Scenario: A hundred or so congresspeople are captured and held hostage. Federal interference keeps the National Guard from showing up; by the time they show up, there are mass casualties. This is entirely plausible.
By the time the terrorists are vanquished, the massacre of legislators is the only news. Trump declares martial law, “until we can sort out what happened.” National guard under his explicit control occupies DC.
For one reason or another, the certification of the votes is delayed. This could be Pence’s directive; it could be McConnell’s; it could be Trump’s. After all, too many legislators were killed, and a vote held now would have too many empty seats. As soon as states appoint replacements for the dead, it’ll be rescheduled.
Martial law continues. The president declares a national emergency. Under this emergency, if any media company attempts to ban the president, the president attempts to nationalize the company under emergency powers. One such power could be “Procedural and substantive limitations in statute granting the President broad authority to create, maintain, protect, expand, or restore domestic industrial base capabilities that are essential for the national defense may be waived”. It’d be legally shaky, but the judiciary is pretty subservient to the executive branch.
Republican state governors delay, or send Republican replacements for Democratic representatives and senators.
False conspiracy theories blaming antifa continue to be pushed via the media.
Trump is itching to declare martial law. He’s already used completely bogus emergency powers to fund his stupid wall. It’s entirely plausible that he’d use a travesty to push the military toward taking control and toward delaying certification of the vote and therefore Biden’s inauguration.
I don’t think the coup would ultimately have succeeded, but it could have been very bloody and could have led to civil war.
But this makes no sense. If the coup succeeded, I’d say all pro-democracy military across the nation should organize and mobilize, and we’d be looking at civil war if that’s what it took to restore the rightful government. You may be right that people would not have the stomach for this, but I don’t see how the fact they are not doing it when it’s not warranted is evidence either way. We should surely be concerned with what appropriate action is not being taken, fighting against what complacency we can see.
This. If Trump’s coup was successful the only proper response would be a civil war to restore democracy, horrible as that may be. No point doing that NOW.
Still could. Don’t know that we are out of the woods yet.
BTW, other than that stipulation, 100% agree with your post.
I certainly don’t
I’m somewhat overweight and in my 40’s, and only a middling shot the last time I was at the range, about 5 years ago.
Even if I took up arms, I don’t know where I would go with them, who I would point them at.
I also have a business and responsibilities and bills to pay.
We get into end of civilization scenarios, then sure, I’ll do what I must, but to be quite honest, most of us aren’t going to be doing anything about it if there were a successful coup.
Ahh, you people are scaring me. I take back what I said about this all being magical thinking. Yes, it might have been possible to throw the government into such disarray that things get delayed, finally ending up in Trump being declared the winner, and the supreme court upholding it.
I think this is one of the key things though. Trump and his supporters needed to get the loyal military officers and police lined up before any of this went down. Any commanders, regardless of their loyalty, would move in to put down the uprising at the capitol and rescue any remaining hostages if order to do so by Trump. But if the commanders and troops (military or civilian police) weren’t loyal to Trump, they might not be willing to go too much farther than that.
Would they be willing to use force to prevent Biden from taking office on the 20th? Whose orders would they follow if Biden, from his government in exile ordered them to stand down? Or to escort him into the Whitehouse?
It’s one thing for the police or military to follow the commander-in-chiefs orders to put down internal unrest, but it’s quite another to follow those orders when the commander-in-chief is the one that instigated the unrest. How would Trump’s followers feel if they got shot at by troops under his command?
The other more likely choice is that the military or police go in and take over, keeping the hostages, and welcoming the rioters as heroes. Are there enough commanders in the military willing to follow in that path? Sure, there is the story about the anti-American Democrats trying to steal the election, but buying the story requires unwavering loyalty to Trump.
I fear you’re right. But I think in any case the professional military ultimately determine the outcome if this spirals out of control. If they hold the line, or if the great majority do, we’ll ultimately come through it. If they don’t, there’s little we can do, other than individual states demanding to secede.
Here’s what I hear/see all the time from the right… “The left are the real intolerant ones. Anyone they don’t like, they call racist, or homophobic, or transphobic…”
I still think, if not for legal reasons, at least to convince the majority of the American people of something this serious you’d have to show plans of some sort. Yeah know, beyond photo ops of your feet up on Nancy’s desk.
I am guessing that is what the ‘recon’ stuff is all about.
It really seems like there were plans, but they were predicated on reaching the reps and senators before they got away. When that happened, the plans fell apart.
The plans weren’t twelve-dimensional chess. The plans were to blow up the chessboard. Trump sucks at governing, but he’s really good at surfing chaos.
I don’t think he’d put it that way, even in his own head. But turn it around. Can you imagine Trump saying, “This is something I really want to do, but no, I won’t sacrifice another human being to get it, that’d be wrong”?
