Last week was a frightening one, with what should have been a dull formality — a joint session of congress counting each state’s Electoral College vote and officially naming Joe Biden the 46th president — was interrupted by a whipped-up crowd of Trump supporters. Their siege on the Capitol ended with five dead but their objectives went unrealized. The FBI are currently rounding up the people who took part, many of whom actually broadcasted their crimes on social media. And just to show that we’re at the part where we can start therapeutically laughing about this, even just a little, someone went and made a supercut of the arrests set to “Layla” from Goodfellas.
https://twitter.com/BL0NDAMBITION/status/1348415203092951043
Of course, Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic has many great scenes and sequences, and one of the most iconic is the one that arrives towards the end of the second act. It comes after the famed (and entirely off-screen) Lufthansa heist, when a paranoid Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway has many of its participants whacked. Scorsese cranks up the ending to the original Derek and the Dominoes version of “Layla,” which plays as each body is discovered by police.
So you get to see failed MAGA rioters arrested on planes, in airports, at their West Virginia homes. And as each Trumpist is taken away by police, sometimes to the cheers of the public, you hear that plaintive piano, building to a bittersweet conclusion. Of course, the main crook — the one who advertised the gathering on Twitter, the leader who stirred them into action with baseless claims of voter fraud — is still at large.
You can watch the Goodfellas version below.