations they might agree with in civilian life. His leadership talks
had stressed professionalism and the importance of military neutrality in
such questions. But expounding on those principles was starting to feel
hollow for him as well. He looked at his XO with empathy and a certain
shame: “I’m so sorry, Chris.” The only guidance he could offer was that doing
their job well could still make a terrible situation a little less bad. “We’re here
because we know how to do it the right way. If it weren’t us, it’d be even more
BORTAC.”

On the other side of the cordon, the Guard’s new posture giving people cause
for hope. With the imminent threat of government assault apparently
receding, the crowd’s thoughts turned back to politics and the future. As a
growing proportion of the protesters got access to the app again, resentments
began to flare between those who’d been suffering on the Mall and those they

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perceived to have had a luxurious time at Rock Creek Park, the Arboretum,
or the camps across the river in Virginia. Some activists argued that people
outside the besieged protest zone shouldn’t be allowed to vote in the
leadership elections on the app. Leading organizers tried to moderate
tensions, but the moods of the movement had a life of their own.

Shortly before 10:00 p.m., Reuters reported that congressional leaders

believed they had the votes to impeach and remove the president, and that
Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell planned to issue a joint
statement in the morning calling on Trump to resign.

In the Hay-Adams’s candlelit war room, the L-team broke out into cheers as
the news was confirmed. The crowd in Lafayette Square began buzzing with
joyous excitement as word spread. Out in Arlington, and at the protest camps
on the north side of the District, tens or hundreds of thousands of
demonstrators held their phone screens aloft in celebration. And on the Mall,
countless voices took up the same gleeful song that had filled the air over the
White House as Trump’s helicopter departed eight nights before: “Na na na
na, na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye!”

But even as weary demonstrators rejoiced, the L-team realized that the fight
was far from over. Sarah Turk and Daniela Saez drafted a brief statement
that went out at 10:24 p.m., reiterating Trump Out’s demand that both
Donald Trump and Mike Pence resign. Republican senators simply replacing
the former with the latter was “unacceptable,” they said, and “would leave
America with an unresolved crisis of leadership.”

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The statement served to remind Trump Out participants that there were very
concrete questions at stake over the coming hours and days, and everyone
had their own vision of what post-Trump America should look like. In
Lafayette Square, an impromptu meeting formed around the fallen Andrew
Jackson statue—now sprayed with tags, gouged with chisels, and repurposed
as a ceremonial urinal. Standing over Old Hickory’s humiliation, an
optimistic crowd of activists started bandying about proposals for
addendums to the demands expressed by the L-team.

Lucía Campos-Herrera, Daniela Saez, LGBTQ+ outreach coordinator Cash

Johnson, and a few other senior organizers hurried out to join the
gathering—hoping to steer the discussion in a productive direction. As Saez
passed, a few drunk protesters saw her and shouted “We love you, AOC!” She
laughed it off and just thanked them—she couldn’t quite see the resemblance
herself, but that seemed to happen at least once a day. The moment got
others around them laughing and broke the ice.

In a far-ranging and sometimes-heated session that lasted until almost three

in the morning, speakers expressed a wide range of proposals from the
moderate to the radical. In essence, the viewpoints fell along a spectrum
from just demanding removal of Trump and Pence, to larger platforms of
changes to the current government, to—in the case of a few activists—an
actual people’s revolution. Some suggestions, like abolishing Homeland
Security, repealing AFEO, and passing constitutional amendments to curb
presidential power, were motivated largely by Trump’s recent abuses. Others
rehashed Democratic or democratic socialist policy ideas from the past four
years: universal healthcare, nationalized banks or oil production, student
loan forgiveness, Supreme Court packing, overturning Citizens United, a

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federal jobs guarantee, or universal basic income. Some focused on tinkering
with the nuts and bolts of elections: abolishing the electoral college, lowering
the voting age to 16, or switching from first-past-the-post voting to one of a
range of more exotic systems. And several entailed relatively fringe ideas—
from establishing an “e-democracy” where major government decisions are
decided by referendum, to selecting legislators randomly from the
population, to outlawing private schools, to requiring representation in
Congress to be half women and proportional to the racial, class, and LGBTQ
demographics of the country.

One item did achieve solid consensus, though. The activists wanted to
demand a blanket pardon for Trump Out participants arrested for civil
resistance actions during the demonstrations. Saez and Campos-Herrera
knew that would be complicated politically, but they both assured the
assembly they would advocate for it in the war room. “Morally, I want to
leave exactly zero room for doubt,” Saez said with her trademark crisp,
vehement hand gestures. “These mass arrests are deeply, fundamentally
unjust. But I need to be real with you that our first priority has to be getting
Trump out as soon as possible, before he starts a civil war. Everything else
depends on that.”

Back on the West Coast, Buzzfeed reporter Noah Feldstein filed through the
press security line outside L.A.’s SoFi Stadium. FBI personnel with
submachine guns looked on as sheriff’s deputies in burly Kevlar wanded him
and checked his credentials. The chaos that had been gripping the City of
Angels all week had largely died down since the afternoon, and police had
clearly shifted their concerns to the prospect of anti-demonstrator violence.
Given the threats, LAPD chief Horace Frank had strongly urged the mayor’s

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office not to go ahead with the scheduled 8:00 p.m. rally—but Mayor Eric
Garcetti and Governor Newsom were adamant that it not be canceled. And
so, Feldstein had set out from his still-ransacked apartment to cover it. It
wasn’t safe to park anywhere, and there wasn’t a prayer of getting an Uber,
so he paid a local Chinese delivery driver $200 cash for the ride out toward
the stadium.

Millions of people were marching elsewhere in the Southland, but the well-lit
streets of the West Side were almost deserted. Every few intersections, tan-
uniformed California Highway Patrol officers with assault rifles were posted
warily by their motorcycles or cruisers, eyeing every approaching car for
trouble. Approaching LAX, it was U.S. Marines in Humvees and camouflage
battle armor. Feldstein could see buses lined up carrying a new shift of the
Air Force personnel being used to keep one terminal open for a handful of
flights despite the strikes.

It was a similarly military atmosphere that prevailed at SoFi, where overflow

crowds estimated at over 140,000 had turned out hours early for Mayor
Garcetti’s rally for peace. Those in attendance were overwhelmingly opposed
to President Trump, but this was not an overtly partisan gathering. Somber
Angelenos filled the stands and field, many carrying photos of loved ones
injured or arrested over the past ten days and nights of disorder. Feldstein
watched from the press section as the former Rhodes scholar walked onstage
side by side with Governor Newsom to muted applause. On the jumbotron,
Garcetti looked gaunter and grayer than he remembered, and the movie star-
handsome governor was missing his usual gigawatt grin.

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After leading a moment of silence for the lives lost during the protests,
Garcetti called on “people of all backgrounds to reject violence … and threats
of violence.” But he did not criticize directly the cops and federal troops who
had injured hundreds of his constituents in the clashes since Michael
Glazer’s shooting, instead thanking them for their “incredible efforts” in
keeping the Los Angeles safe. “I am proud of our city,” he said, “for the way
most of us have expressed our views peacefully… This is a moment for our
shared values to bring us together, and to not let the politics of hatred and
incitement tear us apart.”

Gov. Newsom was more blunt. “President Trump has declared war on the
Constitution,” he said. “He must resign, and he must resign now.” He
condemned Trump for “stirring up so much violence that right now there are
tanks on California streets,” but expressed hope that “we will win, just as we
have been winning.” His signature smile finally flashed when he recounted
the state’s leading role in getting the Section 606 order ruled
unconstitutional and the nation’s communications turned back on. “He tried
to make this country a police state, but we fought and we beat him. California
beat him.” The Democratic firebrand couldn’t help but chuckle as some of the
people on the field started a chant twisting the famous “We stay, he goes”
refrain from Lafayette Square: “He goes, or we go.” Newsom smiled. “No-no-
no-no… We’re not seceding. We’re succeeding.”

As the governor basked in the crowd’s cheers, Feldstein saw the Quitman
story hit his newsfeed. There were photos of cowering deputies and
paramedics tending to a blood-soaked policeman. Another showed a hooded
hostage. And the militia leader was quoted with a bone-chilling vow: “There

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are thousands like us… We will fight to the last bullet for our President.”
Success, whatever Newsom had in mind, felt more distant than ever.

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