Turns out being associated with a failed coup is bad for your brand. Lessons to live by.
A coup takes control of government by force. You become the state.
With respect to those who were injured and died, this merely gave the state a bloody nose.
First of all, Pearl Harbor wasn’t a coup. It was an act of war. Both involve violence, yes, but trying to draw a line between them is just nonsense.
As far as not being “hyperbolic”: an armed mob overran the capital in an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power, and got very close to getting their hands onto the chain of succession. Men with guns and flex cuffs wandered the building with maps and checking unmarked offices for members of congress. Five lay dead, and multiple pipe bombs had to be defused. The federal government remained paralyzed for hours, as someone in the chain of command refused authorization to send in the guard, and the Pentagon refused to pick up the phone. They built a gallows outside, and looked sure as hell like they were going to lynch Mike Pence.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic here, the issue is your lack of perspective and not me being worked up.
Sudden: check Violent: check Illegal: check Attempt to sieze power from a government: check
They came with weapons, human restraints (flex cuffs), and were calling out politicians they disagree with and explicitly looking for them.
The intention of several seems to have been to _at least_ take hostages if not worse. What would you call the threatening, kidnapping and possible murder of your political rivals for the express purpose of keeping your side in power? If that's not a coup I don't know what is. That they failed doesn't mean they didn't try.
It can’t be any clearer than it is now without more bloodshed and still people don’t want to believe it.
What other reason do you think they had for storming congress?
This is an autocratic movement. The legislature is an impediment to that. Maybe they envision a principate to give it the veneer of authenticity that an outright autocracy would not. That worked for the Roman Empire for ~250 years, people bought that it was still a Republic when it's plain to history it was ruled by an emperor during this time.
Of course had it succeeded, no matter how it had, Trump would have accepted it happily. He doesn't care about the Constitution or even the veneer of legitimacy. He just wants to win. Doesn't matter how.
You don't think this was a coordinated effort? President Trump (and several of his allies) has been stoking this flame for _weeks_ explicitly and to the day. He gave a speech the morning of the attack, explicitly pointing them to the Capitol.
He seems to have also, behind the scenes, disuaded the usual defense mechanisms that would have prevented this from being even as effictive as it was. I'd expect much more information will be coming out about that as this is investigated further. I'm not seeing how you're saying this wasn't coordinated though.
He thought he could at least intimidate his political enemies, and convince his allies and those on the fence to _at least_ make a bigger mess of the transfer of power.
For his entire presidency, Trump has really been good at chaos and bad at planning. He regularly failed to do things that were either within his powers or easily doable because he just didn’t follow the process right (DACA, muslim ban), or because he couldn’t work with others (wall, relief checks), or because he just didn’t have the patience to follow through (TikTok sale). When things require organization skill, he falls apart. His two biggest moves have been shit posting on twitter, and shit posting while undermining his own ongoing negotiations. He is incapable of actually doing the work, any work.
Actually doing a coup via the military requires skill and planning. There are a lot of people in the chain who can say no, or drag their feet to delay illegal orders. A smarter autocrat would’ve laid the groundwork to purge the ranks of non-faithful, done his best to bribe rank and file members, or worked to create a plausible story that required military presence in the capital. Instead he vetoed their pay bill because he was angry at Twitter, after he pardoned war criminals and called them all suckers. He is simply not a strategic thinker at all.
Whipping up his rabid fans so that they plan something on his behalf in whatever fetid swamps they’ve been banished to online? Now that he can do, because it only requires some tweets that he thinks of in the moment.
That he was able to get so far with such amateurish work is a sign that the republic is very, very sick. Hopefully we can fix our underlying issues before a smarter autocrat has a go at it, because if that happens we’re probably doomed.
It didn't work. But they all thought it would. Unless this is the most method-acting troll I've ever seen, those who barged into the chambers with zip-tie restraints and tasers truly believed they were there to facilitate the overthrow of the legislature and keep their leader in power.
It was an attempted coup, and a failed one.
The Capitol breach is not comparable to a junta raiding a presidential palace. It was more like the lone nutjob, except there were a few more nutjobs. And a bunch of LARPers and miscellaneous morons tagging along to riot because the protestors outnumbered the cops.
When I see a term like "coup" being bandied about inconsistent with its conventional usage, it looks to me like a rhetorical play rather than an honest analysis of what happened. "Sedition" carries all of the same gravity and probably is more accurate.
Edit: I found a good piece on Quartz that argues this point better: https://qz.com/1953602/is-america-experiencing-a-coup/
But it's also something more than "plain" sedition. Not only was it a group of nutjobs with little chance of success, but they were organized and/or encouraged by the outgoing President himself, and were aided by the anemic security that was also coordinated by the President (via recent appointments to the Pentagon, decision to discourage or deny National Guard assistance, etc.)
That tie to Trump, along with the intentionally weak security, adds another dimension to this.
EDIT: I read your link after the reply above. Thanks, it captures the nuance pretty well.
Quantity matters. A single fence jumper is different than a thousand. One person is a nutball, a thousand is a mob.
Proximity also matters. We now know that the mob came dangerously close to members of Congress. In at least two instances they came within feet of members, or within seconds of passing through barricades that were not yet erected.
This is like your hypothetical fence jumper making it into the Lincoln Bedroom with a few hundred of his closest friends. Given that they literally beat at least two cops to death and erected gallows, there is no doubt that they intended the worst for Congress.
> The Capitol breach is not comparable to a junta raiding a presidential palace. It was more like the lone nutjob, except there were a few more nutjobs. And a bunch of LARPers and miscellaneous morons tagging along to riot because the protestors outnumbered the cops.
You are building up an incorrectly narrow vision on what a coup actually looks like, then using that to declare this to be a non-coup. You are absolutely correct that this looks nothing like a Junta raiding the presidential palace, but that is far from the only form that historical coups have taken. More than once countries have been toppled by a mob seizing the legislature while the military stands around without an idea of what to do. Arguably that is exactly what happened during the August 10th insurrection in Paris, which toppled a constitutional monarchy and led to the Terror.
That's fair enough. Living in the present, we usually have a blind spot about how present events relate to others in history. It's likely that some peasant revolts throughout history were just as stupid and chaotic as this one.
However, the events on Wednesday were particularly complicated. There were many factions and ideologies present. There were MAGAs, QAnons, "Federalists", neo-Nazis, COVID-deniers, Blue Lives Matter supporters, Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Moms for Trump. There was but one shared allegiance—Trump.
There were five separate raids into the building, each as unorganized and chaotic as the next. Not a single rioter inside the Capitol was seen brandishing a firearm (I did see a few outside the Capitol though, via live streams). Many of the rioters were destroying things, but even more were marching through the hallways and rotunda "saying their peace" (from interviews I saw later, many thought they were still legitimately protesting). While there were a few dozen paramilitary types among the mob—or to stop the "coup", as they see it—their intentions were closer to fantasy fulfillment than a coup. One of the "zip tie guys" was there with his mom.
There was a lack of organization, little actual violence, no realistic attempt to seize anything, let alone a realistic chance to seize power in the first place. Throwing "attempted" in front of "coup" does not change the fruitlessness of the proceedings. In hindsight, I don't think even the worst case scenario would have changed much.
Regardless of the criteria we use to determine this case, I argue that it's not clear cut, and the use of "coup" and "terrorism"—as many outlets have—to describe the whole affair, especially before the dust has settled, seems like an overreach. And it's exactly the kind of thing that Trump supporters are constantly accusing the "mainstream media" of perpetuating. That's why it's an uprising, revolt, insurrection, seditious riot. All of these terms are accurate enough for now.
The entire government.
In this case, that was the goal. Keep the losing presidential candidate in power.
It specifically refers to the overthrow of a government. Trashing a single courthouse comes nowhere close to that.
The goal is power. Taking power from your political enemy and securing it for yourself.
The word coup by itself has a broader definition, but is usually used as a compliment. Such as "Heather just closed a $30mm deal with Acme Corp. Her entire sales team scored a coup with that sales pitch"
But when used in the context of gun-toting insurrectionists? "Coup" is shorthand for the full phrase. Coup d'état.
https://ktvz.com/news/crime-courts/2020/07/24/fires-set-insi...
Arguably some of the stuff happening with the autonomous zone wasn’t a coup attempt, it was an attempt at secession. A stupid and doomed attempt, I’ll agree, but a different thing altogether.
There is a plausible path from taking over Congress while they’re certifying the electoral college and declaring the next president and power. I’ll admit that it’s not a likely outcome, but it’s plausible. It wouldn’t be the first time a government has been toppled by a mob taking over the legislature, ask France. If they’d succeeded they would have re-installed Trump contrary to the will of the voters, the rule of law, and the constitution. Hence, coup attempt.
Yes, a lot of them wanted to go protest. But it’s a clear straw man to say “not everyone there was in on the coup attempt”. Sure, a bunch of idiots wanted to stand around and hold up dumb signs because they got conned into the Q nonsense, but a lot of them also wanted to push their way in and lynch Mike Pence in order to get what they wanted. They even built gallows, which is not something you do if you’re just there to protest.
Again, this was all planned out in the open. The told each other to bring zip ties and maps of the capital building. They talked about blowing the building up with a Ryder van like the Turner Diaries (someone did plant pipe bombs), and discussed how they were going to kill congress members to get their way. They even printed “MAGA Civil War” shirts.
And even though they behaved like an unruly mob, they did manage to overrun the capital and came within feet of grabbing members of congress; the lady who was shot had breached the final barrier to where members of congress were holed up. What was clearly missing here was not intent or will, but coordination. And that sure is scary.
(As an aside, plenty of historical coups have been accomplished by coordinating a mob just enough to take over the legislature by force. Ask the French).
And that’s before we get into the really awkward questions, like “why did the pentagon repeatedly deny Larry Hogan authorization to send in the guard after the building had been overrun?” Why was the initial protest organized by republican AGs? Why wasn’t the capital police prepared for a protest that had been announced by the president himself? Perhaps some of that was more opportunistic, trump doesn’t really seem like the planning type to me, but it sure is awkward if your basic premise is that this was just a protest gone awry.
My theory is that the companies are getting some tough calls from Nancy Pelosi- along the lines of you stop supporting violence right now or we will deal with you unfavorably later.
This week has really shown me what people mean when they say workers in tech have power. ~300 cosigners of the employee petition at Twitter helped remove Trump's ability to spread propaganda to nearly 90M followers. That's amazing and something I frankly thought would never happen. Without that internal pressure, Trump would still have his bully pulpit and zero Republicans would be coming forward to talk openly about a post-Trump future for the party like we saw Murkowski do today.