Trump Declared War On America. And Lost.
Trump tried to take up arms against the people of the United States and failed spectacularly on every conceivable level.
Editor’s note: We are reposting this article in light of the reporting on Friday that Trump’s attempted military coup was much more serious than we knew. Last June, as Trump was desperately trying to get the governors to do his dirty work for him, Trump’s aides were busy drafting an order to invoke the Insurrection Act, something Trump had been threatening for weeks. Doing so would have allowed Trump to send the military into American cities and there is every reason to believe he would have left them there until after the election, using them to suppress the vote in key cities in key states. A “legal” military coup. We were already on the brink of disaster when the military refused to be weaponized. But it is not clear they would have refused if the Insurrection Act had been invoked. We were closer to the abyss than we realized.
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(image: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
by Justin Rosario
What if you threw an American military coup and no one showed up, including the military? That’s the question Donald Trump answered for posterity last week as he bravely hid in his bunker and tweeted his impotent rage to the world.
Make no mistake about what happened; America was on the edge of the abyss. We were at the same inflection point we’ve seen in other countries right before they fell into despotism. Where the military ceased to be a force to prevent foreign incursion and instead became a weapon to coerce the civilian populace.
Trump tried to take up arms against the people of the United States and failed spectacularly on every conceivable level.
What Happened?
The basics are clear: George Floyd was slowly asphyxiated to death over the course of almost ten minutes by a white cop who was clearly enjoying himself. Three other officers helped hold Floyd down while this murder was taking place, showing a depraved indifference to what was happening.
The entire scene was recorded and it went viral, sparking large protests. The police in several locations around the country responded as the police are wont to do: poorly and with grossly unnecessary violence. There was tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and pepper balls; all of which was unloaded into crowds of unarmed protesters with reckless abandon.
At the same time, a small number of protesters, overwhelmingly and curiously white, smashed windows, burned cop cars, and instigated looting.
Unlike previous protests over police brutality that got violent, disproportionately little of the violence appears to have been carried out by the black community. For instance, here’s a totally not-at-all suspicious looking white protester smashing windows and then immediately leaving the scene. Nope. Nothing odd about this guy. Absolutely spontaneous. For sure.
This lends credence to various reports from authorities that white nationalist agitators were targeting the protests in order to kick off their long-awaited race war. Or maybe just a war against the government. It depends on which faction of the domestic terrorist right you belong to. Do you wear Hawaiian shirts to the second Civil War or do you wear camo? These questions matter, darnnit!
Regardless of which group of white people started smashing things or why, the right blamed Antifa, the right’s favorite boogeyman not named George Soros or Hillary Clinton. This allowed them to clutch their pearls in fear and demand an increasingly violent response to the civil unrest. Trump, following his authoritarian instincts, wanted to use the military to stomp out the protests. But, as in most of his life, his natural cowardice prevented him from actually giving the orders.
Instead, he tweeted about how he was going to send the military into cities and be super duper tough. Then he demanded governors carry out his super duper tough guy plan for him because, again, he was too cowardly to give the order himself.
It was only after Trump hid in his bunker that he (or more likely someone on his staff) ordered the military into DC to quell the growing protests.
That’s when Trump’s grand plan to lead a military takeover of the United States went off the rails at high speed.
If You Lead, They Might Follow. But First, You Have To Lead
Trump “leads” the same way a mob boss “leads”; he never gives the orders himself so he can claim innocence in a court of law. “It’s not my fault that military raid went wrong, blame the generals!” “It’s not my fault this pandemic spread, blame the CDC!” “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”
This is why he was trying to get the governors to order the military in. It’s true a president legally needs their consent to use the military in American cities but Trump has nothing but contempt for the law. If he thought the military would obey his illegal orders, he would have given them without a second’s hesitation.
But he didn’t know if the military would be his personal weapon so he wanted the governors to try it out first. If they had done so, Trump could take credit and he would know that the military would, in fact, deploy against the civilian population if he ordered them to start shooting protesters. If they refused to take up arms against civilians, he could blame it all on the governors for trying to force the military to break their oath, etc. etc.
These kinds of tests are a regular occurrence in the Trump regime. Cross a line here, violate a political or ethical norm there. Who needs the Constitution when you have the most powerful military in the world to subdue the masses?
And it has to be the military. While it’s been obvious for decades that the police in America are exactly the kind of stormtroopers any authoritarian thug would love to have guarding his palace, they are not a unified group. Unlike the military, there is no central command for cops. Every state, every city, every town, etc. has its own police force. Even colleges have their own distinct police force and they don’t really answer to anyone but the municipal body that pays them.
So while Trump can easily get cops to violate the civil rights of anyone and everyone he wiggles his tiny little fingers at, he can’t get them to pacify the entire country for him the way the military can. This was his chance to find out if Americans troops would, in fact, point their guns at American citizens.
Turns out the answer is, “No.”
Not one governor called the National Guard on protesters. Even in Minnesota, where protesters (or “protesters,” it’s not clear who they were) set a police station on fire, there was no hint the governor would call in the military the way Trump was demanding. Even Republican governors flatly refused.
This refusal was absolute despite increasing pressure from right wing media and, of all places, The New York Times, who solicited (yes, solicited. They called him) an incredibly disturbing op-ed from future fascist overlord Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Gilead) about how we really do need to send in the military to shoot protesters and restore “law and order” in America by throwing out the Constitution, civil rights, and human decency.
While this was going on, Trump (or Stephen Miller perhaps?) ordered the National Guard to converge on Washington DC (where it is legal for Trump to send them because there is no governor). At least he could have the military “dominate” the streets around where he lives, right?
Not so much.
Despite having roughly 5,000 troops in D.C., the protests continued and grew larger. The military did not start shooting civilians and all of the video coming out of the nation’s capitol showing state violence still had the police front and center.
Trump’s Lafayette Square stunt, possibly the single worst assault on civil rights in my lifetime that did not result in a dead body, relied entirely on the police. Even though Defense Secretary Esper and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley were there, military units were not.
Then Esper ordered most of the National Guard to return to their home states and the ones that were still there to disarm. He did this without consulting the White House a few days after issuing a statement that the military should never be used against the American people except as an absolute last resort.
Esper won’t be Secretary of Defense much longer but in the meantime, Trump’s military coup was a complete and total failure. Trump is spinning this as a “victory” for “law and order” and he is 100% correct. He was unable to destroy the rule of law. The walls held against his literal tyranny.
Trump wasn’t even able to summon his MAGA Moron Mob to save him from the mean protesters. He tweeted out the call to arms and no one came. They grabbed their guns and lined the streets in small communities to fight imaginary Antifa hordes but, except for scattered groups here and there, Trump’s brave Second Amendment Warriors hid in their bunkers, too. Maybe they had coup flu.
Orange-Skinned Surrender Monkey
Trump is already back to talking about lockdowns and slow re-openings because he would very very much like to refocus the conversation on how mean and awful Democrats are. Turns out that threatening military action against the American people in support of police brutality is super unpopular. Who would have guessed Richard Nixon’s “law and order” playbook from the 1960s, when America was way whiter and much more racist, wouldn’t work in 2020?
So, yeah, Trump is giving up the fight against the protests because he lost, badly. Give it a few more days and he may even try to take credit for the marches before denouncing them again. Who knows? It depends on what Fox News and the voices in his diseased brain tell him to do.
The good news here is that this means Trump’s almost inevitable attempt at a military coup should he lose in November is a lot less inevitable. If the military wouldn’t do his bidding now, it’s all but certain they won’t when he declares the results of the election fraudulent and orders the National Guard to install him as president-for-life.
On the other hand, it means the GOP will redouble its efforts to steal the election by any means necessary. Trump’s MAGA Moron Mob may not have shown up to risk their lives at the White House fighting protesters, but it will not be that difficult to find a small army of racists to harass and intimidate voters at the polls just five months from now. And there’s still the possibility Trump will try to grant himself “emergency powers” and seize control that way.
Trump’s military coup may be on life support but he's still a dangerous threat to American democracy. Act accordingly.
Read an excerpt from the latest piece for Banter Members:
After Four Years Of Chaos And Pain, We Need To Deal With Our Post-Traumatic Stress
"It only recently dawned upon me that all of us -- you, I, and so many of the people we know also emerged from this dark ride with internal damage"
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- Over the weekend, I took my first steps toward re-acclimating to the new post-vaccination normal, the same process so many of us are dealing with after too many years of trauma. For the first time since February 2020, I sat inside a restaurant, ate food, and drank coffee without a mask, surrounded by other maskless people.
It was familiar, of course, but more than a little unnerving. Suffice to say, I was happy to be outside again afterward. But while inside, in those conditions, I had several flashbacks to recurring COVID nightmares in which I was in a public place without a mask, and once I realized it in the dream, it became a frantic scramble to find a mask to wear before I was infected. These are the sorts of dreams we have when we’re traumatized -- especially events that are completely out of our control.
And it occurred to me that I might have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, I believe tens of millions of us do, too.
I’ve overcome a lot of terrible things in my relatively short lifetime: two devastating house fires, a bankruptcy, a house foreclosure, I’ve been hit by a car while bike riding, my best friend and podcast partner died unexpectedly... I know what trauma looks like and it really doesn’t get easier. It simply becomes more livable, even though the pain lingers and the scars form. The past four years, the Trump era, took a chunk out of me. While I’ve often discussed damage to our nation, it only recently dawned upon me that all of us -- you, I, and so many of the people we know also emerged from this dark ride with internal damage. Psychological hemorrhaging. Post-traumatic stress.
For more than a year, we trained ourselves to look upon other humans as exhaling poison. Even with masks, there were people walking around the grocery store or at work who were breathing toxins that, in the right quantity at the right time, could kill us or, short of that, leave us with myriad side-effects. Until recently, we had no sense of when it might end, no sense of what “normal” might look like when it does, and even less confidence that when the next emergency occurs we’ll be capable of handling it like responsible society-conscious grownups.
We awakened every day to news of the complete destabilization of American life, foisted upon us all by a maniacal fascist dictator whose unpredictability and incompetence made us feel as though we were perpetually about to fall over backwards in our chairs: the nauseating rush of adrenaline sparked by existential uncertainty. This kind of panicked imbalance takes a toll. We never knew when the other authoritarian shoe would drop, and whether we’d all survive…
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