For some references of what does and doesn’t constitute a coup. Look up Jeltsin. By your definition there was no coup there either, except there very much was one.
Look up the end of the Ceaușescu; The fall of the Iron curtain, Arab spring, Mao, Lenin: How should a a coup look?
This was 100% a coup.
This sounds a lot like the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Is there a dictionary definition that comes anywhere close to what you claim?
Yes, it was. It certainly wasn’t a very effective or well-planned attempt, and it seems to have been less of an orchestrated plot and more of a bunch of unscrupulous opportunists, both among the rioters and among the political leaders, continuing to push the limits of what they could get away with.
But a disruption of a legitimate election, and an illegitimate seizure of the reins of power, is what Trump was encouraging all along with his “stolen election” bullshit. And plenty of Republicans decided to go along with his bullshit to keep the goodwill of his rabid supporters.
I don’t imagine that Trump had any more serious plans for his refusal to accept the consequences of the election than “avoid looking like a loser” and “stay in the limelight by any means necessary”. I suspect that last Wednesday’s events, to him, were no more portentous than trying to lean on a foreign head of state to discredit a political opponent, or not releasing his tax returns after he got elected as he’d said that he would. It was just another way in which Donald Trump asserts his supremacy by ignoring rules and restrictions, which in his mind are only for “losers”.
But placing one’s own personal self-aggrandizement above all considerations of respect for the law and democracy, and using one’s position of power to demand that law and democracy be ignored, still counts as a coup attempt. Even if the attempter is a shit-for-brains reality-TV ham who doesn’t really know or care what he wrecks as long as he thinks his actions might keep him from looking like a “loser”, and his minions are mostly an addled bunch of bullshit addicts, and his enablers are mostly a greasy bunch of unprincipled grifters.
This shitshow was no Caesar’s march on Rome, that’s for sure. But a coup attempt doesn’t have to be successful, or strategically plotted, or intelligently organized, or led by somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing to qualify as a coup attempt.
Trump very much would like to be a dictator, just like all of the other strongmen he venerates. That he is too stupid to actually make plans, or surround himself with actually competent conspirators does not negate his clear intent which was made explicit in his rejection of an election that virtually every legitimate observer of either party has agreed was a quantitatively fair and open election (including multiple recounts in some states), and then directly ordered Vice President Mike Pence, in his role of President of the Senate, to reject the votes of Electoral College electors that didn’t favor him in contradiction to the Constitution and over 230 years of precedent. He then directed his followers who came to see him speak at the White House to go to the Capitol Building and told them, “We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you will never take back our country with weakness,” which is as close as you can get to saying, “Intimidate senators into not certifying the election for Joe Biden,” as any Mafia don would get to actually giving the order to actually wack someone.
That so many Republican Congresspeople–who are sworn to uphold the Constitution–continued to tacitly and often explicitly concur with the baseless claims of election fraud, indicates that Trump is not alone in wanting to reject democratic norms and enable a coup–an unconstitutional, procedurally illegitimate, and unprecedented interference with an election–to further their cause and appeal to would-be insurrectionists. Even if many, if not all, didn’t actually believe in the claims they were repeating and had no actual expectation of preventing Biden and Harris from being certified as the legitimate president and vice president, they certainly facilitated and aided those who did.
A comically shitty and ill-conceived coup attempt was still an attempted coup, and one in which several people have already died. Trump and his supplicants should be held to account for more than just those five lives, or even his explicit and repeated attempts to violate federal and state election laws and influence duly appointed election officials into falsely rejecting or fabricating votes, but there is no question that he is immediately, explicitly, and directly engaged in inciting violence in furtherance of voiding an election to allow him to remain in office. And for what it is worth, he has spoken before about remaining in office past the Constitutionally-mandated two full four year terms, so unless one still accepts the notional that we should take Trump “seriously but not literally”, he has been advocating for dictatorial power and authority for much longer than the last few days, notwithstanding his attempts to suppress and punish journalists, intimidate leaders of democratic nations (again, if with utter incompetence), and generally acting like a strongman leader in one of those “shithole nations” he so decried a couple of years ago.
Trump is a would-be dictator from a Marx Brothers movie, but he’s still a would-be dictator.
Stranger
Posted elsewhere, but it certainly applies to this thread:
The OP is ridiculous. The orange traitor spent two months trying to overturn a free and fair election in every way possible. Not via military coup, but only because that wasn’t possible. Everything that was possible, he did. For two months he pursued both outlandish legal avenues (the 60+ court cases that he lost) and entirely illegal ones (demanding that the Georgia secretary of state “find” enough votes for him to win, after which he planned a repeat performance with other swing states in a domino effect). Then he encouraged his VP to violate the Constitution and not certify the results of the Electoral College. Then he tried to get Congress to object to the EC results so that the election would be decided by a delegate vote in the House. When it looked like all that was going to fail, he blatantly encouraged an insurrection at the national Capitol.
If that’s not a coup attempt, I don’t know what is. A coup doesn’t necessarily have to play out like it does in the movies, or in literal banana republics that actually have bananas. A coup is anything that seeks to illegitimately overturn democracy so that an autocrat can stay in power.
This. Just perfect.
People wanted to stop the legal process of certifying the next leader, who was democratically elected per the Constitution, and maintain the leadership of a person who had failed the election, thus stealing power through force and instilling a leader they support.
How the hell is that not a coup attempt?
Just because the coup only took the Capitol and members of congress rather than a beer hall, and just because it was directed by a soon to be past country leader rather than a future country leader to be does not mean that it was not a failed coup.
Even if it wasn’t a coup per se (and I side with those who say it was) it was undoubtably a trial-run or feint for a coup. A “testing of the waters” for a coup. It was not a close out celebration as the final step in these idiots’ plans.
Pragmatically, preliminary or tentative steps towards a coup are part of a coup.
Videos of the incident show the first rioters to breach the building immediately shouting “go, go, go” to each other and setting off at a run. They were masked, and carrying blunt weapons and zip ties.
They reached the offices of key elected officials in minutes. These offices are not easy to find and in some cases are unmarked. This would not be possible without planning and inside information.
One of the key organizers of the attack says he got active collaborative assistance from people inside the building, including elected officials among the GOP. That has been denied, but is being investigated.
One Congresswoman indicates she saw certain GOP colleagues, the day before, giving guided tours of the building to small groups of civilians. She said it looked like “reconnaissance” (her word). This bit is not yet solidly confirmed, but it fits the picture.
A lead staffer for another Congresswoman says she returned to their offices to shelter in place, and found that the panic-button panel had been “torn out.” What this means, exactly, still needs to be clarified.
Taken in isolation, any individual point may be dismissed. Taken together, especially if the last three pending items are confirmed, the picture is unmistakable. Something very dark was attempted. There was a clear objective and some degree of coordination. How dark, and how coordinated, has yet to be determined.
Denying this, at this point, is folly.
The rioters wanted to stop the certification of the electoral votes. Which they actually did, for a time. They wanted this because they believed that it would prevent Biden, duly elected, from becoming the President. They idiotically believed that this would ensure Trump, who lost the Presidential election, 4 more years. They used deadly violence to do this.
Call it a coup.
Please stop with the attempts to make what Trump did not so bad, or pretend things aren’t as bad as they are. I get why it happens: it’s a way to manage your own fear and uncertainty. But doing so only helps those who are attacking our country.
This fits all the definitions of a coup attempt. The plan appears to have been to take hostages and try to force them to install Trump. They had bombs, guns, restraints, and so on. They were ready for a battle, no just protestors who were surprised to get in.
It is the fact that they had security take people away that frustrated their plans. One woman was shot and killed when she tried to stop them from doing so.
The coup failed. The insurrectionists and turncoat cops weren’t able to accomplish their main goal, and just accomplished their goal of terrorism. But it was a coup that occupied our Capitol, something that had not happened in the US since the War of 1812.
Sedition, terrorism, coup attempt, insurrection: all are appropriate terms for what these people did.
Certainly suspicious, but I’m guessing that many days that Congress is in session that you’d find people getting private tours. Heck, back in 1980 I got to meet Rudy Boschwitz, MN senator and had a (very) mini tour. The guy I was road-tripping with was the son of a small-town banker and that was all it took for a meeting.
Hear, hear! This is exactly correct and Trump didn’t just do this recently; he was setting the stage and grooming people for this over the last four or five years.
It was absolutely an attempted coup. As others have said, it may have been stupid. It may have had no chance to succeed (in the sense of achieving the goal of installing Trump as a dictator). But, it was still an attempted coup. And you will note, that the DoJ yesterday said that they are looking at the events as sedition. Don’t be surprised if quite a few of them get charged as such.
Quite so.
As has been stated in this thread, Trump has tried all sorts of tactics to stay in power illegally.
Packing the Supreme Court; messing up postal voting; claiming over and over again that the vote was crooked (no actual evidence of course), urging Pence to simply ignore the democratic process etc.
Here in the UK, it is truly staggering to see the President address an armed mob and incite them to march on and break into the Capitol.
They could have done anything from destroying Electoral College results boxes to killing Trump’s opponents.
The frightening thing is that Trump just keeps lying and behaving worse and worse … until nearly half the population believe his lies and each successive disgrace numbs the rest of us until even an atrocity still gets support from Republicans.
Remember when Trump boasted in his election campaign “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters.”?
Now look aback at the stream of disgraceful behaviour since - all designed to keep him in power and profit (the money and the fame is of course why he became President…)
To try to show how bad things have got in America let’s consider the British equivalent.
Now Prime Minister Boris Johnson (our rough equivalent to President) is also an incompetent liar - just nowhere near on the same scale as Trump.
Our seat of power is the Houses of Parliament in London.
Nearby is Speakers’ Corner (in 1872, an act of Parliament set aside this part of Hyde Park for public speaking.)
So let’s assume that in a future UK election, Johnson and his party have been voted out of power. He decides to whip up a mob, march on Parliament and stage a coup.
Here are some suggested responses from the crowd:
Well you get the idea. It is terrible what Trump and his Republicans have done to a great country.
It certainly was an attempted coup. Those who fail to recognize it as such put us at risk for further, better organized attempts.
Those members of Congress had no illusion that their objections during the certification would overturn election results. They were making political theater. But they must be considered complicit in that their actions helped to froth up the Trumpists and helped to incite the insurrection.
So you’ve explained what it’s not; what is it, then?
Good post, as was senorbeef’s.
I’d add, even if it wasn’t a coup, even if this was “just a riot,” it doesn’t have to meet the definition of a coup in order for it to be disastrous for the cause of democracy. Violent unrest, even if it’s poorly organized without any real endgame, is itself fatal to a democratic political system if it isn’t confronted and people aren’t held accountable.
I believe it was an attempted coup – a very piss poorly organized one and thank God for that, but nevertheless, meets the definition of one. It was an attempt by a group of people to stop the constitutionally-sanctioned and lawful transition of power. That is a coup.
But even if you want to parse words and resist calling it one, anyone would have to acknowledge that what happened, if not confronted forcefully, would eventually lead to the type of coup that everyone would recognize.