Looking back on January 6 2021 via LGM
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I looked at the LGM archives for the first week of 2021, and it’s remarkable the extent to which the attempted coup on the 6th was something that should have been totally unsurprising. We had numerous posts here in the days leading up to that act of open sedition by Trump and his allies that discussed how Trump was openly engaging in a seditious attempt to block the Electoral College certification.
We noted that on January 3, all living former Secretaries of Defense published an op-ed imploring military commanders not to follow illegal orders. Remember that? I didn’t! I made a snarky post on the night before the coup about how Cleta Mitchell had gotten sacked by her fancy law firm for the faux pas of engaging in a seditious attempt to overturn the election. Again all this was BEFORE the attack on the capitol.
Trump had been openly out of control for two months at that point, feeding his crazed fantasies/bullshit/lies (I don’t know and I don’t care which they were, do U?) about a stolen election and making it perfectly clear that he was going to do everything possible to not honor the election results. I had also forgotten that the actual recording of Trump’s January 2nd phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, ordering him to “find” 11,780 more votes, was released by the WAPO the following day. For weeks all this was treated by The Savvy ™ as just a big joke, or some sort of therapeutic venting, because Guardrails etc. (Side point: That after all this and so very much more Respectable Academics like Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn continue to crank out erudite bullshit about how Trump is really kind of like FDR if you squint just right is among other things a tribute to the normalization of treason).
My point here is that I believe there’s a strong natural tendency — I feel its force myself — to treat January 6 as if it were some sort of a bolt out of the blue, as opposed to something that happened because Trump and his minions spent, and largely out in the open, every day for two months ensuring that it would happen. That is the textbook definition of a conspiracy, and the fact that none of these people ended up paying any price for any of this explains exactly why we are where we are today.
Even more true today than five years ago:
Trump and his co-conspirators should have had a Ceausescu Christmas on the morning of January 7th (hat tip: Eastern Orthodox calendar).