Tyler Evans really has to go.
Having marched down Pennsylvania Avenue all the way from the White House to the U.S. Capitol, Evans is brimming with pride and a full bladder. But there’s trouble ahead: There’s no head.
It’s January 6th, and the Capitol staff has rudely neglected to station portable toilets for the convenience of the rioters who are threatening to kill people. From this, Evans surmises that the District of Columbia must want visitors to urinate and defecate in the streets. And so, he says in a video he posted to Facebook hours later, he relieved himself in public on the Capitol grounds.
As reprehensible and juvenile as that act is, it only hints at why Evans should resign from being the mayor of Thomasboro. His video is a celebration of the mob launched by President Trump to attack Congress, halt its confirmation of a new president and rip the heart from American democracy. Evans is defiantly unaware of it, but that’s insurrection. That’s sedition. And yes, it’s treason.
Before Senators, Representatives, staff, and Vice President Pence had to flee for their lives, they had been carrying out their constitutional duty to count the electoral votes, confirming President-elect Biden had won.
Evans says he saw no violence at the Capitol, that the media simply fabricated what America saw through hundreds of eyewitness lenses, many controlled by people like himself. Somehow, from his vantage point on the Capitol steps, inside the zone of trespass, Evans missed the melee as the crowd punched, pulled, and kicked its way through manned barricades to the doorways where tear gas began billowing out. He missed the Capitol Police officer being dragged by his gas mask through a doorway and down the steps, to be struck over and over by a pole from which hung the American flag. He missed the more than 50 other cops being injured, and the officer who died after the mob smashed him with a fire extinguisher.
There was more that Evans says he missed: The sacking of the Capitol, the theft of documents and artifacts, the parading of Confederate flags and Nazi swastikas through the halls of democracy. China, on the other hand, saw it and wasted no time using the footage to excuse its human rights abuses.
Perhaps Evans also missed the more than 60 court decisions that found no basis for the President’s false claims that the election had been stolen. He might have missed that all 50 states certified their election results, that Georgia counted the votes three times, that all of Trump’s conspiracy theories have been crushed by facts and his arm-twisting of officials rebuffed.
But I’m being overly generous. Evans surely knew that Trump was a liar; that he lied about Mexico paying for a wall; lied about the coronavirus going away by Easter, then by autumn, then by November 4th. Over 25,000 lies counted and recorded.
Evans had to know there is nothing in the Constitution that gives a violent mob the power to decide an election, nothing that gives a president the right to incite a mob and aim it like so many human missiles at a co-equal branch of government.
Tyler Evans is a young man, but a grown one. He became mayor through the same democratic process that on a national scale raised up Trump, and now Biden, to the White House. He has now betrayed that democratic process and the people who elected him.
He claims he saw no violence as the government of the United States, however briefly, fell before his eyes, on the hallowed ground where he urinated to emphasize his disrespect.
Tyler Evans is unfit to hold elective office. He has to go.
Chris Powers is a retired journalist who covered federal, state and local government, among other topics, for three decades.