January 6: America's 'feast of the goat'?

Rafael Trujillo is the central figure in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel

When reports from the January 6 committee’s latest hearing came in, it told us nothing we didn’t know, but evoked an image that reminded me of Rafael Trujillo in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel ‘The Feast of the Goat’. Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years and that period, centred around a fearsome personality cult, is thought to be one of the bloodiest regimes in the Americas.

So, to the hearing in Washington, DC. It documented Donald Trump sitting in a small dining room off the Oval Office for 187 minutes, watching the US Capitol under attack by “my people”. Unmoved by the violence playing out on television, worldwide, the man who swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, stayed before the small flickering screen, never reaching out to heads of law enforcement or national security to end the attack. In effect, he served as the chief inspiration, chief fomenter, the …