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It's so weird to me, because it's like a minimum coup. Not even a minimum viable coup, because it clearly isn't. It's not doing your enemy a small injury, it's like slapping your enemy in the face with the broad of your sword, then running away. Are you trying to start shit or not? It's like they themselves didn't know if they wanted to start shit or not. Like a child's drawing of a coup: all the parts are there, the march, the violence, the fraudulent scheme, but they're just executed with zero skill or coherence, basically at random. I think that's why it causes so much division. It's like your neighboring country rolls a tank over the border, but it's made of cardboard, plops out one sad shell and falls apart. Now you don't even know if you're supposed to be at war.
It's a coup done by a person who just doesn't know how to do one. So do you let it count?
There's also just kinda a mess when the question of what extent Trump was actually involved.
Contemporaneously in 2021, there were quite a lot of allegations that Trump and close associates were deeply integrated into the planning and execution phases of the riot itself, to the point where the Trump campaign was supposedly giving out pdfs with specific movements to specific individuals. Into the next couple years, we had people testify that he got into John Wick-esque battles with the Secret Service, that he'd called off military assistance to capitol officers. It's still possible that's the case!
But what's actually been proven is that he gave a pretty dumb speech, and his campaign authorized the
'alternative''fake' elector slates, and he called the governor of Georgia. I'd argue that this is an impeachable offense, and that in a sane impeachment hearing we could start pulling at the threads of those more serious allegations to see if any justify a conviction. They didn't -- the impeachment hearings were a political joke even by the low standards set by recent competition -- and as a result we never even got to the question of whether such a conviction would be justified or whether such a conviction should include future prohibition from office.I don't know whether his involvement genuinely ended with the speech, but if some there's a lot of underpants gnomes involved between that speech and the riot itself.
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