AN ATTEMPTED COUP

 

This afternoon, I became aware that Donald Trump’s attempt to burn to the ground the democracy he couldn’t dominate had reached a new and ever more incendiary stage. Word was that there were nationwide protests around public buildings by irate die-hard Trump supporters. Even in my own small hometown in Ohio, folks were asking each other on-line what was going on, that “people carrying flags” were circling the county courthouse.

Inciting insurrection

Just after that, I became aware that there were “massive protests” at the Capitol Building in Washington DC. But as I speed-read numerous reports and watched live coverage, I quickly realized that the “protests” were much more than that. The Capitol was under siege. Rioters (not protesters) had clashed with undermanned federal police officers and had not only managed to enter the Capitol by had also made it to the doors of the two chambers and engaged in standoffs with law enforcement. The security of Congress, in other words, had been completely overrun and police had ended up with their backs to the doors of the Senate and House, trying desperately to keep Trumpsters from pushing through. At least one person, a woman, was shot and critically wounded during the standoff and at least six other people, including one police officer, had to be hospitalized.

Inside those chambers, voting to certify the Electoral College results had to be suspended as members of Congress and their staff were forced to shelter in place in the face of a major national security breach. Vice-President Mike Pence eventually ordered the Senate evacuated and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi requested National Guard assistance to clear the Capitol Complex. The entire complex had already been placed on lockdown.

Normally, the president of the United States would have taken national security measures under such grave circumstances and immediately reinforced security with more federal police, the Secret Service, the FBI and/or the National Guard. But in this case the presidency was conspicuous by its absence. Or better said, the occupant of the White House was no longer acting as the president of the United States, but as the leader of a domestic terror organization that had managed to breach national security in his name. That doesn’t mean, however, that he won’t eventually order full-scale security measures, and considering who and what he is—a public official in clear rebellion against the established order—this is further cause for concern about the security of the nation. Some constitutionalists fear that, after inciting insurrection and allowing it to get completely out of control, Trump could then invoke the Insurrection Act and, basically, take over Washington DC using active duty federal troops, and citing the national security breach that he himself has fostered.

Shots fired! Members of Congress shelter in place

Aghast at what he was watching, CNN’s star political anchor, Jake Tapper, correctly said that what we were witnessing was “unprecedented”, that nothing even close to this had happened since the Vietnam War protests, and that those had been peaceful. This was something else. This was, he said, “sedition.”

But he was wrong about that. This was quite clearly insurrection. That is, “a violent uprising against an authority or government.” Sedition had indeed taken place prior to this and was the catalyst that caused it, and the author of that sedition was Donald J. Trump. The insurrectionists had come directly to the Capitol from a Trump rally on the Ellipse, just south of the White House. There, the forty-fifth occupant of the White House addressed the raging hoards of his supporters calling on them to “fight for” him. He encouraged their rage by indicating that they were part of a popular crusade.   

“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical Democrats,” he harangued the crowd. “We will never give up. We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”

The so-called “Save America March” was organized entirely on the basis of Trump’s false claims that he won the election and on his lies regarding “mass voter fraud”, which have been definitively and repeatedly debunked and disproven in more than sixty court cases in favor of Biden. In his rabble-rousing speech, the president-in-rebellion told his hard-core base that elections in “Third World countries” were “more honest” than the one that he lost. “We will not let them silence your voices.” he said.

Seeking to bring populist pressure on the vice-president, whose ceremonial duty under the democratic system is to declare Joe Biden president-elect once congressional certification is completed, Trump told the crowd, “I hope Mike is gonna do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”

Secret Service members, guns drawn in Congress 

That is, of course, utter rubbish, as was his later assertion that “one of the top constitutional lawyers in our country” had informed him that the vice president has “the absolute right” to throw out the election results. Unless Trump considers Rudy “El Loco” Giuliani one of the country’s top constitutional lawyers, no attorney could seriously have told him that, since it is a bare-faced lie. As Mike Pence himself is reported to have told Trump, he has absolutely no legal authority to refuse congressional certification of the president-elect’s clear and proven win.

Trump also lashed out at Georgia Republicans after they lost both senatorial run-offs and, as a result, the Senate passed to Democratic control. The president-in-rebellion called that election process “a setup,” and slammed the current Republican administration in that state as “weak” and “pathetic”.

“We have to primary the hell out of the ones that don’t fight,” Trump raved. “If they do the wrong thing,”—i.e., throw the election—“we should never ever forget (what) they did.”

He also expressed his approval for how his backers had turned out at the airport in Washington to harass Senator Mitt Romney of Utah—sharp critic of the president’s anti-democratic machinations, and the   only member of the GOP who voted in favor of his impeachment conviction—when he flew in for the Electoral College certification vote. “I wonder if he enjoyed his flight in,” Trump scoffed to cheers from his fans.

As if all of his previous inflammatory rhetoric hadn’t been sufficient, it was the president himself who urged his by now enraged supporters—reportedly including elements of the Proud Boys and other violent ad hoc “militias”—to march from there to the Capitol, so as to “give our Republicans the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Long Trump’s “partner in crime” in defying democracy during his last four years as Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell delivered a belatedly impassioned speech against Trump’s effort to overturn the election results, while Trump rioters clashed with law enforcement officers outside the Capitol, before they managed to breach the building’s security and storm inside.

If history is honest, what happened—indeed, what is happening—today and what has happened over the course of the two and a half months since the November presidential election, will be recalled for what it is. Not the whims of an unstable president. Not the ravings of a lunatic who was never fit to serve. Not even one man’s delusional efforts to legally overturn voting results because, narcissist that he was, he simply couldn’t understand how he could possibly have lost.

If honesty and objectivity reign, these incidents will be recorded and remembered as the seditious attempt by a sitting president of the United States to incite insurrection and to stage a populist coup d’état. An attempt that, no matter how unsuccessful it may ultimately be, is treasonous, and has succeeded in disrupting the business of government and in breaching national security in one of the most security-sensitive venues in the entire country.