To help sort through the overload of information about last week’s coup attempt, I’m finding it useful to think of it as involving three overlapping elements: an attack on our democracy by President Trump, an attack by congressional Republicans, and an attack by an insurrectionist mob that included neo-Nazis, white nationalists, QAnon supporters, and other members of the violent far right.
The president had been engaging in an attempted coup for weeks before the physical assault on the Capitol, centered around the lie that he won the November election, and he pursued through various attempts to throw out or manufacture an alternative set of election results. The insufficiency of this effort finally led him to incite an actual attack on Congress that might block the certification of the electoral college results or massacre his political adversaries.
Alongside that effort, congressional Republicans participated in the president’s attempted coup by echoing or at least assenting to his lies about the election, and so working to create an alternate reality that would convince millions of Republican voters that they had been robbed of their presidential choice. These efforts finally led 6 senators and 139 representatives from the GOP to vote against the validity of the 2020 election — a legislative coup attempt that instantiated the president’s attempt to overturn the election result, and which was the legislative parallel to the physical assault on the Capitol.
The third strand of the coup attempt was the physical assault on the Capitol, inspired and inflamed by the president’s claims of a stolen election, and carried out not only by conspiratorially-minded rank-and-file Republicans, but also by far-right extremists interested in decapitating the American government and perhaps instigating a civil war.
One reason to parse out these three strands, apart from helping to better grasp a complicated and fast-moving reality, is that each requires its own particular response. You could say that over the past few days, I’ve been reading furiously, and writing a bit, about how to respond to the culpability of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in making war on the United States. But I wanted to at least highlight the third element of the story for a moment, the far-right extremists who committed the actual assault on the Capitol. One of Trump’s primary crimes has been to progressively embolden and unleash these violent actors, but many have rushed to point out that this extremism has been gestating and growing for many years without nearly sufficient attention by either the federal government or by law enforcement. And we are seeing signs that these extremists have been tremendously emboldened by their attack, which at least initially resulted in justified feelings of impunity. Now the FBI is warning of possible right-wing attacks leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration this week. It appears that Trump, in his final days, has uncorked an insurrectionist movement long in the making, and that presents an immediate threat to the United States in and of itself, apart from the president’s illicit attempts to hold on to power.
But though they constitute an autonomous, and ongoing, threat to the United States, these violent actors can be influenced by the political decisions made in the coming days. There are strong arguments that punishing Trump now will take some of the wind out of their sails; at the Washington Post, Kathleen Belew and Elizabeth Neumann argue that removing the “inciter-in-chief” is a necessary element of fighting seriously against this menace. They also note that, “A united Republican response removing the individual most responsible for the incitement and empowerment of violent extremism would send a swift message that the United States will not tolerate supporting terrorism in any form — even when it comes from within their own party.” Such a response, of course, has not been forthcoming — so that even as thousands of armed men plot murder and mayhem under the blessing of the president, the Republican Party refuses to take even the most basic, patriotic steps to defend the American people and our government.