Some among America's military allies believe Trump deliberately attempted a coup
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
coup
/ko͞o/
noun
1. a sudden, violent, and illegal
seizure of power from a government.
The part I’m not understanding is where was the attempt to seize power?
The people who came in armed and with zip-tie flex cuffs, what were they attempting to do?
A sloppy mob sacked the U.S. capitol, and occupied it for a few hours.
If this exact same thing happened to the White House, would you call it a coup attempt?
Do you remember last month's attempted kidnapping of the Michigan governor that was foiled? Are you aware their backup plan, if they couldn't find the governor, was to lock themselves in with the legislature and start executing them? That's certainly violent, and the legislators are certainly where power is held in a democracy. Executing them would definitely be the violent overthrow of that government, quite a lot more so than the executive. Not least in terms of numbers, the greater difficult of replacing them, in contrast the straightforward presidential succession process.
You knew that the Vice President was with the legislators in the capitol when this transpired, as was the Speaker of the House. Right? The #2 and #3 in the order of presidential succession?
In my opinion, your position looks timid, lacks imagination and awareness. Perhaps you're not American and have no attachment or pride in the the U.S. capitol being sacked by a sloppy mob that included white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Trump flag waiving cultists and Confederate battle flag waiving losers.
Does their incompetency make it less serious of a problem? You really have no imagination at all for how very differently things might look had it been more sophisticated?
If they interview people from that group and an actual plan emerges beyond mess up the Capitol building and steal shit I'll eat crow.
Threatening various state authorities to undo it, including constant ridicule and lies directed at Georgia and Pennsylvania officials what they should do and could do is part of this plan. That is not ethical, moral, or legal. Yet he did do that, we have audio of it. And it is a crime against democracy.
And then the big lie that Congress could change this on January 6th. Trump told this lie, over 100 Republicans in the Congress spread this lie.
And then on Wednesday, winding up his supporters at a rally at The Ellipse, telling them more lies about a stolen, fraudulent election, telling them they can't allow it to happen and should fight fight fight. And also proposed that Mike Pence could unilaterally just declare Trump the winner. We have video, audio, and transcripts of that actual plan and effort.
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-sav...
Had this coup attempt worked? Trump absolutely would have taken it. He would accept a second term on this basis and he would have bragged about it. You know he would. I know he would. And I know that you know that he would. Because that's what he does, it's what he has always done.
Had the Republicans in Congress had the majority, would they have gone through this anti-democratic charade? Set aside legally certified results from the states? This is a national security story. You don't like it. I don't like it. You are being timid about it, and I can understand that. And this is why I totally understand your cowardice, I get it, let me put a fine line on it.
This country is founded on violence. It is founded on two revolutionary wars. The first is the war of independence, and it is unquestionably about representation, and self-determination to establish self rule via elections. It was bloody. Far bloodier was the American Civil War. Lincoln won an election, the minority losers did not like that he won and asserted the right to break up the union. Lincoln said no, they must accept their loss or democracy is ruined. We fought a war, in effect, to force the losers to accept the result of an election. We murdered each other over an election.
And that was not the end of it. And it is relevant today. Reconstruction was ended in 1877 with the Hayes Tilden Compromise. That resulted in the Jim Crow era. It resulted in lynchings. These murders, morally worse than the Civil War because it forced freed Blacks to disproportionate shoulder the sins of this society. Yet again. Now, you tell me what kind of person says we need to use the Hayes Tilden Compromise as a model to to resolve the 2020 election question, which is not a question. Questioning its veracity is a lie. What do you think the end game is? Just making money? You hope that's all it is about is stealing money from racist fools with too much money. But what kind of person is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, for proposing this specific solution?
You might think this is mere politics. I think it is language that asks for violence, it begs for people to give up on a peaceful civil approach to resolving disputes and just revert to murdering each other. It is not that I have an imagination for it, I am all too well schooled on the history of humanity and especially the United States, and the actual murders that have happened as a result of election disputes, over self-determination disputes.
Had these people succeeded, Trump would have gladly accepted the win. He has made it clear over the past two months he will accept the most craven bullshit reasons to claim he has won, including claiming he has won by a landslide when he plainly has not.
This is an incendiary blood lie, to falsely claim that elections are stolen when they are not. The entire intent is to commit a fraud followed by another. And it is a crime against democracy. Had it succeeded, it would have had not one tiny bit of legitimacy, even by Trump's own supporters. They, like him, simply would have accepted the win anyway.
And we would absolutely murder each other for that. We would. There's ample evidence of it. I do not want to find out. But I know it to be true.
Trump's white nationalist, white supremacist supporters are appalled at being shot at by police this week. Only BLM rally goers are supposed to be shot at by police! White people should not have to comply with the police on demand! Black people should!
White nationalism must be made to submit to equality, to truth, and to democracy. If they do not do it peacefully, the foundation of this country demands that it will be done with murder. That is America's past, present, and future. There is no escape. It must be confronted and people are going to have to stop being cowards about the rampant white supremacy of this presidency. It started that way on the racist lie of birtherism which Republicans, overwhelmingly, profited from. And it's now ending on a series of lies that know no bounds that are at their core both white nationalist and anti-democratic, one in the same thing because they know when all legal votes are counted they lose.
I understand you don't want to call it a coup attempt. But that's what it is.
https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/us-capitol-police-officer-dies...
But this did involve the storming of a legislature in session in a obvious attempt to thwart the proceedings in a power grab. It was poorly organized but seemed premeditated on the part of many participants.
I mean, that's a coup attempt. There's no need to look for another term. It was an incompetent coup attempt, sure, but the term still applies.
The more technical term for the kind of coup attempted (an extension of power beyond the legitimate term or scope by or on behalf of the current leader, is “auto-coup” or “self-coup”.)
If you can't tell this is a coup, then it might be your first -- the punchline from: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/trumps-far...
Riots are sudden, violent and illegal. This was a riot organized to specifically stop the transfer of power. Only the characteristic "sudden" is doubtful; this coup was organized in the open, without the usual element of surprise.
How? This is the part I'm missing. Yes it got stalled for a few hours while everything was going down, but after folks got their selfies and pilfered swag it was done. I'm not sure this motely crew really anticipated squaring off against the US Secret Service and National Guard to indefinitely suppress the transfer of power.
There were organized elements in the group. The event was organized on Parler, and other sites, a week in advance. They were goaded and led by the president, his family, and loyal senators. Their aim was political, to retain power using violent undemocratic means for their leaders. They had weapons and bombs. They had enough planning to position caches of weapons and ammunition. They weren’t there to protest some new agricultural rule and just got out of hand. It was a coup attempt by any definition. It is only because it happened in America people are having trouble with that. There’d be no such trouble if this happened in Mali, or Niger, or Chad, or Albania, or any European country.
By intimidation, at a minimum, and potentially (though this wasn't acheived) by (potentially selective) destruction of the electoral vote certificates and violence against the persons of legislators (including the Vice President, who some involved have pointed to as a specific target.)
> Yes it got stalled for a few hours while everything was going down, but after folks got their selfies and pilfered swag it was done.
That's because, despite being too overwhelmed to prevent the Capitol from being taken, the security forces at the Capitol were able to execute an effective delaying and evacuation effort, getting the legislators and electoral votes to safety.
> Yes it got stalled for a few hours while everything was going down, but after folks got their selfies and pilfered swag it was done.
It wasn't “done”, as many of the insurrectionists explicitly stated the intent to return and continue violence until and unless their goals are met.
Imagine the legislators didn't escape - that a majority of them were killed. Trump and his people use this as an excuse to illegally "send the vote back to the states." Kelli Ward suggested this while the mob was in the capitol. We were not far from that scenario.
Less bloodily, imagine the boxes of electoral vote certificates didn't escape in the hasty evacuation, and the certificates from th contested states were selectively destroyed, so that when the session was able to resume and the certificates were counted, they weren't present. (Remember that a recent public scheme to overturn the results was a campaign to simply have Pence not open the certificates from the states whose votes Trump disputes toe exclude them from the count.)
So that heavily implies that whatever their methods, the intention was to get them to ignore the democratic process and confirm trump instead
> One NATO source set the stage, using terms more commonly used to describe unrest in developing countries.
"The defeated president gives a speech to a group of supporters where he tells them he was robbed of the election, denounces his own administration's members and party as traitors, and tells his supporters to storm the building where the voting is being held," the NATO intelligence official said.
"The supporters, many dressed in military attire and waving revolutionary-style flags, then storm the building where the federal law-enforcement agencies controlled by the current president do not establish a security cordon, and the protesters quickly overwhelm the last line of police.
"The president then makes a public statement to the supporters attacking the Capitol that he loves them but doesn't really tell them to stop," the official said. "Today I am briefing my government that we believe with a reasonable level of certainty that Donald Trump attempted a coup that failed when the system did not buckle."
The insurrectionists/rioters were not simply attempting to disrupt the vote. Many of them explicitly posted on social media about intending to kill members of congress. The woman who was shot and died, Ashli Babbitt, said on social media the day before, that “Nothing will stop us. They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours …. dark to light!” The Storm is an explicit QAnon conspiracy forecast event where Trump / his supporters would conduct mass executions of the democrats and his opponents.
Similarly, many of the insurrectionists were explicitly looking for Mike Pence in the Capital. They had weapons, they had zip ties for detaining people, several had pipe bombs. If they would have found any of their targets (or the full group of lawmakers on lockdown) and a hostage / execution scenario began, that would have created a power vacuum / level of chaos that could have opened the door to Trump trying to stay in power.
So this was clearly a coup attempt -- a pathetic one that wasn't well executed. But the folks who stormed the building were explicit in their motivations -- to stop the legitimate functioning of government, to foment revolution, and to force the world to keep Trump in power.
https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1346920198461419520?ref...
The alternative for that officer was violence. While surrounded.
The lies coming out of the media (which normally lie he took the selfie with the protesters) at the moment are insane.
Sure, "Trump deliberately attempted a coup".... because he's mentally ill.
But the media is actually pulling off a real coup by consistently implying it was even close to happening. Feeding "Multiple European security officials" who feed them back.
How did the "5 people dead" reported from the media actually die out of interest? We know one, filmed from many angles, all the rest? These ongoing media lies are outrageous.
One person was shot by police. As for the other three:
"One adult female and two adult males appear to have suffered from separate medical emergencies, which resulted in their deaths," Contee said. "Any loss of life in the District is tragic and our thoughts are with anyone impacted by their loss."
At least one one those medical emergencies was simply a heart attack. And possibly another from an accidental fall from scaffolding, though the article says police were unclear. Doesn't sound like violence had anything to do with them, at least directly. If it did, I'd expect that to be made clear.
Think about it, Trump invites these gas bags to the white house, and then gets em all riled up about something or other, then tells them to march to the capitol? That's 9 miles away! A march of that length is practically a death sentence for a lot of these patriots! Trump is playing 4d chess as always.
Sure, some of them may have rascals or walkers to lean on, but that march might as well be 40 years in the desert. Stumbling, out of breath, leaving a trail of high capacity ar-15 mags emblazoned with the cross, and dragging a confederate flag through the mud like a starving sauropod's tail, just after the meteor.
Trump new exactly what he was doing. Exercise for Americans!? He's bold,you got to give him that.
Yeah he had the presidential limo pacing ahead of crowd while he dangled one luscious, bizarrely hairless orange leg out an open door to keep up their spirits.
Trump is currently not mentally-ill enough to be unfit for the Presidency. Of course, that's decided at the Capitol, so it may change after he directed violence toward it.
And Fox News agrees with other outlets about the circumstances of five deaths.
This article is about NATO contemplating what it would mean to bring financial sanctions against the USA under the circumstances of a successful coup.
No, it's decided in the White House Cabinet Room (well, metaphorically; by the VP and Cabinet, wherever they are located) initially, under the 25th Amendment; Congress isn't involved until he says he's all better after he's been temporarily removed, where if the Cabinet disagrees Congress resolves the dispute.
Whether he is too criminal to continue in office is decided in the Capitol, through the impeachment process, though.