Bottles of water, clothing, Trump flags and even a U.S. flag scattered on the ground inside the U.S. Capitol after a crowd supporting President Donald Trump looted the building.
New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim walked through the fray shortly after voting to certify Joe Biden’s victory over Trump – and felt the weight of the day on him – when something motivated him to clean up the waste.
“It simply came to my notice then. I felt this kind of intensified, overloaded patriotism that I just felt assumed, ”he said in an interview.
That’s when he noticed that police officers were putting pizza boxes in the garbage bags, so he also ordered one and started cleaning.
“When you see something that you think is broken, you want to fix it. I love the Capitol. I’m honored to be there, ”he said.“ This building is extraordinary and the roundabout in particular is just awesome. How many generations have been inspired by this room?
“It broke my heart and I felt compelled to do something. … What else could I do? ”
The image of Kim crouched down cleaning the trash and took away a violent historic day that saw an angry crowd break police lines, break windows and open doors as they besiege the building, shortly after Trump said in a rally they were to show “strength” ”and fight Congress for certification of Biden’s victory.
Kim, a second-term Democrat from a district that Trump won twice, did not seek publicity, according to a colleague who reached out to him and did not recognize him at first.
“I think it was 1 in the morning,” said Tom Malinowski, a Democratic representative from New Jersey. “There were a couple of national guards and I noticed that someone from their hands and knees was leaning under a bench to pick up something and it was Andy all by himself, who was taking out the rubbish and putting it in a plastic bag. Of course he didn’t do it for an audience.
“It was for me the most poignant moment of the long night.”
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said Kim “represents the best of New Jersey and our nation.”
Tom MacArthur, the former New Jersey Republican Party representative whom Kim won in a narrow race in 2018, was encouraged by his successor’s action. It was MacArthur who had helped maintain the Republican Party’s effort to repeal the Accessible Assistance Act through the House and who was on the side of Trump and others in the White House to celebrate it, though that the effort failed. Kim defended in part the popularity of the signing of Barack Obama’s health care law.
Kim represents the 3rd district, which stretches from the suburbs of Philadelphia along the Delaware River in the west, through the pine barrels of New Jersey to Ocean County.
He began his campaign in 2017, returning to live in the southern city of New Jersey where he grew up after a career in Washington and abroad.
A graduate of the University of Chicago and Rhodes Scholar, Kim served from 2013 to 2015 as director in Iraq of the Obama administration’s National Security Council.
Prior to that, he was the director of Iraq at the Pentagon in the defense secretariat. He previously also served as a civilian adviser to Generals David Petraeus and John Allen in Afghanistan.
The son of Korean immigrant parents, he became the first Asian American to represent New Jersey in Congress after being elected in 2018.
On Thursday, he reflected on how he, a person of color, was cleaning up after people waving white supremacist symbols like the Confederate flag during melee. He said he had not considered the race at the time.
But he thought for a moment and added, “It’s so hard because we don’t look at ourselves and see ourselves as Americans first, whether it’s race, ethnicity or religion or political party that bothers us. to have that shared identity that our country forged and that is necessary to be able to continue “.