“Hang Mike Pence!”
That was the signature, self-defeating cry of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Why the cry? Because Pence would not assume dictatorial power and refuse to count electoral votes that Joe Biden won in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia, which would allow the House of Representatives to declare Donald Trump president on a one-state-one-vote basis. It was self-defeating because if Pence were hung, no one else would do it in his place. Why signature? Because it embodied the violence, illogic, incoherence and profound disconnect from reality that defined that attack.
Yet it would be a profound mistake to characterize the insurrection — and Trump’s efforts that motivated it — as a failure. It may well have been a success, after all: with an effective date of January 2024.
While there’s much we still don’t know, five things are clear: 1) Trump attempted to stay in power, regardless of what the voters wanted. 2) Republican politicians were divided on whether to support him and how far to go. 3) Republican politicians publicly diminished their support immediately after the insurrection — as did Republican voters. 4) But support for Trump and even the insurrection itself has been resolidified since. 5) A profound threat to our democracy remains.
Points 2, 3 and 4 are straightforward, confirmed by congressional votes, public statements and polling data. For example, Republican leaders vocally supported a bipartisan commission to investigate insurrection right after it happened, but they’ve since blocked it and are now attacking Democrats for investigating anyway — and for including two non-Trump Republicans in the investigation committee. As for GOP voters, a CBS/YouGov poll found that 39% of Republicans strongly disapprove of the insurrection, down from 51% in January. More ominously 55% would describe it as “defending freedom” and 51% as “patriotism,” compared to just 31% and 29% respectively in January. Meanwhile, a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll found that 80% of Republicans believe the election was stolen from Trump — despite the lack of any supporting evidence.
However, the first and last points are more complicated and require further clarification.
Trump’s Attempt To Cling To Power — By Hook Or By Crook
Trump was impeached for his earliest known attempt to cling to power, when he tried to coerce the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden, as a way to damage Joe Biden’s reputation and make his own corruption seem less exceptional. Even though there’s an actual federal law against that, using federal power to interfere with an election, only one Republican senator — Mitt Romney — voted to impeach.
Trump’s most sweeping and prolonged effort to cling to power came in the form of his repeated, years-long attacks on voting rights — promoting the myth of voter fraud, making wild claims, adding new self-serving twists, and trying to block vote-by-mail efforts undertaken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the period from election night, Nov. 3, through the insurrection on Jan. 6 was the most intensive and complex – is still largely hidden, as indicated by recently revealed fragments of information. For example, during this time period it was known that Trump replaced top officials at the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice — highly unusual moves that strongly suggested he was trying to use those departments to maintain his hold on power. But now we know more.
Perhaps most chillingly, the book, I Alone Can Fix It, by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker recounts that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told aides he feared Trump would call on the government to stage a coup after his election defeat.
“He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior,” they write. “This is a Reichstag moment,” he told his aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”
What’s more, Milley and other Joint Chiefs generals also discussed resigning if they were ordered to participate in a coup, as the book also reports. “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed,” Milley said, according to the book. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”
But there are other ways. On July 30, a new telling detail came to light about Trump’s attempt to enlist the Department of Justice on his behalf, by declaring — without evidence — that the election was corrupt. On Dec. 27, 2020 Trump made this request in a phone call to Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, pushing voter fraud claims that the department had already disproved. Donoghue responded that they had no power to change the election outcome, but that wasn’t Trump’s aim, according to his notes. “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote.
This was the same playbook Trump had tried with Ukraine: Coerce others into announcing something was rotten — as he had nothing to do with it — and then he and his minions would bamboozle the world into falling in line. It was just a shade more subtle than his follow-up attempt to pressure Georgia’s Secretary of State.
“I just want you to find 11,780 votes,” as he said in a Jan. 2 call. So his pattern of coercive criminal conduct is quite clear.
A Flat-Out Coup
In fact, it was a flat-out coup attempt, according to former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal.
“This was an attempted coup, an attempt to steal an election, and weaponizing the justice department in the process,” Katyal said on MSNBC that afternoon. “That’s both illegal and pretty much the most un-American thing you can come up with in your wild imagination.”
Former Republican Rep. David Jolly went into more detail.
“This further establishes the sequence of the plans leading up to Jan. 6,” Jolly said. “The three sequential elements of Donald Trump’s culpability for the insurrection was first laying the predicate — the big lie. Second, issuing the invitation, telling people to come to Washington on Jan. 6, a date that no one would have otherwise known to come, and then giving the charge when he gave that speech on that day.
“What we learn from the notes was just preceding the events of Jan. 6 he wanted his Department of Justice to announce that the election indeed was corrupt. Now, the question is was Donald Trump acting alone in organizing the events that ultimately were going to lead to Jan. 6, and we know that cannot be the case. Ultimately there was a political network.”
In short, there was a conspiracy to overthrow the election, which means a conspiracy to overthrow the government.
On the morning of Jan. 6, Mike Pence was Trump’s last best hope. Trump had been convinced that Pence, presiding over Congress in the counting of the electoral votes, had the unilateral power to reject the electoral votes of all the states Trump claimed to have won. He had one crackpot lawyer making the argument to him — in addition to Rudy Giuliani, of course. But Pence, while loyal to a fault, was not delusional.
In a three-page statement issued before proceedings began on Jan. 6, Pence went through some of the relevant history before concluding, “It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.” Only the people’s representatives in Congress could do that, as specified in the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
Trump, of course, cared nothing for history.
“If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” he lied to his supporters at the pre-insurrection rally. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.”
This was Trump’s ultimate plan. But Pence wouldn’t go along.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country,” Trump tweeted.
So the only thing left was violent intimidation. It might be a long shot, but Trump had nothing to lose — as shown by his subsequent acquittal in the Senate for second impeachment. He simply watched things unfold as his minions rampaged through Congress.
The details remain to be found, but the broad sweep is clear, as described by Officer Harry Dunn in the first House hearing on the insurrection.
“There was an attack carried out on Jan. 6 and a hit-man sent them,’ Dunn said. “I want you to get to the bottom of that.”
The Ongoing Insurrection
That would be enough, if the insurrection were over. But it’s not. The armed expression on a single day may be behind us, but the broader effort to derail American democracy has only gotten stronger in months since then. The guardrails of democracy that held this last time have already been severely eroded in the past six months — 30 voter suppression laws have been passed in 18 states as of July 22, non-partisan election administration has been eroded in multiple ways, with Republican legislatures taking power away from local election officials, and Republican leaders have not only done everything possible to prevent a 9/11-style investigation into Trump’s insurrection, they’ve begun spreading a counter-narrative, trying to blame Nancy Pelosi for the violence that day, while recasting the insurrectionists as patriots and martyrs.
But above all of that, two things stand out. First, the power of Trump loyalists has only increased, as illustrated by the ouster of Lyn Cheney from her GOP House leadership position. Trump is a narcissist, who requires much more than ordinary loyalty — one must accept and act on his inflated, self-declared omniscience, or else be cast aside. No one could deter him from trying to overthrow the election, regardless of the facts, for a reason spelled out clearly by Ian Hughes in his book, Disordered Minds— How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy:
Generally, narcissists do not hold onto any particular belief or consistent position, except one – the belief that they are superior to others. They can therefore constantly shift their stated position and adhere to this altered position as doggedly as before. This combination of rigid certainty (they are superior and therefore must be right) and blatant inconsistency (shifting their position moment to moment) makes it extremely difficult for others to counteract their arguments.
Trump hasn’t changed because he can’t. And what he requires of loyalists is an equally detached relationship to the truth. Pence would not go that far, but Trump has no need of figures like him now. And thus they’re losing power as Trump loyalists advance.
The second thing that stands out is the broader sweep of popular animus — from railing against COVID-19 public health measures to outbursts against “critical race theory” by people who have no idea what it is, with Trump’s grievance about the so-called “stolen election” right in the center of it. Remember that 80% of Republicans now buy into that lie more than did shortly after the insurrection. At that time, an AEI poll found that 39% of Republicans said that taking “violent actions” is an appropriate remedy when elected leaders refuse to protect the country — compared to just 17% of
Democrats. One reason was spelled out in a follow-up op-ed:
In our poll, support for political violence is much higher among those who believe white people experience discrimination comparable to Black people and other minority groups. Moreover, people may be more prone to engaging in extra-constitutional actions if they believe democratic processes are corrupt or stacked against them and that their political opponents present an existential threat.
The illusion that the insurrection is behind us could be even more dangerous than the illusion that the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us as well.
In short, all the core themes of Trump’s political rantings key into increased support for political violence. And that’s very dangerous, as Ian Hughes explained when interviewed for Salon.
“Toxic leaders are never able to rise to power alone,” he said. “But toxic leaders enabled by an authoritarian party and supported by a critical mass of followers who see democracy as expendable are often impossible to stop.”