A practice they apparently reversed yesterday:
They did - but only for now. The cold, hard reality is that the insurrectionists have real political influence and power, and Toyota is not in a position to appear partisan for extended periods of time. Rep. Steve Scalise predicted that the big donors would be back within a matter of months, and he was absolutely right - and they’ll be back again. This is how our system operates, with transparent corruption.
Oops, sorry about that. I know better. @asahi did a better summing up than I could have, too.
Check her basement!
Nothing to add, but thought everyone would want to join me in this:
Whenever I see this thread title I start singing “American coup / stay away from me…”
It has now morphed into “American coop-de-doop-de-doop / stay away from me-hee-heeeee…”
They’re coming to take me away,
Haha, they’re coming to take me away,
Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha,
To the funny farm
Where Life is Beautiful all the time
And I’ll be happy to see
Those Nice Young Men
In their Clean White Coats
And they’re coming to take me AWAY,
HA HAAAAA
A new book says that during the insurrection, Jim Jordan grabbed Liz Cheney and said, “We need to get the ladies away from the aisle. Let me help you.”
Cheney slapped his hand away and said, “Get away from me. You fucking did this.”
Dang. I’m fixin’ to start liking her. 
You took the words right out of my mouth. Go Liz!
She’s got moxie!
“You’ve got spunk. I hate spunk!”
(First episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was informally preparing to prevent a coup. I wonder just how far Trump actually went. Could it be that he actually suggested to General Milley or other members of the top brass that they should in some way interfere in the transfer of power? I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump might even have actually given such orders.
‘If I Did It’, by Donald John Trump:
CJCS is formally outside of the chain of command.
So if Trump - or any president - decided to use the active-duty military to stage a coup, the Joint Chiefs would not necessarily be in the loop. Orders would go from the president through the defense secretary (Mark Esper or Chris Miller) and on to the commander of NORTHCOM, who as of August 2020 is GEN Glen VanHerck, USAF.
However, the JCS is responsible for policy and planning, and the CJCS as the military’s ranking officer carries a great deal of weight. Milley would have been well within his purview to ask VanHerck (and other combatant commanders - SOUTHCOM and CENTCOM are also both based on the US mainland) to be informed about any suspicious orders they had been issued regarding suppression of “civil disorder” in the US.
If it had happened? The military is firm on the principle of civilian control and the principle of resistance to unlawful orders. If those two principles came into conflict, we would have the mother of all constitutional crises.
Trump is pretty craven at the core, so I suspect he would not have given such an order before “feeling out” SecDef’s position on the issue. Did Trump perhaps hint at it to Esper, Miller or Milley, in a thoroughly deniable way?
If he had, I’m sure he would have gotten pushback from any of them. There are too many ways for a coup to go wrong, and anyone who goes along with it would be considered our greatest traitor-in-office since John B. Floyd, or maybe even Benedict Arnold.
“If I had really wanted to coup, I wouldn’t’ve couped with that guy.”
Unfit to the end.
Well, he’s not wrong – he would have had to pick some Colonel with jumped up ambitions, the right kind of connections, and a Proud Boys decal on his truck.
I’m sure you’re correct about this. What I’m wondering is if such a thing happened and we just haven’t heard about it. It’s something we would probably never find out about, but I can’t help but think that something like this did go on behind the scenes.
Insurrectionist ordered back to jail for violating the terms of his pre-trial release,
Is he the guy who answered questions from journalists shirtless on his stoop?