Erika Geiss felt a tinge of déjà vu on January 6. She watched in horror and disbelief as thousands of rioters—driven by Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent—scaled the outer walls of the US Capitol and violently forced their way inside the building and into the Senate chambers. But the “ire and vitriol” that Geiss says she saw watching live coverage of the Capitol insurrectionists on TV at her home didn’t surprise her. It was all too familiar. “We saw that here,” says Geiss, a state senator in Michigan representing a district just south of Detroit. “And we saw it mounting and escalating throughout April.”
On April 30, 2020, as Geiss and her colleagues convened for a legislative session in the Michigan Statehouse, a demonstration against the state’s stay-at-home orders took a harrowing turn as the protesters forced their way inside the building. Just as the insurrectionists did on January 6, the Michigan rioters broke through barricades and doors and pushed their way past security personnel until they entered the Senate chamber. Though the Michigan event never turned physically violent against lawmakers, it came quite close as protesters hovered and shouted in the galleries, many wearing bulletproof vests and armed with rifles and AR-15-style assault weapons. In hindsight, the riot at the Michigan Statehouse in April seems like a dress rehearsal for what happened eight months later at the US Capitol.
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