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From the Trump side, we did see an attempt to overthrow democracy, and it was successful: the Biden coup.
If 2020’s election season and J6 were indeed a Biden coup, it was portrayed to those in the know as a way to pre-empt a seemingly inevitable Trump coup, complete with Nancy Pelosi’s daughter capturing events for a documentary intended to portray events as a 9/11-style attack.
If it was a Trump attempt at seizing power, it was the most ridiculously convoluted and ineffective plot in political history, with an impromptu army of hundreds of thousands just giving up without firing a shot.
If it was all just a series of bad game theory moves which gave each side's actions the illusion of malfeasance through tribal lenses, it is a tragedy of democracy all around.
You can apply this excuse to the more naive of Trump's supporters, but it can't be applied to Trump himself. The "Biden coup" is not a thing he reacted to, it is a thing he invented out of whole cloth to justify his attempt to stay in power.
I would rank it as possibly the second most convoluted and ineffective plot in political history after the Beer Hall Putsch.
Sounds like the BHP was radically successful in comparison:
By comparison, on J6, the sitting President’s social media accounts were suspended or deleted, and he wasn’t publicly seen in the media for months afterward.
I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing. Trump is also being put on trial and he is also using his prosecution to boost himself. Arguably DeSantis would be leading the primary race right now if Trump had never been indicted.
But that's not what I was referring to anyway. My point was that the Beer Hall Putsch, like Jan 6, was a profoundly incompetent and unrealistic attempt to seize power. But that does not mean that such attempts should be airily dismissed as inconsequential. They signal a clear intent to overturn democracy and a willingness to do so if given the chance later. It's a bright red line and there should be no forgiveness or mercy for those who cross it.
Inconsequential? I don’t think I ever implied that. Already a major consequence has happened: a clarification of the Constitution in which the vice president’s role in the presidential election has been reduced in power from the novel political theory that Trump put forward as an attempt to return democracy after a bad election.
But keep in mind the great mass of who Trump appeals to: people who believe in the great myth of America and the rule of law, who hate totalitarians and love democracy, who believe in the founding fathers and the great experiment of what used to be known as liberal America before Commies stole “liberal”, a capitalist democratic republic forever at peace within its borders.
These are people who believe that babies are being murdered in most heinous fashion every day, yet refuse to storm the clinics and kill the doctors. These are people who are descended from World War II vets who fought literal Nazis. These are people who despise the quarantine camps of Australia and the government-sanctioned euthanasia of Canada. They can be enticed into riotously entering the Capitol, but absurdly walk peacefully though Statuary Hall. These are people who watch police procedurals on CBS and cheer when the wrongly suspected are confirmed innocent.
The red tribe won’t start a war to end America, nor willingly make it a state more totalitarian than already it is at this point, unless the Commies or the Jihadis do something so stupid and terrible as to make it necessary.
Regrettably, it hasn't. The first Eastman memo said that Pence should declare the Election Count Act unconstitutional and ignore it. The second Eastman memo offered a range of options, including ones where Pence ignored the ECA (and Trump wins, possibly after the election is thrown into the House because the contested states' electoral votes are treated as "spoiled") and ones where Pence tries to follow the ECA (and Trump almost certainly loses).
Various other commentators suggested that Pence could exploit the ambiguous drafting of the old ECA to weasel out a victory, but Eastman wargames those out and concludes that they don't work. So the first choice legal theory for a Pence coup was always that the ECA is unconstitutional (either because the Constitution assigns the authority to count electoral votes to the VP, or because the Constitution requires that all challenges be resolved in joint session without the two houses separating).
In other words, if Gavin Newsome beats VP Ramaswamy in the 2028 presidential election and Trump and Ramaswamy cry foul like they did in 2020, then the most likely scenario is that Ramaswamy gavels in the joint session, announces that he considers the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 unconstitutional and accordingly that he is obliged to ignore it, and then counts the electoral votes in a way which allows him to declare himself elected.
If Eastman is right (either that the ECA is unconstitutional, or that there is no effective way of challenging a VP who says it is), then the problem requires a constitutional amendment to fix. If Eastman is wrong, then the problem probably never existed in the first place.
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