Tyler Merbler via Wikipedia; Creative Commons license
For the first anniversary of the January 6th coup attempt in Washington, I recreated the day in the lives of six Mainers who were at the Capitol complex that day: Senators Angus King (I) and Susan Collins (R), Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden (Ds); grocery store butcher Kyle Fitzsimmons (in jail and facing 10 count criminal indictment for actions during the attack) and “Putin’s favorite Congressman,” former Orange County, California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who moved to York, Maine after losing his seat in 2018 and attended the 1/6 rally (a story I broke in the Press Herald last June.)
The story – partly researched in D.C. and including fresh takes on the events by King and Pingree – was in today’s Portland Press Herald and can be read online here.
I reported on some of these themes just before the holiday break in this interview story with Senator King for the Maine Sunday Telegram. “The idea that it can’t happen here – that’s just not so, and that’s just what’s worrying me,” King told me. “We have a lot of people who are just not committed to the idea of democracy.”
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.