This is a moment of shame and grief.

If we are not very careful, it will also be a terrible moment of opportunity for President Donald Trump. The violence Trump incited could be his pretext for further abuses of presidential power.

As so often with Trump, he has indicated the plan in advance: Use the Insurrection Act to somehow interfere with the transition of power. He could try it this very day.

In institutional self-defense, Trump must be impeached again and this time removed. That needs to happen immediately, before he can declare martial law, so that Vice President Mike Pence can oversee the constitutional transition of power, the first time since the Civil War that such a transition can no longer be described as “peaceful.”

The images keep flashing back to me. Jake Angeli, clad in horns, a pelt, and face paint, flexing on the dais of the Senate. America’s leaders, wearing both medical masks and gas masks—the one a barrier against the coronavirus, the other against another kind of threat. The bust of Zachary Taylor, his marble face apparently smeared with blood. Images like those were part of the point of yesterday’s attack; they will serve as recruiting tools for bigots and as indelible stains on America’s history. And they will very likely lodge themselves, impressionistically, permanently—horns, flags, masks, smoke, fists, marble, blood—in Americans’ memory of January 6, 2021. In a coup attempt, first you take the television.

We have promoted democracy in our movies and books. We speak of democracy in our speeches and lectures. We even sing about democracy, from sea to shining sea, in our national songs. We have entire government bureaus devoted to thinking about how we can help other countries become and remain democratic. We fund institutions that do the same.

And yet by far the most important weapon that the United States of America has ever wielded—in defense of democracy, in defense of political liberty, in defense of universal rights, in defense of the rule of law—was the power of example. In the end, it wasn’t our words, our songs, our diplomacy, or even our money or our military power that mattered. It was rather the things we had achieved: the two and a half centuries of peaceful transitions of power, the slow but massive expansion of the franchise, and the long, seemingly solid traditions of civilized debate.

The scene that unfolded at the U.S. Capitol yesterday—an insurrection in all of its ugliness, all of its violence, and all of its kaleidoscopic horror—is the responsibility of Donald Trump. But it doesn’t stop there.

It is also the responsibility of countless of his aides and supporters, those in right-wing media and Trump’s evangelical backers, “intellectuals” and pseudo-historians, Republicans in Congress and outside it, all of those who have stood with Trump at every moment in his corrupt and corrupting presidency. It is the responsibility of Trump allies who attacked those who warned that Trump was malicious and malignant; who said that he was an institutional arsonist who would do grave damage to the nation; who warned about his race-baiting, his constant provocations, the psychic delight he took in dividing Americans and stoking grievances; and who raised concerns because Trump’s sociopathic tendencies might lead him, and those who followed him, to very dark places.

Updated at 6:48 a.m. ET on January 7, 2021.

The U.S. government is relatively coup-proof because, like the president who heads its executive branch, it is bloated and sluggish, and due to its sheer inertia, resistant to being jostled far out of position. That does not stop some from occasionally trying—and yesterday a crowd of deranged seditionists, encouraged by specific Republican officials, took a hard run at the government and tried to knock it down. It did not fall, and today the sun rose. Let’s see what we’ve learned.

(1) The president is still a coward. Donald Trump’s attempt on Saturday to hector Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into committing election fraud, released by The Washington Post, revealed that he believed every conspiracy theory about the election and—like some kind of idiot savant—had mastered even small details without developing any higher mental function. He really believes that dark forces have stolen his victory, and when he incites his followers to behave accordingly, he asks them to supply courage where his own is lacking. This limitation was always going to stop him from waging a civil war. A man who has spent his life avoiding situations that would demand physical courage, and despising those who have it, will be at his most cowardly in a moment like this.

Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different. Maybe someone already has.

This has been a leitmotif of the Trump administration: Donald Trump does something outrageous and inappropriate, maybe even illegal. Immediately, there are horrified reactions from across the political spectrum, but pretty quickly, the anger fades. Republican officials test the political winds and decide to keep their heads down. Maybe they even say that what Trump did was just fine. Democratic officials rage but shrug and say there’s just not much they can do.

Don’t let the events of January 6 get memory-holed or excused in the same way. The health of the republic depends both on what swift consequences come—for Trump and for others—and also on how people remember the participants’ actions later on.

Insurrection Day, 12:40 p.m.: A group of about 80 lumpen Trumpists were gathered outside the Commerce Department, near the White House. They organized themselves in a large circle, and stared at a boombox rigged to a megaphone. Their leader and, for some, savior—a number of them would profess to me their belief that the 45th president is an agent of God and his son, Jesus Christ—was rehearsing his pitiful list of grievances, and also fomenting a rebellion against, among others, the klatch of treacherous Republicans who had aligned themselves with the Constitution and against him.

“A year from now we’re gonna start working on Congress,” Trump said through the boombox. “We gotta get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world. We gotta get rid of them.”

The Ellipse was a deep sea of delusion. Thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters drove or bused or flew from all corners of the United States to meet here, in the treeless space beside the White House, in their quest to overturn the results of the 2020 election with the help of congressional Republicans. “As I live and die, we will never give up until we have a fair-and-square election!” a small child in a rainbow hat yelled into a megaphone.

But the morning’s fevered theorizing about election fraud and “Stop the steal!” chants, which at first felt more pitiful than threatening, gave way to violence by the afternoon. The mob stormed the Capitol, chased police officers up the marble steps, and forced the evacuation of the vice president as hundreds of lawmakers and congressional staff huddled under desks and reached for gas masks. It was a grave moment for American democracy, and a clarifying one as well: Today was one of the few times that Trump’s most extreme supporters actually encountered the Republican lawmakers who have stoked their anger and encouraged their delusions for years.

The vaccine rollout is not going as planned. Since mid-December, the U.S. has distributed 21.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines; less than one-third have actually made it into people’s arms. The problems have been many and varied: holiday delays, scheduling scams, long lines in some places, and not enough demand in others. These initial kinks are getting worked out, but that alone will not get us back to normal anytime soon. The next phase of the vaccine campaign—reaching tens of millions of elderly people and essential workers, along with the rest of the community—will be even harder.

The initial vaccine rollout is simpler than the phases to come because it targets hospitals and long-term-care facilities, where the relatively small number of eligible people are already concentrated. Finding and scheduling them should be straightforward. “This is the easy part,” says Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Finding and scheduling people in the next priority groups will bring a new tangle of logistics, for which the country is still not prepared.

The Capitol building of the United States was breached yesterday by a mob seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election at a sitting president’s behest. Waving Trump banners and Confederate flags, it forced the evacuation of the building and temporarily delayed the timely ceremonial counting of the electoral votes.

The immediate catalyst for the assault on the Capitol was the president himself. After addressing thousands of his supporters who had come to protest the results of the election, Donald Trump called his defeat an “egregious assault on our democracy,” urging the crowd to “walk down to the Capitol. We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and -women, and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you will never take back our country with weakness.”