Pro-Trump extremists storm the Capitol building in Washington Wednesday. “It's watching one of those terrible historical moments in real time.” That’s how political historian Julian E. Zelizer, Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, described his reaction to Wednesday’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. But was Zelizer surprised? “At one level, it’s just horrible to watch our democracy be in this place,” he said as the 6 p.m. curfew approached and pro-Trump extremists began to disperse amid a growing police presence. “At another level, it's hard not to see how this is the culmination of what has been happening in the last four years -- in fact in the last four decades,” since the rise of what Zelizer has called the new Republican Party.