Trump has described the crowd that was soon to attack the Capitol as “loving.” But we must ask “loving of what?” For I do not think that the epithet “loving” can be applied to this mob-to-be in any ordinary sense.

What’s evident in the increasingly available videos of the Insurrection is whole-hearted hooliganism. Yes, there may have been a few deluded patriots in the crowd, but the vast majority seem to have been hooligans with a temporary cause. As usual, they wanted some uproar, wanted some violence, wanted to show off before one another, wanted to overcome the frustration they endure as across-the-board misfits. So they loved the vandalism, loved to abuse police, loved menacing the members of Congress, loved glorying in their own ignorance, and especially loved the publicity.

They were little different from sports mobs around the world, whether the soccer mobs in Europe or the football and basketball mobs of many a college campus, mobs that are thought-repressing and conscience-numbing, mobs in which what would otherwise sink to the bottom rises to the top. However, sports mobs usually have an occasion for their violence: long-standing or momentary hostility to “the other side,” losing a game, or winning a game. These things may not be the absolute cause of the violence, but they provide the occasion for it.

In the case of the insurrectionist mob, all the preconditions were there in the people assembled: a lot of anger about whatever, an incapacity for independent thinking, a desperate craving to “belong.” So the insurrectionists were pre-disposed to what they were to do. But they needed a cause, an “occasion.” They needed someone to point them towards the target they were ready to attack, and our traitorous President was just the one to do the pointing. It was his peak so far as demagogue and wrecker of law and order. The “loving” mob may have loved Trump, but clearly Trump loved the mob.