Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol

Certain political factions have worked furiously to whitewash what happened on January 6, 2021, when, at the President Trump-inspired attack on the U.S. Capitol, a mob sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and stifle the peaceful transfer of power. In a masterful display of forensic journalism, The New York Times has produced a 40-minute documentary video that meticulously reconstructs that day, the culmination of a six-month investigation and reporting from thousands of cell phone videos, police radio dispatches, news broadcasts and footage, photographs, livestreams, social media postings, and police bodycam footage. The evidence is overwhelming and damning in not only pinpointing what happened that day—exactly where, when, and how the riot unfolded both outside and inside the Capitol—but also showing just how close the political insurrection was to being successful. Footage identifies extremist groups such as QAnon, Oathkeepers, and the Proud Boys as playing a major role in organizing and executing the attempted coup, while sadly revealing a Capitol Hill police force that was woefully unprepared for the violence that would consume them. For producing a historical recreation of fact that should be impossible to deny or ignore about one of the greatest threats to our nation’s democracy, Day of Rage wins a Peabody Award.