Call it what it was: a coup attempt by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, Wed 06 Jan 2021

I call it a coup attempt because, though I assume that it will not prevent the Biden presidency, it certainly
intended to.
On Wednesday, a coup attempt was led by the president of the United States. A rightwing
mob attempted the coup in the form of a violent riot that stormed the Capitol building. They
disrupted the proceedings that would have completed the recognition of the election of Joe
Biden and Kamala Harris. Those proceedings had been disrupted earlier by elected officials
bringing forth bad-faith claims that the election was not legitimate and should instead
produce a continuation of Trump’s presidency. This too was a coup attempt, an effort to
violate the constitution and override the will of the voters in this election. Inside and outside
were two faces of the same thing, and both were fomented by the leaders of the Republican
party and by the US president. The mob outside would not exist without the politicians
inside. Those insiders will make noises of horror and repudiation, but they own this.
Had Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders recognized the legitimate winner of the
election in early November, had there been no challenge to a legitimate election from inside
the government, there would have been no mob. Having failed to suppress enough votes to
guarantee a Republican presidential victory, the Republican party and the Trump
administration decided to try to suppress them retroactively. Trump invited the mob and
whipped it up for months and set it off today, as surely as if he’d lit a bomb’s fuse.
I call it a coup attempt because, though I assume it will not prevent the Biden presidency, it
certainly intended to, and is part of a campaign to delegitimize and thereby weaken the
incoming administration. It was a long time coming, building up for years with white rage,
especially white male rage fuelled by everyone from Trump himself to the National Rifle
Association, Fox News and the various rightwing pundits, the Republican party, the various
faces of white supremacy, and far-right groups such as the Proud Boys. It is a rage against the
fact that other people might be equal under the law, that women and people of color might
also govern as power begins to be distributed more equally, the same rage that attempted to
delegitimize a black president with birtherism and obstruction. It is a rage against equality.
Democracy is a set of agreements to make decisions together and respect the outcome
whether you like them or not. The kind of violence we saw on Capitol Hill is authoritarian, a
way to try to force other people to submit to the will of the perpetrators. This violence comes
from the white men who were long the only people with power in this country imagining
themselves as marginalized and oppressed outsiders because others might also have power
and a voice. We saw these kind of men last summer, when they invaded the Michigan capital
while carrying semiautomatic rifles and saw them again when a handful of them were
arrested for a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We saw them in racist
shootings from the Texas border to a Pennsylvania synagogue.
This coup attempt was built by the more and more uninhibited ideology of violence we have
seen again and again, in the mass shootings that became a norm in 21st-century America, the
fetishization of guns and gun rights that made the killing machines and the death they inflict
far more common, so that death by gun recently overtook death by car as a leading American
way to die.
As I write, I hear a Republican leader on TV say “Remember we are the party of law and
order,” and, of course, the riot going on in the Capitol is technically lawless, but “law and
order” as a rightwing slogan means that they are the law and they impose their version of
order. Authoritarianism is always an ideology of inequality: I make the rules, you follow
them, I change them at will and punish those who don’t obey, or, if I feel like it, those who do
because I can. Political scientist Frank Wilhoit once said: “Conservatism consists of exactly
one proposition … There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind,
alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” They are demonstrating
that nothing binds them and that they expect to have whatever they want. Entitlement is too
demure a word for this. 
What is at stake in America today is the outcome of an election. But it’s also the rule of law
and the rights of voters. And in the end it’s also about the authority of facts and evidence and
history and science, that no one has the right to override those things for personal gain.
Trump’s position all along has been that he in particular has that right. Today it came to a
head and became a crisis as a mob sabotaged a constitutionally mandated procedure for the
peaceful transition of power. This was always going to happen because Trump’s power was
always going to be finite in reach and duration under the law, and because he wants that
power to be infinite, he was always at war with the law, and he always had a volunteer army
willing to help him take it. Today they acted like an army, a hostile occupying force in the
nation’s capital. This is what he wanted and this is what he orchestrated and this is what we
got.
Trump was the most prolific public liar America has ever seen, and his lies were an essential
part of his authoritarianism, a refusal to be bound by facts, even the facts of what he said or
did the day before. He demanded a parallel narrative in which he won the election and laid
the groundwork long before to claim, if he lost, that it was illegitimate, as he did in 2016. In a
recorded video on Wednesday, Trump said to the crowd “We love you” as he told them to go
home but also reasserted that the election was stolen, which is why they’re there in the first
place. Ivanka Trump apparently deleted a tweet in which she called them “American
patriots”.
The Trumps and their loyalists in office will disavow the worst of what happened and
pretend to be surprised by it and continue feeding it. Conversation about what’s been
happening over the past several months has often bought into the false binary that either we
have a successful coup, in which they steal the election, or we have a failed coup, but there is
something insidious in-between: the delegitimization of the democratic process and the
incoming administration. In this in-between state, Trump supporters continue to regard
their leader and themselves as above the law and entitled to enforce it however they see fit,
on the basis of whatever facts they most enjoy having. They are building a separate reality
and appear to wish for a shadow government to beleaguer and undermine the legitimate
one. Today, we’ve seen it in action.
Trump Incites Rioters by Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Jan. 6, 2021
The president may use the language of patriotism, but these are the actions of Benedict Arnold.

What the pro-Trump rioters attacked was not only a building but also the Constitution, the
electoral system, our democratic process. They humiliated the United States before the world and
left America’s enemies chortling. They will be remembered as Benedict Arnolds.
“Our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we have seen in modern
times,” President-elect Joe Biden said. He described it as “an assault on the citadel of liberty, the
Capitol itself.”
“Our Constitution was the product of centuries of tradition, wisdom and experience. … A radical
movement is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance. Left-wing mobs have
torn down statues of our founders, desecrated our memorials.” — Trump, Sept. 17, 2020
Patriotism is not about words. It is not about waving flags or singing “America the Beautiful.” It is
about struggling, imperfectly and inadequately, to make this country we love a better one.
It is not about a president supporting an insurrection or trying to win another term despite having
lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Whatever a president’s rhetoric, he betrays the Constitution when he oversees a campaign to
overturn a free election guaranteed by that Constitution, and when he galvanizes rioters to
overpower our democratic process.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, isn’t someone I usually agree with. But he was
right when he finally stood up to Trump and warned the Senate that legislative moves to overrule
voters by excluding some states in the Electoral College count “would damage our republic
forever.”
“President Trump is promoting national unity through renewing understanding of and
commitment to America’s shared founding principles.” — White House “fact sheet,” Nov. 2, 2020
After a year in which Trump presented himself as the law-and-order president and denounced
protesters as rioters, he summoned supporters to Washington and unleashed them as rioters on the
Capitol as the Electoral College votes were being counted. “Be there, will be wild,” he tweeted.
“Let’s have trial by combat,” his lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a rally of Trump supporters shortly
before they stormed the Capitol.
So pro-Trump crowds dismantled security fences and invaded the Capitol. You can call them
rioters or terrorists or coup plotters, but they were not Making America Great Again.
In Portland, Ore., last summer, I saw federal authorities periodically use tear gas even against
protesters who were peaceful and outside — so it was astonishing to see waves of protesters
overrun the Capitol with almost no response. Leftist protests sometimes did become violent and
destructive in Portland and other cities, and when that happened Biden repeatedly denounced
them; he stood up to his base. Trump in contrast incited violence by his base on Wednesday
morning.
There have been whispers that Trump might try to take advantage of disorder at home or a crisis
abroad by invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying military forces to interrupt the presidential
transition. We should all be on alert and remember the warning of every living former U.S.
defense secretary that the military should stay out of such a crisis.
Trump’s assaults on truth are not as visible as assaults on the Capitol, but they are also damaging.
Some 62 percent of Republicans say they do not accept Biden’s election, and that is toxic for
democracy and lays the groundwork for this kind of violence.
Trump and other Republicans talk about personal responsibility and obeying the law. So Tanya
McDowell, a homeless African-American mom, was imprisoned after misleading school officials
about where she lived so that she could send her young son to a better school district and give him
a better life. But, hypocritically, Trump fails to take any responsibility after a term in which he has
lost the House, the presidency and the Senate — and then unleashes mobs to terrorize the Capitol.
As I said, I’ve covered other attempted coups, and history usually catches up to autocrats and
thugs — eventually. They end up in prison, exile or disgrace, whining about the unfairness of it
all, monuments to the perils of demagogy and authoritarianism.