by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m too lazy to hunt down the details of what I’m about to write — I’m not writing for VOX, after all — but here is a rough outline of what I know about the events leading up to Trump’s January 6th attempted autogolpe. I’ve added relevant text from another post I’ve written to flesh out this post.
Background
When the history of Trumplandia is written, two people will stick out as having changed everything by what they did — or didn’t do: Bill Barr and Mike Pence. What makes their actions so weird in hindsight is neither one of them was ever mentioned as the “guardrails” that were going to save us from Trump’s excesses. In fact, they were some of the biggest toadies for Trump — until they weren’t at very crucial moments in time.
First, Bill Barr. Bill Barr — at least in my opinion — had a specific purpose when he was originally hired: end the Mueller Investigation. He wrapped that up and did plenty of really shitty things. And then in the 2020 – 2021 timeframe he did something that saved American democracy for four more years: nothing. He sat on his hands.
So, even though Barr intimately knew on a personal basis how badly Trump wanted DOJ to indict the Bidens, or Hillary or Obama or whomever, he was able to simply slow walk all of Trump’s would-be autocratic moves so they were moot. Without Barr doing that, it’s very possible that all the autocratic things I thought up in 2020 Trump would have done and he would still be president.
It is a testament to what a lazy ding-dong Trump is that in the summer and early fall of 2020 he was not far more aggressive against Biden. Anyone else in Trump’s position would have leaned into the fact that he was now politically above the law and, as such, could do anything to stay in power and it work. If Bill Barr wouldn’t indict the Bidens, then a true autocrat in Trump’s position would have fired him in the middle of 2020 and found someone who would. Trump talked a lot about indicting Hunter Biden or Joe Biden…but it was all talk. He didn’t even simply fire anyone necessary to have something akin to the Second Comey Letter released.
We can only conclude from this that Trump is a historical and political avatar. He’s not a great man, he just kind of drifts through history reflecting the rot of our undead liberal democracy back at us. As such, it didn’t really sink into Trump he might be forced out of office until the moment it was too late to use politics — the moment the election was called for Biden. It was at this moment Trump both freaked out and, on a political level, all of Trump’s options ended.
Thus, Trump would have to use extra-political means to stay in office.
Autogolpe
When, on a political basis, all of Trump’s options faded away, he began to freak out and think up ways to stay in office through an autogolpe — self-coup. His first idea was to berate and lean on the people who certified the election results in an effort to get them to nullify Biden’s win that way. He was calling up election officials from all over the country — and even inviting to the White House –in a panicked, desperate attempt to nullify Biden’s win at one of its weakest links.
When that didn’t work, Trump continued to panic. He began to lean on the Justice Department, hoping that they would simply say “the election was corrupt.” That’s all he wanted, just like with Ukraine. He just wanted people with authority to announce an investigation into the “corrupt” 2020 election and then he and Rudy would use the same agitprop techniques of the last five odd years to, through sheer ego and bullshit — force the election into the House and Senate.
Here’s something to mull — it’s very possible that our autocracy will come “legally’ when Republicans starting in 2024 always push POTUS elections into the House and Senate. Because Republicans have a majority of House delegations, they will always win. Let me repeat that: They. Will Always. Win. Because this up-to-now obscure element of the Constitution is their ultimate failsafe for winning elections, Republicans will use it to establish white Christian minority rule.
In fact, if America slips peacefully into autocracy, it will be because of that specific provision of the Constitution. It will be “Constitutional” so it will give the liberal media a hook to explain to the average person why they should cool it with talk of a civil war. This development will be framed just like the Bush V. Gore decision and, gradually, it will be such conventional wisdom that Republicans always win presidential elections that Republicans will finally get what they want: people will stop voting.
Of course, Republicans, once they know they can do whatever the fuck they want, will inevitably abuse their power to the point where we’re indistinguishable from autocratic Russia or there’s a civil war. I think we’re probably just going to become an autocracy and that’s it. At the moment, I just don’t see us breaking the seal on civil war.
If civil war happens, it will probably happen directly because of Trump’s personal incompetence at some critical moment in history. If history picks anyone else to shepherd us into autocracy, then it’s a done deal.
Let’s go back to the autogolpe. In the end, what spelled the demise of Trump’s autogolpe plot was how fucking lazy and stupid he was. He came up with all these ideas for how to throw the election into the House and Senate…and he just couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. He just was too deranged to simply fire anyone necessary to get that accomplished.
All the conditions were there, but, in the end, it was Trump, specifically, who fucked up and gave American democracy a few years of breathing room.
Because Trump could not pull the trigger, the last ditched effort of the autogolpe was something like this — gather a bunch of die hard MAGA fuckers near the Capitol, incite them in a speech, and then see what happened. At moment, there is no evidence that Trump knew how successful the insurrection would be, but he and his toadies knew, in general, what was likely to happen. In this respect, Trump gave himself some “plausible deniability” should the insurrection actually be a success.
So, from what I can tell, what Trump wanted was to get the mob to browbeat Pence into not certifying the vote. Why else were they chanting, “Hang Mike Pence?” This would throw everything up in the air and then Congress would get involved and that’s where Trump thought he would win because in the House each state delegation would get one vote and Republicans have a majority of delegations
The specific uses of the Electoral Count Act elude me, but it might have bene the middle step that Trump and Rudy could have fucked with to get a win. But the point remains — weirdly enough, we all owe Pence a lot of gratitude for destroying his political career by doing his fucking job.
Pence is the consummate Trump sycophant. Or, at least, he was until January 6th. After defending Trump at every turn for any and everything he did, no matter how horrible or autocratic, on January 6th Pence gave American democracy a second chance by simply doing his fucking job. (Which in the specific case of certification was simply to announce the certification, he didn’t really have to do anything other than not nullify the certification by going rouge.)
And, so because of the actions of two people everyone assumed would be Trump’s lapdogs, American democracy was spared for a few years. You honestly could not make such shit up.
Anyway, once Pence certified the vote, Trump lost.
