mellowtigger | it's as bad as I thought (Reply)

There's still debate about the use of the word 'coup'. I initially understood why there were detractors, but now I no longer understand why. In addition to my initial assessment, more information is now available to prove it was an engineered crisis.

Trump Stacks the Pentagon and Intel Agencies With Loyalists. To What End?
So far, there is no evidence the appointees harbor a secret agenda or arrived with an action plan. But their sudden appearance amounts to a purge of the Pentagon’s top civilian hierarchy without recent precedent.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/us/politics/trump-pentagon-intelligence-iran.html

Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence to do his bidding to overturn the election, threatening repercussions if he didn't. Reminder: Someone was wandering Congress specifically asking, "Where is Pence?"

People close to the vice president now believe he is being set up as a "scapegoat" to shoulder the blame inside Trump-world after Pence refused to buckle to the President's demands to engineer a procedural coup that would keep Trump in power.
On Tuesday, Pence came under intense pressure from Trump to toss out the election results during a meeting that lasted hours in the Oval Office. The vice president's chief of staff, Marc Short, was banned by Trump from entering the West Wing, the source said, as the President repeatedly warned with "thinly veiled threats" to Pence that he would suffer major political consequences if he refused to cooperate.
"The message was pretty clear," the source said.
- https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/politics/trump-pence-riot/index.html

The WaPo story goes into great detail about the security response, and it appears bureaucratically complicated due to the fact that D.C. is (still) not (yet) a state, but the relevant passages are these (also confirmed in this news video):

The Defense Department controls the D.C. Guard because the military force answers to the president rather than the mayor. The president’s power over the D.C. Guard is delegated to the defense secretary, then the Army secretary, who makes command decisions. It is therefore up to the Pentagon leadership to call state governors if the D.C. Guard needs reinforcement.... “I was actually on the phone with Leader Hoyer, who was pleading with us to send the guard,” Hogan said. “He was yelling across the room to Schumer and they were back and forth saying we do have the authorization, and I’m saying, ‘I’m telling you we do not have the authorization.’ ” Hogan said Maj. Gen. Timothy Gowen, the adjutant general of the Maryland National Guard, was repeatedly rebuffed by the Pentagon. “The general . . . kept running it up the flagpole, and we don’t have authorization,” he said.
- www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-protests-washington-guard-military/2021/01/07/c5299b56-510e-11eb-b2e8-3339e73d9da2_story.html

The military were manipulated to stall. The police were at least partially complicit. Meanwhile, some of the insurrectionists were prepared for more.

First of all, given the well-documented overlap between ex-military, law enforcement, and right-wing militias, it’s entirely possible these guys were weekday warriors using their training in service of extracurricular interests. (One of the Twitter sleuths who are now trying to track them down sure seems to think they’re ex-military.) More importantly, the long awful course of history reminds us how slippery the slope is from playacting as a strike force to actually behaving as a strike force. Once the zip ties go on, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a “real” terrorist or not.
- https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/was-there-a-plan-for-hostages-or-killings-at-the-capitol.html

I repeat that what happened on January 6th was a failed coup, intended to support loyalists within government who tried to deny reality and ignore votes. Thankfully it had the opposite effect on some of the useful idiots who finally realized their own lives were endangered by this nonsense. It was not an ordered coup, but a manipulated one. Still a coup.

History threatens to repeat itself. <----- IMPORTANT