Wednesday the whole saw how Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, and tried to keep elected politicians from doing their job, as defined in the constitution. There is a lot of hand-wringing among certain parties about what to call it, though it seems like a lot have settled on insurrection, edged on by Trump and his surrogates.
From outside the US, a different word springs to mind.
The supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday to stop the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory were attempting a violent coup that multiple European security officials said appeared to have at least tacit support from aspects of the US federal agencies responsible for securing the Capitol complex.
Insider spoke with three officials on Thursday morning: a French police official responsible for public security in a key section of central Paris, and two intelligence officials from NATO countries who directly work in counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations involving the US, terrorism, and Russia.
There is no doubt that the Capitol was not as secured as one would have expected, given the fact that the insurrection has been planned fairly publicly .The unpreparedness and outright willingness to help, does leave one wondering whether at least some of the people responsible for the security of the Capitol would have been okay with Trump staying in power, by any means necessary.
Luckily, the coup was not successful, but have instead resulted in a backlash against Trump, even getting Twitter to ban his account (something long overdue).
From inside the USA, many of us believe it was an attempted coup by Trump with the help of (some) federal law officials, too.
As the backlash shows, what happened hardly worked out to Trump’s advantage.
It also was far from being a worst-case scenario. We might have ended up with video of Congresspeople or Mike Pence being bound with zip ties and executed. We might have seen the entire Capitol going up in flames.
But I can’t think of a single scenario that would have ended up with Trump still in charge on January 21st. A coup requires support from the top military brass, which is one thing he does not appear to have.
… appeared to have at least tacit support from aspects of the US federal agencies …
Ya think?
The only thing we can be sure of at this point is that whoever gave the orders was a blithering incompetent.
If they were honest, they were incompetent to have ignored all the warnings.
But if they were actually planning a coup, they were even more incompetent. I can’t think of any action that crowd of insurrectionist knuckleheads could have taken that would have led to Trump staying in power on January 21st.