Did the January 6th Coup Fail?
By warping the Republican party, Trump made
another coup attempt possible.
by MONA CHAREN
JANUARY
5, 2022 5:30 AM
January 6th should have
been the point of no return, the pivot point at which even the most blinkered
sugarcoaters of Trumpism recoiled in disgust from what they had wrought. For a
nanosecond, it seemed that it was. In the first days after the desecration of
the Capitol, a number of previously timid Republicans found their voices. As
I noted at the time, Sen. Pat Toomey said the
president had committed impeachable offenses and was unfit to serve. Sen. Lisa
Murkowski said, “I want him out.” Sen. Lindsey Graham expressed his disgust on
the Senate floor: “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey . . . but today all
I can say is: Count me out. Enough is enough.” Rep. Kevin McCarthy said Trump
was responsible for the storming of the Capitol, and warned Republican House
members not to criticize those who voted for impeachment because it might
endanger their lives.
For everyone who had
convinced themselves that, whatever Trump’s flaws, the true threat to the
American way of life lay on the left and only on the left, January 6th was a
blaring klaxon. Yes, Trump was a buffoon and incompetent and unfamiliar with
the levers of power—and yet this clown nearly brought a 232-year-old democracy
to its knees. Had it not been for 1) a half-dozen or so Republican officeholders
at the state level who demonstrated basic integrity, and 2) the unwillingness
of Mike Pence to perform as Trump had commanded, the outcome could have been
very different. As George F. Will said, “I would like to see January 6th burned
into the American mind as firmly as 9/11 because it was that scale of a shock
to the system.”
The most threatening
aspect of January 6th was not the ferocious attack on the Capitol but the
response of Republican officeholders thereafter. Even after the unleashing of
medieval mob violence; even after the erection of a gallows; even after members
had been forced to run for their lives; even after the deaths and injuries;
even after all of that and more, 147 Republican members of Congress voted
not to certify Joe Biden as the winner of the presidency. The transformation of
the GOP from a political party into an authoritarian personality cult became
official that day. McCarthy’s bootlicking visit to Mar-a-Lago in late January 2021
merely provided the visual.
In the year since, most
Republicans (with some extremely honorable exceptions) have descended further
into cultishness. They blocked the creation of an independent January 6th
commission, attempted to pack the congressional January 6th committee with
Trump Dobermans like Rep. Jim Jordan, and engaged in flagrant gaslighting about
the events of that day. Rep. Andrew Clyde was typical. He had been photographed
screaming in alarm on January 6th and barricading a door to the chamber. But he
told his constituents in May that January 6th had been a “normal tourist visit.”
Now, with the arrival of
the first anniversary of the most shameful day in recent history, Republicans
and right-wing opinion leaders have returned to their comfort zone: blame the
media.
Pence, who frankly
showed uncharacteristic independence that day, has been testing the waters and
understands what works with the GOP audience. “I know the media wants to
distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day
in January,” he told Fox News. He and Trump are on great
terms, he said, and he’s focused “only” on the future.
“I don’t think January
6th is going to help the Democrats like the media seems to think it
will,” tweeted radio host Erick Erickson. “But
there is a genuine obsession in the press about it. It was a bad day, but it
doesn’t outweigh crime, inflation, COVID, school closures, etc. for voters.” A
day later, responding to those who dug up his (subsequently deleted) January 6
tweet demanding that we “shoot the protesters, waive the rules, impeach!”
Erickson was at pains to emphasize that he isn’t now
minimizing what happened at the Capitol, but merely responding to a “press
corps obsessed with it as the worst thing ever.”
This is not to say that
there’s no such thing as press overreaction or hysteria. It’s as common as
water, particularly among people who earn their living through clicks. But the
right has been engaging in distraction and evasion for years with the “but the
media” trope. In the wake of January 6th, it looks not just dishonest but
absurd. January 6th is not an “issue” like crime or COVID or inflation. It’s
the heart of our system. Without bipartisan allegiance to the verdict of voters
and the willingness to cede power to those you oppose, no other “issues” can
ever be addressed.
Erickson doesn’t even go
as far as some on the right. W. James Antle III allows that the events of January 6th were
“terrible” and “had the potential to be even worse in terms of injury or loss
of life.” But the House January 6th Committee’s “obvious desire to elevate Jan.
6 to a 9/11-level event—and to treat a ragtag group of rioters, who made up
most of the death toll, as a serious attempt to overthrow the federal
government—is laughable.”
Just a ragtag group of rioters.
Note that Antle includes only “injuries or loss of life” as the possible
consequences, not the subversion of democratic governance.
In the Wall
Street Journal, Barton Swaim was equally dismissive:
The idea that the Capitol rioters threatened
the American republic is a fantasy. Even to pose such a threat, they would have
needed to do far more than break into an unguarded Capitol building and stop
Vice President Mike Pence from certifying the count of the Electoral College.
To stage a coup, these renegades would have needed the backing of the military;
and to govern afterward they would have needed cooperation from other
institutions, including the news media and the federal bureaucracy. They had no
support from those quarters and no hope of getting it. Their effort was witless
and pointless, a dud grenade thrown at an armored division.
Encounter Books editor
Roger Kimball mocked the gravity of January 6th. Trump
might have been “imprudent” to stir up the crowd, but “was it an effort to
overthrow the government? Hardly.” The trouble, of course, is the media:
I know this is not the narrative that we have
all been instructed to parrot. Indeed, to listen to the establishment media and
our political masters, the January 6 protest was a dire threat to the very
fabric of our nation: the worst assault on “our democracy” since 9/11, since
Pearl Harbor, since the Civil War!
In fact, Kimball claims,
the media narrative amounts to a “January 6 hoax” to pair with the “Russia
hoax.” Don’t be fooled by these warnings about the state of democracy, he
advises:
Note that phrase “our democracy”: Nancy
Pelosi, Joe Biden, and various talking heads have repeated it ad nauseam. But
you do not need an advanced degree in hermeneutics to understand that what they
mean by “our democracy” is their oligarchy. Similarly, when Nancy Pelosi talks
about “the people’s house,” she doesn’t mean a house that welcomes riff-raff
like you and me.
Bow-tie-sporting Kimball
is also the editor of the arts journal the New Criterion. He
received a degree from Bennington College in classical Greek and a Ph.D. in
philosophy from Yale. But he suffers from “riff-raff” envy. Or, more likely, he
understands that in our time, power resides in the mob, and far from
identifying with them, he has such contempt for them that he assumes they don’t
check Wikipedia.
Unlike some of those
cited above, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is not an
apologist for Trumpism. He doesn’t blame the media, but, like Swaim, he doubts that Trump has the wherewithal to
subvert our system. Yes, Trump did try to steal the election, Douthat writes,
but:
If you compare all those Trumpian intentions
with what actually transpired . . . what you see again and again is his
inability to get other people and other institutions to cooperate . . . a
variety of conservative lawyers delivered laughable arguments to skeptical
judges and were ultimately swatted down by some of the same jurists—up to and
including the Supreme Court—that Trump himself had appointed to the bench.
The political branches
were resistant as well, Douthat argues. While Trump did pressure state
legislatures and governors to “deliver” for him, “every state government
dismissed it: No statehouse leader proposed setting aside the popular vote, no
state legislature put such a measure on the floor, no Republican governor
threatened to block certification.”
And while Douthat does
say he underestimated the mob, he urges that “You can’t assess Trump’s
potential to overturn an election from outside the Oval Office unless you
acknowledge his inability to effectively employ the powers of that office when
he had them.”
That’s a comforting
thought, but it fails to grapple with two things. One is the GOP’s systematic
purging of officials who did the right thing in the 2020 election. Remember
Aaron Van Langevelde, a GOP member on the Michigan board of canvassers who
refused to lie about the vote count? He’s out, and his family needs police
protection. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been removed from
the board overseeing election certification, and is being primaried, as is
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Local GOP groups are censuring Republicans who voted
for impeachment. Across the country, Republican officials who stood in the
breach when it counted and did the right thing are being hounded from office. Members who voted to
impeach are resigning or close to resigning.
It’s true that Trump
didn’t quite know where the pressure points were last time, but he’s learning.
He has supported secretary of state candidates who deny the validity of the
2020 result in four swing states. Meanwhile,
Republican-controlled legislatures in a number of states have passed laws
withdrawing power over election certification from local election
administrators and handing it to legislatures.
But the most profound
reason to fear a repeat of something like January 6th is that Trump has
corrupted the minds of a substantial percentage of Republican party members. As
Lincoln said in a debate with Stephen Douglas,
“Public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing
can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts
statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”
The polls consistently
show that about two-thirds of Republicans believe the Big
Lie that the election was stolen. Nearly a third believe that “Because things have gotten so
far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order
to save our country.” Among rank-and-file Republicans, January 6th is not even
viewed as regrettable. One poll found that 52 percent identified those
who entered the Capitol as “defending democracy.” As Jonathan V. Last put it last year, “What the Republican
party has done over the last two months is akin to having dropped polonium into
America’s political groundwater.”
Institutions are not
self-sustaining. They are composed of people, and if people have lost faith in
them, or have given themselves permission to break the rules, they will
crumble. John Adams cautioned that character is essential to
self-government:
We have no Government armed with Power capable
of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice,
Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our
Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for
a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any
other.
An updated version of
Adams might add that a people beguiled, deluded, and propagandized cannot be
trusted to uphold the pillars of the democratic process. Trump failed at his
improvised coup, but he succeeded in warping enough of the electorate to make
another attempt—and even success—all too possible.