After the Coup
The catastrophic failure of trying to 'muddle through' til Trump leaves, and in praise of the Republican officials trying to tell voters the truth.
In the spirit of hoping for better days, I titled a recent post, written before New Year’s Eve with some in my family household recovering from covid, the (civilian) cavalry is coming. Now, two weeks later, in the aftermath of events I could not have imagined, the cavalry--the real cavalry, in the form of 20,000 National Guard troops, has arrived in Washington, D.C., after an attempted coup by pro-Trump extremists.
The unprecedented military deployment comes after thousands of pro-Trump extremists were mobilized and incited by Trump to attack the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the next president of the United States. The Guard troops are among the thousands of law enforcement officials now trying to avert the threat of more violence by pro-Trump extremists ahead of Biden’s Inauguration next week.
Since the election, until last week, it had seemed reasonable to try to keep a sense of perspective on the few remaining weeks before Trump left office; to lament the Trump administration’s pathetic covid vaccine rollout, while over 4,000 Americans a day die from it; to be alarmed at Trump surrounding himself with ever nuttier conspiracy theorists advancing his crazy and false claims that he did not lose the election; all while hoping we could somehow muddle through. That we will avoid terrible calamity between now and when Trump leaves office, and mostly competent, decent, sane people—not perfect, but competent, decent, sane—will be in charge, and the US government agencies that have been systematically decimated under Trump may again start to properly function.
Last week showed, even that was overly optimistic. We can’t count on muddling through. Our agencies under Trump either failed to anticipate, or perhaps looked the other way, at the potential for large-scale violence by supporters of the president. And it becomes apparent, the more information, videos, witness testimony and charging documents that emerge, that it could have become a massacre.
When Congress impeached Trump a second time on Wednesday (Jan. 13), Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Washington state Republican, said it wasn’t just Trump’s incitement of his supporters in a speech before they stormed the Capitol to prevent Pence certifying the election that influenced his decision to vote for impeachment. It was Trump’s refusal to do anything to call the violent mob off once he learned what was underway.
Trump “did not strongly condemn the attack nor did he call in reinforcements when our officers were overwhelmed,” Newhouse said in a statement explaining why he would vote for impeachment.
Conservative South Carolina Republican congressman Tom Rice, in the most surprising of the ten Republican impeachment votes, made a similar case. He said he didn’t know if Trump’s speech to his supporters at the Stop the Steal rally before the storming of the Capitol met the legal definition of incitement, “though any reasonable person could see the potential for violence.” But, Rice continued:
“Once the violence began, when the Capitol was under siege, when the Capitol Police were being beaten and killed, and when the Vice President and the Congress were being locked down, the President was watching and tweeted about the Vice President’s lack of courage…."
"It has been a week since so many were injured, the United States Capitol was ransacked, and six people were killed, including two police officers. Yet, the President has not… offered condolences. [Tuesday] in a press briefing at the border, he said his comments were 'perfectly appropriate.'" …
"This utter failure is inexcusable."
A NPR report Friday said local South Carolina Republican party officials expected several people would jump in to primary Rice next year, in outrage to his impeachment vote. To which Rice responded, if he gets voted out for this, “so be it.”
Russia expert Fiona Hill, who served as an advisor in the Trump National Security Council until 2019, laid out a series of Trump actions, statements/propaganda, personnel and judicial appointments, mostly taken in plain sight, over months, to take control of and test the loyalties of the military and paramilitary forces (“my generals”), communications systems (putting a loyalist donor Louis DeJoy to head the post office, Twitter and cable TV), the judiciary (“my judges” Trump repeatedly said would decide the election for him), government agencies and the Republican party itself, that culminated in “the storming of the Capitol building on January 6….so that [Trump] could retain the presidency,” in what she called an attempted “self-coup”:
Trump purged Cabinet members and career officials who resisted him. He bypassed Congress and installed acting officials in crucial national security positions…He made it crystal clear that personal loyalty was the primary factor for candidate selection. He removed Esper after he lost the election. Attorney General William Barr resigned in the same period…[after refusing to] declare massive election fraud. Trump wanted officials in place in January 2021 who were entirely beholden to him and likely to support his efforts to stay in power…Finally, Trump usurped the Republican Party... He threatened to destroy the careers of Republican members of Congress who did not favor overturning the election result….
The truth is that for the past four years, Trump has been stress testing the U.S. democratic system to see if anyone will rein him in….
The good news for the United States is that Trump’s self-coup failed. The bad news is that his supporters still believe the false narrative, the Big Lie that he won the election….Millions of people still think the election was stolen…and many are prepared to take further action on his behalf.
“As in the case of other coup attempts, the president’s actions have put us on the brink of civil war,” Hill warned. “Trump did not overturn the election results, but, just as he intended, he disrupted the peaceful democratic transition of executive power.”
The way out of such a dangerous situation, Hill wrote, is to tell voters, especially Republican voters, the truth.
“Congressional Republicans…must tell the truth to their constituents about the election and what the president tried to do in January 2021,” she wrote.
On Thursday night, Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, another Washington state Republican representative who voted for impeachment, did just that, posting a series of tweets outlining Pres. Trump’s role in perpetrating the Big Lie that the election had been stolen from him, and his repeated incitement of his supporters to “fight” to prevent that, and the certification of Biden’s election victory.
“The president helped organize the January 6 rally,” Herrera Beutler wrote.
“For months, he insisted the election had been stolen and consistently urged people to ‘fight’ in order to change the results: ‘WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!!’ (Tweet, Dec. 12),” she wrote, citing Trump. “During the president's rally on January 6, he repeated phrases like ‘fight like hell,’ and ‘we're going to have to fight much harder.’"
“Many coming to the rally did intend to fight, with physical violence,” Herrera-Beutler wrote, noting that “Leading up to the rally, specific threats were numerous. Hundreds of TikTok videos promoted violence. Thousands used hashtags promoting a second civil war.”
But, “Rather than take any action to curb the threats, the president at his rally said, ‘When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules,’” Herrera Beutler wrote. “He said ‘You'll never take our country back with weakness.’"
Then she turned to Trump’s particular incitement of the mob against Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump had falsely portrayed to his supporters as having the discretion not to certify Biden’s election victory. Then accusing Pence of betraying him when the mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“While the riot was in full swing & a mob was in the Capitol hunting Mike Pence, the president tweeted: ‘Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts ...... not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify."
She posted a video of the mob at the capitol shouting, hang Mike Pence, after Trump tweeted on Jan. 6 that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
“The commander in chief’s primary job is to protect U.S. citizens,” Herrera Beutler wrote. “While this mob hunted for Pence, who had fled to a secure location, the only action we know the president took was calling GOP Senators, seeking their support to delay the Electoral College certification.”
We, and American democracy, are under threat, maybe for a long time to come. From a coalition of people who have been mobilized and radicalized by Trump’s lies. And the cynical politicians hoping to rise to power courting them, when they can get Trump out of the way.
So let us truly value and praise the brave Republican officials, politicians and lawmakers who are taking real risks—to their own security, to their political careers—to tell people the truth, and try to help pull the country back from further civil unrest and fracture.