Are We Looking At A Coup?

Nan Elections, Politics, , , , ,

I’m going to let readers consider the following and make your own conclusions.

Coup: A sudden and decisive change of government illegally or by force.

From Vox: Trump is Attempting a Coup in Plain Sight

“Joe Biden has won the presidency. But the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is attempting a coup in plain sight. “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” he tweeted on Saturday morning. This came after he demanded that states cease counting votes when the total began to turn against him, after his press secretary shocked Fox News anchors by arguing that legally cast votes should be thrown out.”

[…]

“That this coup probably will not work — that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively — does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences. Millions will believe Trump, will see the election as stolen.”

“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell.

As some of you may be able to identify, I have relatives that are certain this election was “stolen.” They are waiting with baited breath to see what their Dear Leader will do next … and will undoubtedly vigorously applaud his every action.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

71 thoughts on “Are We Looking At A Coup?”

  1. The last 4 years have looked like an attempted slow coup. But Trump fails at everything.

    However, I’ll give Trump some credit. He has convincingly shown that the Republican party is the party of crooks and traitors. And he has shown that there is nothing Christian about American conservate Christianity.

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    • Surely we have known for a long time the deviousness of the GOP. Trump has pulled back the covers for all to see their corruption. How long will the public remember their assault on democracy?

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    • he’s a scary scary man, if only because he’s so inept, and because his worshippers see him as St. Donald. I have no idea why.
      Yet he has managed to convince people that he is to be the next permanent president and don’t think they havent thought of that.

      He’s a disrupter.

      I can only hope he lets go of the office he had no business ever being in, in the first place. I don’t care if they have to tie him to a chair and wheel him out the window. Sooner or later someone will realize that he’s mad, truly, and should be tucked away somewhere.

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  2. Perhaps violent riots, yes, but to what end? States can raise the national guard and perhaps some might follow direction from Republican governors to support Trump and the rioters but many will not… because Trump is not the Republican party but a loser in an election. And nothing galvanizes Republicans more than getting ready for the next election!

    Seriously, though, without the US military FIRMLY behind a coup, I can’t see it happening. And the military will defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. Trump refusing to concede the Office he has lost in a free election at the very least to the popular vote – no matter how many frivolous lawsuits and claims of fraud might be made, no matter how many supporters are willing to bear arms – is illegal. The Armed Forces will be at Biden’s disposal because he is the legal Office holder-in-waiting. So the real question is whether Biden has the steel necessary to put down by overwhelming violence if necessary civilian rioting. I have no doubt Harris does, but Biden I think will want to demonstrate patience and commitment to a peaceful resolution first. The problem, however, is that Trump has neither quality and so I would be surprised – very pleasantly surprised – if there was no violence by some grossly deluded Republican nationalists.

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  4. I can remember several close elections in our past where the losing Party screamed, whined, cried, protested, etc, etc, et al. The last one was Al Gore & George W. Now the bull-horns are reversed, as they’ve always done. But the difference today is that we truly have an Authoritarian 6th-grader in the WH who cannot stand losing… so much so that he embarrasses and shames himself every time he opens his mouth or types up asinine Tweets. 🙄

    Meanwhile, I found this song to be SO apropos today and the coming days/weeks of lawsuits, courts, judges, etc, etc, from the White House trying to get in the judicial doors in futility. Check it out…

    Ob la di, ob-la-da, life goes on, BYE
    La-la, how the life goes on
    Ob-la di, ob-la-da, life goes on, BYE
    La-la, how the life goes on

    Sing BA, BA, BA, BA, BYE-BYE!!! 👋

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  5. “Farcically, erratically, ineffectively” — those are the key words in the post. For any autocrat to mount a successful coup, he needs institutional support. Trump has systematically insulted and alienated the military, Congressional Republicans, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, and every other group whose support he would need to pull off a coup. Even Republican politicians only went along with him these four years out of fear. Now that his power is soon to end, they have no incentive to back him in an extra-legal power grab which they know would probably fail and land any collaborators in prison or in front of a firing squad in the process.

    Even Kushner has tried to persuade Trump to face reality and concede to Biden. If Trump can’t even win over his own demon-possessed Ken doll, he doesn’t have a chance in Hell of pulling off a coup.

    Yes, millions of Trumpanzees will remain convinced the election was stolen, but so what. There’s not going to be violence on a major scale. They’ll sit at their computers and post menacing shit on the internet and do nothing, just as they always have. They’ll join the other millions who believe in Kennedy-assassination conspiracies and alien lizard people and low-carb diets and creationism and astrology and all the rest of the sludge that accumulates at the bottom of the gene pool. It’s depressing but we’ve lived with it for generations and can continue to do so. The important thing is that Trump will be out of power.

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    • Not sure that I totally agree with this — They’ll sit at their computers and post menacing shit on the internet and do nothing.

      There have definitely been some artillery-laden Trump supporters that have caused more than a little uproar. With a bit of “encouragement” from their messiah, I wouldn’t put it past them to do what they can to support his warped mindset. Remember, he’s technically still in office until January 20th.

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      • Oh, there will be isolated violent incidents. There already have been. But nothing even remotely approaching the scale needed to have any political impact. These guys can’t launch an insurrection. They’re far too inept and disorganized.

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        • I’ve got a few cousins who are gun carrying Trumpers and white nationalists. They’re looking for a fight and so friggin’ unorganized, angry and dumb, they’re just as likely to shoot themselves in the penis as anyone or anything else. They’re out there, and violence may break out here and there, but a full on coup? Unlikely, I think.

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          • Seriously, there are good reasons why an army isn’t just a random mob of guys with guns each of whom runs around shooting at anything he personally doesn’t like. It has a formal hierarchical chain of command culminating in senior generals who formulate and execute an overall strategy. The wingnut militias have nothing like that. At best they’re small local bands, each with an informal dominant male with no real way of enforcing his authority if others decide to challenge it. They have no way of formulating and executing a strategy beyond the scale of local raids, never mind what would be necessary to challenge the government of a continent-spanning nation across any appreciable portion of its territory. They’re more comparable to urban street gangs than to an army. They’ll never be more than a sporadic law-enforcement problem.

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          • I agree, though these idiots looking for shit to shoot at can hurt people with their idiocy. Pulling off a coup? No. BUT, idiots with guns firing at perceived bad guys can, I believe, get several innocent folks hurt and/or killed. Trump may very well indeed incite this kind of thing. The dude is just a bad guy. He’s gasoline walking around lightly burning embers of idiocy just praying to ignite them into a full blaze of violent asininity. I just hope innocent folks do not get hurt. However, I am greatly in favor of trumpanzees shooting off their own dicks cause, really, these people simply need to stop having the ability to breed.

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          • Yes, like I said, there will be isolated violent incidents. People will get killed, maybe even dozens. But the Nan was talking about the possibility of an actual coup. The rank-and-file armed wingnuts are nowhere near capable of pulling off anything like an insurrection from below, and Trump is in no position to pull of a coup d’état from above, as I said in my first comment.

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          • “A well-regulated militia” they are not. There is no cohesion and no discipline. They do present a danger and a menace to the public, therefore the FBI has a file on most of them.

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        • Although the right-wing militia are too inept to pull off a coupl they could be “useful idiots,” sparking and fuelling unrest — along with the more activist hotheads of the left, portrayed by Trump as “Antifa scum” — which, if widespread, could allow the President to declare a state of emergency, and interfere with a smooth transition in January.

          With this in mind, his call to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” may be even more of a dog whistle than we knew. These nutbar militias are primed to defend Aaerica against what they see as some sort of communist takeover by the Democrats. They think Trump is their leader in this patriotic mission. When told to “stand back,” do they hear “Just leave it to me, watch and learn, and be ready to act when it all goes down”?

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          • Hello AJ! I appreciate you stopping by and sharing your thoughts. Your last paragraph rings truer than many of us would like. 😟

            Hopefully, Trump will decide playing golf is more fun than stirring up trouble. HA! I’m not going to hold my breath.

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          • I suspect the T— plan is to create an impression of fraud, use social media to continue to broadcast this indisputable fake news, and get state officials just uncertain enough to NOT to certify the vote count immediately but hold off… hold off long enough to have the decision passed on to the House of Representatives where each state gets but one vote. This is the only thing that makes sense to me. Whether these officials cave or not I think is the thing to watch… and what the military might do in response to this ‘legal’ maneuver. I would hate to see what happens if this plan succeeds because I don’t think it would stand without significant violence erupting coast to coast.

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        • I do get the sense that people are distancing themselves quite rapidly from Trump, much the way you’d begin to leave when drunken Uncle Arthur careened into the party…they may laught at him, and cheer, but no one wants to get involved with him, at any level.

          Mueller and his merry band are sitting put, shoot, they got the jobs they wanted, and I doubt if there’s much support there.

          Blinding flash, here: i wonder how many people are left in his cheering section who have already realized what a loon he is, but they can’t admit it to anyone.

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      • Bears a frightening resemblance. Those women that recently won the Nobel prize for their genetic scissors should maybe now look for and eradicate the sequence that produces this arrogant grimace.

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    • A military coup is not going to happen. They may be willing to test some local law enforcement, but don’t think they have the huevos to buck the military.

      The Supreme Court can’t simply take an action for or against anyone. It doesn’t work from the top down. First, there has to be some substantial evidence of voter fraud or other illegal activity. Second, the offended party has to begin their case at the local level. Then, upon losing their case they can begin the appeals process. I have no doubt in my military mind that if there was a whit of evidence, the Trump/GOP Keystone Kops corp would be all over it.

      I don’t doubt that some of those knuckle-dragging minions will attempt some stupid act, like kidnapping a Governor. I was afraid that during all the celebrating Biden/Harris election, that something bad would happen. As far as I know, it didn’t. But when we are dealing with people of that intellectual caliber it isn’t safe to count anything out.

      This article was in Daily Kos today:
      https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/7/1993905/-No-I-will-not-meet-you-halfway-You-must-change?detail=emaildkre

      The GOP, the Christian Nationalist, the White Supremacist, the wannabe militias who presume they have some monopoly on long guns, do not own this nation. It is ours, and if we care at all for our democracy, we will have to stand up for it.

      The voters have delivered the coup d’etat to the Trump regime. The coup de gras is in the offing. There will be a lot of chimpanzees throwing dirt in the air and shaking the bushes as they get over their loss, but they will be OK. They spent four years trying to get over the fact that Trump won in 2016. Maybe this will help them to move on.

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      • Exactly. The fact that Trump is talking as if he can actually do any of this crap shows that in four years he still hasn’t bothered to figure out how things actually work. He thinks he or the Supreme Court can just issue a vague order telling everything that’s bothering him to go away and it will happen. He didn’t even seem to know that the president doesn’t have the authority to postpone an election.

        We really need to spend less time worrying about some of this stuff. Yes, there were grounds for worrying that Trump might legitimately eke out another electoral-college win, but that danger is past. The idea that one of the most incompetent politicians in American history, who has alienated almost every ally he might need in such a case, could carry out a coup d’état — or that small disorganized pockets of addled cosplayers with guns could seriously threaten the legal government of such a huge country — well, one can always imagine all sorts of scary monsters hiding under the bed, but they don’t actually materialize.

        I don’t doubt that some of those knuckle-dragging minions will attempt some stupid act, like kidnapping a Governor.

        It’s remotely possible that they might even succeed in kidnapping and/or killing a governor. But again, that would have no effect on the legal political order. The lieutenant governor or whatever would just take over and that would be that. And, such an act would scare the shit out of a lot of powerful people and probably lead to a massive crackdown on the militias. They’d doom themselves and accomplish nothing.

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        • in four years he still hasn’t bothered to figure out how things actually work — This is probably the best argument against a coup that’s been offered so far … !!!

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          • This is an operation that tried to book space at a hotel for Giuliani’s press conference and apparently ended up booking it at a landscaping company with a similar name by mistake. These guys are definitely a few ants short of a picnic. I think any coup they attempted would end up looking like something out of a Three Stooges movie.

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          • And anyone who actually believes that they can stop an official vote count on their commands alone (because hes looooosing) has no idea of just where he is in the heirarchy. Presidents preside. They don’t dictate. They are the servant of the people. He seems to have not gotten that far.

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  6. I think maybe even the Senate might vote for an impeachment to shut him up now, he’s trying to foment a civil war. Just one unguarded plea to his base to cause violence would e enough to have him. A quick result could see him arrested …or shot…….and the army on the streets might cool the ardour of the base until things settle down. I’m sure Trump and most of the family have committed Treason right back to Mueller’s report.
    Hugs

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  7. Hi Nan;
    I just spoke with a person who I admire and respect, but is a republican. He believes there were illegally cast votes sufficient to change the election. When I told him that Trumps own people were unable to find any substantial illegal voting he declared that “the absence of evidence does not deny the presence of crime”. I don’t know how to respond to something like that.

    Hugs;
    randy

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    • See? Typical religious apologetics and denialist tactics seamlessly transferred in to the political sphere. This is the identical line of reasoning to the fact that there is no evidence from reality to support so many religious beliefs, so the standard reply – the apologetics – is to say the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence… as if no evidence can be so easily explained under the disguise of “We don’t know everything for certain, therefore there is just as much a likelihood for something unbelievably irrational as not.” This is why evidence-based reasoning doesn’t apply to the True Believer in any area of honest inquiry about reality… because reality plays no part – the denialism – and so evidence or its absence FROM reality gains no respect. It is the antithesis of fact-based reasoning, and that explains why so many Trump supporters are willing to believe that their beliefs about reality should trump reality’s part in supporting claims made about it (pun intended). And that’s just another fact-based evidence-adduced reason to demonstrate how faith-based belief poisons everything, no matter what area of human concern we’re talking about.

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    • he declared that “the absence of evidence does not deny the presence of crime”. I don’t know how to respond to something like that

      Tell him he’s a child molester. When he protests, tell him that the total lack of any evidence supporting the accusation “does not deny” that it’s true.

      Absence of evidence is evidence of absence, in the case of a phenomenon which would logically generate such evidence if it were real. If somebody claims there is an elephant in the room wit you, the fact that you don’t see, hear, or smell any trace of an elephant genuinely is evidence that he’s wrong and that there’s no elephant there.

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    • I think that this is being investigated right now. Probably there is not going to be evidence of sufficient concern to overturn the outcome of the election. But, it seems to me that it is better this is all looked into now and proven one way or the other, so we can move forward together especially because it was such a close election.

      As Nan’s post shared, “Democracy only works when the losers can accept that they’ve actually lost…”

      We need a clean slate moving forward.

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      • Hello Becky. The problem is the accusations of wrongdoing are being thrown around with no evidence to back the accusations up. Everyone from SPTV ( fox news ) reporters to tRump’s own lawyers in court are asserting they have no evidence of the very accusations made. So is it worth making a drawn out court investigation of something that doesn’t exist? As Infidel753 said if there is a claim of an elephant in the room yet no evidence of one, that is evidence of no elephant being present. I can claim rainbow unicorns exist and tore up my yard but should the local police be forced to spend time investigating to find these rainbow unicorns? All during the voting there were accusations of mail in ballot fraud that were so baseless as to be a farce due to the lack of knowledge of how the mail in ballots work and are check to insure no fraud. Now the nonsense claims of fraud are continuing like a child desperately trying to find an excuse that will get him out of a lie. It is an insult to the voters, a waste of time for the courts, and feeds the attempted illegitimacy tRump wants to paint the Biden Presidency with. We shouldn’t allow or entertain that smear tactic. Be well. Hugs

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    • Why would you even consider responding to such a comment?

      Read up on (or take a course in) basic logic, argumentation, and read Eric Hoffer’s, “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.”

      Get better friends. 🙂

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  8. The opposite to a Republican coup you ponder is far more likely, in that if Trump were to try to stay in power there would be just as much if not more armed resistance… assuming civil authorities were to go along with it (which I sincerely doubt). I get a sense of a line being drawn especially by legions of younger people right here, right now that they will not tolerate doing nothing about so many very real and pressing concerns that have been systematically ignored by the governing Republicans. That time frame of being patient I think is done, and so I suspect far, far more violence would result if the smooth transition of power were not to occur.

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  9. I can see this by definition.

    We were warned by his former lawyer how this would go, and his prediction is playing out. One senior Trump appointee is already blocking normal progress of the transition. I expect that to continue well into next year. They stone-walled Obama, they will play the same game with Joe.

    DT is not going away, neither are his (now 67 million) cult followers.

    Most coups are against existing, in power, governments. This is that entity waging a coup against itself in many ways with no thought of the consequences to the American democracy or the people.

    The photo of “Il Duce” and the “Ob la di, ob-la-da, life goes on” song will be playing in my head for the rest of this day. ARG!!

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  10. I trust most of you who have responded noted the very first line in this post? 😊

    And I thank you! It’s been a great discussion … and I think most everyone who took part agrees it’s HIGHLY unlikely, if not impossible, for a coup to take place.

    This doesn’t mean, however, that the next several weeks are going to be free of the same/usual Trump sh__. He NEEDS as much attention and fawning of his supporters (in and out of the White House) as he can get in order to function.

    However, THANKFULLY, it will all soon end!

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  11. The relief was palpable over the weekend for many of us who felt like a weight had been lifted. I’m not going to rest easy, however, until this president is behind bars without WIFI. He and his supporters do not play by any rules or moral codes. Time and time again, he has proven that he cares for no one other than himself. We know he’s a loose cannon and that isn’t going to change. IMHO

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