Trump sent a mob to the Capitol.
Some people call it a failed coup d'état. It is the violent overthrow of the government. It is treason.
After all, he gathered a crowd, egged them on, and sent them to demand he be kept in office. One policeman has died, property was damaged, they set fires, they left explosive devices. The business of an orderly transition of power was interrupted on purpose. That sounds sort of like a coup.
Something big happened. Just what was it?
Herbert Rothschild writes today that it ought to be understood not as a coup d'état but as a threat, a heavy-handed attempt at intimidation. Trump was being a bully. As this blog described yesterday, Trump and his sons were making political threats against Republicans, and the events on January 6 were a culmination of those threats. Persuasion came to push comes to shove. The shove part was sending people there to disrupt Congress and put the fear of God into them.
The more ugly, loud, rowdy, militant, and potentially armed the crowd was, the better. They did not represent debate. Debate failed. Lawsuits failed. He had failed to get Republicans to manufacture votes for him or discard votes cast against him. It was down to this: blunt force disruption. The threat was that these people--and millions more like them--represent the future for Republican officeholders. Angry mobs will disrupt their Town Hall events, march in front of their offices, make their lives miserable, and defeat them in their next primary elections if they don't come through for Trump. They were the advance guard of Trump's army.
Herbert Rothschild grew up in Louisiana, was educated at Yale and Harvard, and is now a retired professor and lifelong activist for civil rights and peace. He lives in
Southern Oregon.
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| Herbert Rothschild |
Guest Post by Herbert Rothschild
People speak of the invasion of the Capitol by several thousand unarmed people as a coup attempt. But if a coup means an effort to seize (or in Trump's case) hold onto the levers of power, there's no evidence that he laid such plans. If one wishes to preempt rule by law, one must control executive and communications centers--e.g. military installations, TV stations. The people he unleashed had no idea of where such levers were to be found. Apparently a few of them thought they were in Nancy Pelosi's desk.
Far from formulating a coup, here's what I think took place in Trump's mind: He believed (with considerable evidence) that the Republican Party is his party and that it will remain his party long after he leaves office. So he was sure that he could control the Republican Members of Congress, that he need only crack his whip and they would jump for fear of his "primarying" them. But when most of them didn't jump, it seems to have shocked and outraged him. So his overriding (if not single) reason for unleashing the attack was to instill fear into them and bring them to heel.
Well, he did scare them and other Members and a sizable number of Americans, including his own staff, but no additional people were brought to heel. Besides fright, there was shock, and those feelings will quickly morph into anger. There is no upside for Trump. He has ruined himself.
I won't pretend that I thought he would go so far. We've known that he is extraordinarily egotistical and contemptuous of any rules of conduct. But I've used the "maniac" in "megalomaniac" to characterize, not diagnose him. Perhaps I should have given more weight to his going so far as to appoint a commission after his 2016 victory to discover why the election returns showed (wrongly, he was sure) that he trailed Clinton in the popular vote. A person focused on power wouldn't have cared. His party controlled both chambers of Congress as well. His being troubled by an operationally total but image-related partial electoral victory came back to me yesterday with new force.
If we define madness as living in a reality that no one else shares, then we cannot yet declare Trump mad. He still has the ability to get large numbers of people to share--and thus confirm--his certainties. But that is only one definition of madness, because while social reality may be largely a matter of consensus, reality transcends and ultimately judges social reality. Hitler and his legion of adherents experienced that judgment. The Reich that was to have lasted 1,000 years lasted 13. I predict that Trump's sway will end more quickly than that. What isn't clear to me is the future of the Republican Party, which now must cope with his demise.
4 comments:
Words have power. Coup or insurrection armed mob are all words that have been thrown around. I feel the attempt to modify the words used to describe what happened are an attempt to minimize, distract and confuse the interpretation of the events on that day. Totally unacceptable. Members of paramilitary groups were embedded within the throng of Trump supporters intent on preventing the recently elected slate to assume their place as the next President and Vice President. Pure and simple the actions of the day were clearly an attempted coup and as such treason. The full meaning of what happened is truly hateful and an attack on America more so than the bombardment of Fort Sumter was in the leadoff to the Civil War. The forces arrayed against the Biden/Harris transition want to take us back to those horrible days. Lies,, misinformation and distraction are the tools of the propagandist. Please don’t soft pedal the seriousness of what occurred. These are now darker times as a result.
Well said and to the point. It looks like some Republicans are finally abandoning Trump, but only to usurp the power. They are now a snake pit fighting for who will take over.
A recent poll found that 45% of Republicans approve of the attack on the Capital. This is not a surprise given the decades long assault on Democracy the Republican party has waged with lies, propaganda and the fraudulent "conservatism" dogma that has brought us a nationalist authoritarian demagogue who has incited violence in order to overturn an election that, thankfully, he lost.
Democrats need a 50 state effort to replicate Georgia and rally Americans to stand vigilant so we won't descend into chaos again. We have two years.
America is often touted as the "land of the free," not the land where if you don't like the results of an election you form a mob and through rioting and coercion reverse the result in your favor. For the first time in his entire woeful presidency this misogynic, bigoted liar performed a useful task. He utterly exposed his contempt for the democratic process, and like the spoiled child he is, preferred to incite a mob of equal ignorance to do his bidding by intimidating our elected representatives into invalidating the results of a presidential election. To their eternal discredit, (stupidity?) during the past four years Republicans seemed incapable recognizing that Donald Trump is unstable and if not for inherited millions (over 23 that we are aware of) would probably be in a mental institution where he rightfully belongs. To those who understood the danger this egocentric jerk represented his actions in fomenting this attack on Congress were not surprising. If there is any justice in this world,(Ha-ha) Donald Trump will be held directly responsible for the attack/riot and write his lying presidential memoirs from a jail house where he rightfully belongs.
Bob Warren
Why was the US Capitol so poorly defended that a mob could invade it and take it over for a while? I heard the answer on a podcast called "The Daily," published by the New York Times this morning.
It seems that the DC city government was displeased with how violent BLM riots were handled by federal authorities this past summer. They put policies in place to keep federal enforcers out of the situation so that future riots could be handled more gently. These policies were in place this past Wednesday, and as a result, the forces available to defend the Capitol were too small, too ill-equipped, and too gentle to handle the situation.
Meanwhile, the liberal mainstream media were having a field day using words like "riot" and "insurrection." While I don't think their use of those words was inappropriate, it was a huge contrast with how they refused to use words like that about the BLM riots last summer.
When left-wing thugs chased the police away and took over six blocks of Seattle for a couple of weeks, I didn't see a single use of the word "insurrection." And the Associated Press famously admonished journalists to use the word "unrest" instead of "riot" when BLM protesters looted, trashed, and burned businesses, or as in Portland attempted to vandalize and burn down the federal courthouse. "Unrest is a vaguer, milder and less emotional term for a condition of angry discontent and protest verging on revolt," they said.
The Babylon Bee had a very funny article this morning about how the "Stop The Steal" rioters were too stupid to pick a Target store for their riot instead of the Capitol. They didn't snag even a single big-screen TV for their efforts.
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