Act One is over; the intermission could end at any moment
“The more we learn, the less this looks like a coup bound to fail, and the more it looks like plain luck that all our legislators and our vice-president were not murdered.”
— Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Donald Trump’s bumbling, slap-dash, failed coup was every bit as ridiculous as might be expected, but a lot more dangerous as well — because so many people failed to take it seriously, in the days, weeks and years leading up to it. It was dangerous not just because it left five people dead—and could have left many more—but because it may well be only the beginning. The FBI issued warnings that violent demonstrations could occur at all 50 state capitals on Inauguration Day. Beyond that, it could grow even worse. That didn’t happen, and the inauguration ceremony and speech were crafted to reduce the Trump-driven threat to democracy. But history warns, it could still grow even worse.
Thus, in contrast to President Joe Biden’s call for unity, Trump’s farewell speech focused solely on his movement, with an ominous promise that “We will be back in some form.”
Historian Timothy Snyder put it succinctly. “The lie outlasts the liar,” he wrote in the New York Times. “The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish ‘stab in the back’ was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?”
He’s right to be worried: Both participants in the coup attempt and Trump’s approval ratings suggest frighteningly broad support for Trump’s “stolen election” lie, which he has refused to abandon, even after accepting he wouldn’t get a second term.
“Today is the day Americans start taking down names and kicking ass,” Mississippi Rep. Mo Brooks exhorted the rally before it invaded the Capitol.
“This insurrection wasn’t just redneck white supremacists and QAnon kooks,” historian Terry Bouton tweeted, as the first of “FIVE big take-aways” from the rally he attended as a seasoned observer of Washington protests:
The people participating in, espousing, or cheering the violence cut across the different factions of the Republican Party and those factions were working in unison.
Preppy looking “country club Republicans,” well-dressed social conservatives, and white Evangelicals in Jesus caps were standing shoulder to shoulder with QAnon cultists, Second Amendment cosplay commandos, and doughy, hardcore white nationalists.
We eavesdropped on conversations for hours and no one expressed the slightest concern about the large number of white supremacists and para-military spewing violent rhetoric. Even the man in the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt wasn’t beyond the pale. They were all “patriots.”
Bouton went on to note that law enforcement was “purposefully understaffed” and that “There were also no clear crowd rules” unlike all other D.C. protests he’d attended, as well as noting that “The Trump rioters only supported law enforcement as long as they believed law enforcement was supporting them.”
The indulgence of the almost-all-white mob continued even after its deadly consequences became known.
“It’s rare that we get an opportunity to see sedition for dummies live and acted out, but that’s what we witnessed,” said Mark Claxton, director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, after The New Yorker released a new video of the insurrection. “After watching the video — and most important, the audio — I’m convinced more than ever that many of these insurrectionists are being grossly under-charged. It’s obvious many of these terrorists are individually and collectively engaged in a course of conduct and criminal offenses that lead to the death of officer Sicknick and for that, all should have charges enhanced, and some should be charged with his murder.”
But Bouton’s last big take-away was particularly chilling:
These people are serious and they are going to keep escalating the violence until they are stopped by the force of law….
The most alarming part to me was the matter-of-fact, causal ways that people from all walks of life were talking about violence and even the execution of “traitors” in private conversations, like this was something normal that happened every day.
I am convinced that if Congress doesn’t act to do something about this quickly, these people are going to keep going and the unrest and violence will get more widespread and more uncontrollable. This is a crisis. It’s real. It’s happening. It must be taken seriously.
The insurrection rattled GOP lawmakers — a little. (Even Trump would eventually criticize the violence, albeit in the low-energy way that tells everyone he doesn’t really mean it.) They had planned to vote on objections to results in five states, but ended up only voting on two: Arizona and Pennsylvania. While a few changed their minds in light of the violence, eight senators and 139 representatives voted to sustain objections to one or both states — just shy of two-thirds of all GOP representatives.
If the crowd’s attitude and actions were chilling, polling data should be concerning as well. Trump’s approval rating dropped sharply from 42.7% in 538’s polling average the day before the insurrection to 34% job approval rating for Trump in Gallup’s Jan. 4-15 poll, but that’s still rather robust compared to George W. Bush, who’s polling average for his last year was just 29.9% according to Real Clear Politics. It sometimes dipped to the low 20s. Trump is nowhere near that unpopular, thanks to still-broad Republican support, which limited Republican support for impeachment to just 10 representatives, even after Liz Cheney, third in line of GOP House leadership, spoke out forcefully for impeachment the day before the vote.
The January Insurrection
“On January 6, 2021 a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol to obstruct the process of our democracy and stop the counting of presidential electoral votes,” Cheney said. “The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
“No one is expected to be a lion day after day after day, but on this day, lions are required,” said Democrat Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, during the impeachment debate. But the GOP could barely muster a small pride. The overwhelming majority shrouded themselves in shame. The most common excuse they used to oppose impeachment was to label it divisive and call for “unity” but without disavowing their embrace of Trump’s ‘stolen election’ lie, the lie that has actually divided the nation and led to insurrection in the first place. A range of polls including Qunnipiac, CBS, the Washington Post/ABC, and Vox/Data For Progress all found that less than one in three Republican voters consider Joe Biden the legitimate winner.
The Big Lie
“Donald Trump incited the violent part of his base to harm people because he made them believe the Big Lie, that he won by a landslide,” Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu, of California, a House impeachment manager, tweeted on Jan. 16. “All Trump has to do to prevent further political violence is say one sentence: ‘The election was not stolen.’” To date he hasn’t backed off this allegation and has not provided any evidence of election fraud.
Trump’s ‘stolen election’ lie qualifies as a ‘big lie,’ Snyder explained: It was significant — about the right to rule the world’s most powerful nation. It’s mendacity was profound — not only wrong, but made in bad faith. What’s more, “It challenged not just evidence but logic” by claiming it was rigged against him, but not against GOP senators and representatives. In addition, Snyder noted. “The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved.” So, everyone from bipartisan neighborhood poll workers all the way up to the Supreme Court must be tarred as either actively involved or criminally negligent lifelong Republicans.
“On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists,” but probe deeper, and “it inverts the position of the strong and the weak,” given where all the supposed “irregularities” are: “At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people,” which is “the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election.”
White nationalism is the key driving force, terrorism and extremism expert J. M. Berger explained in a twitter thread linked to supporting articles:
If you’re wondering how we got here it’s a story that goes like this:
White nationalists looked at Republican Party demographics in 2012 and said “we have an opening here”
On social media, they began to reach out and seek engagement with Republicans.
Only one Republican was willing to really do the work of reaching back to white nationalists in an explicit way.
That, in a nutshell, is the untold backstory behind Trump’s campaign announcement speech, when he falsely cast Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. (Multiple studies show that immigrants are substantially more law-abiding than natural-born citizens.) The rest is more well-known, if too often ignored or downplayed. But, as Berger summarized, “Once elected, he began to craft policies designed to keep and embolden that constituency.”
The end result has been that the GOP “is now more similar to autocratic ruling parties such as the Turkish AKP, and Fidesz in Hungary than to typical center-right governing parties in democracies such as the Conservatives in the UK or CDU in Germany,” according to the V-Dem Institute, which has compiled a database of 1,955 political parties across 1,560 elections since 1970.
The white nationalists Trump has reached out to comprise a range of different groups, mostly formed during three different periods: first, armed militias (illegal in all 50 states since the early 1900s) initially organized as leading organizations in the 1990s “patriot movement;” second, a more specialized range of militia-like groups founded in the “Tea Party” era, as described in David Neiwart’s informative book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump; and third, newer groups that emerged alongside Trump himself, such as the Proud Boys and QAnon.
The specialized groups included ones oriented toward the military and law enforcement, such as Oath Keepers, a group “founded by Stewart Rhodes in 2009, that was geared toward recruiting military and law enforcement veterans,” according to Neiwart, and a related group, the Three Percenters, founded by Mike Vanderboegh, focused on “ordinary civilian gun owners”… the name “an allusion to a myth that only 3 percent of the American colonists actually participated in the Revolutionary War as combatants.”
Of the Trump-era groups, the Proud Boys are the most militantly confrontational, but the more amorphous QAnon, commonly described as a conspiracy theory, but perhaps more accurately a cult organized around a conspiracy theory, has enormous radicalizing potential according to those who’ve studied it closely. It might even be the ultimate information war weapon, at least so far. It has the potential to provide a lingua franca for expanding Trump’s reactionary base and a capacity to further fragment our shared civic reality, which will be the subject of part two, next issue. Understanding QAnon will help shed light on what Act Two of the Continuing Coup holds in store.
