The coup against the Capitol

Submitted by AWL on 11 January, 2022 - 2:53 Author: Barrie Hardy
Capitol attack, 6 June 2021

A year has passed since the assault on the US Capitol building by people intent on overthrowing the country’s elected government. The extent to which Donald Trump and his lieutenants were personally involved in orchestrating events on that day is yet to be determined.

Initial attempts to whitewash Trump saying he was just acting “the showman” on 6 January and didn’t really want his supporters to storm the building have become less and less credible with the passage of time. We know that there was a “command centre” in the Willard International Hotel staffed by Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani and others. The degree to which they were in contact with Trump on that day should emerge if the investigating House Committee gets hold of White House documents and call logs.

The public hearings into the Capitol attack scheduled this summer are expected to reveal the complicity of many Republican Congress members as well as Trump. But for certain there was a concerted attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, aspects of which are outlined in American journalist Jonathan Karl’s book, Betrayal - The Final Act of the Trump show

Karl essentially deals with the final year of the Trump presidency, when its main intent was to undermine public trust in US elections. A key theme throughout is the division between members of the Trump administration and US military who wanted to stick to constitutional rules and Trump acolytes who promoted conspiracy theories and illegal actions to keep Trump in power.

Members of the former group would refer to the latter as “the crazies” and “the cabinet of idiots”. The stuff they were coming out with was bizarre indeed. Wireless thermostats made in China for Google were supposed to have manipulated voting machines in Georgia.

The dreaded “deep state” was supposed to be exemplified by CIA Director Gina Haspel going on a secret mission to Germany to destroy evidence of rigged voting machines. “Our votes are counted in Germany and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of George Soros and [Venezuelan president] Maduro,” Giuliani declared. In fact US election results are counted locally. Fox News and others are facing billion dollar lawsuits from voting-machine companies for repeating such drivel.

Michael Flynn, who was Trump’s National Security Adviser for three weeks before being forced to resign for lying to the FBI, can be counted as one of the “crazies”, and has recently become a leading figure in the QAnon conspiracy movement. He suggested Trump declare martial law and have the military seize voting machines.

Among attempts to intimidate election officials, most infamous is Trump making one of his “perfect phone calls” to Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger instructing him to “find” 11,780 votes. Raffensperger’s refusal to do so led Trump to dub him “an enemy of the people” and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to denounce him as “Georgia’s corrupt Secretary of State”. Those charges produced a torrent of death threats against Raffensberger and his family.

Then Trump put the most high profile election official in the country, Vice President Mike Pence, in the frame on 6 January as number one target for the vengeful attackers. “You can go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy”, Trump told Pence on the morning he was due to go to Congress to certify the election results. Pence refused to do Trump’s bidding then. That made him for some the unlikely hero of 6 January. Like many other Republicans who baulked in January 2021, since then he has sought to shield Trump by denouncing investigation as distraction “from the Biden administration’s failed agenda” and undue concern with just “one day in January”.

Mark Meadows, Trump’s outgoing Chief of Staff, had a 38-slide PowerPoint presentation drawn up on how to organise a coup. It was a coup that failed, but it also looks increasingly like a dress rehearsal for a possible successful seizure of power in 2024, when the Trumpists have ironed out some of their own inefficiencies.

Karl sheds some light on shadowy figures in the Trump regime. Johnny McEntee, his “body guy”, Trump’s personal aide, previously under investigation for financial crimes related to gambling, set about purging anyone suspected of showing the slightest disloyalty to Trump. His particular concern was with the “Never Trumper” Republicans in the administration.

McEntee was out to ensure unquestioning allegiance to Trump. That is now being demanded at all levels in the Republican Party as Trumpists seek control of many branches of the federal and state governments in the mid-term elections of November 2022. Raffensperger, who refuse to “find” the necessary votes, has already been removed from his post as chair of Georgia’s state election board.

In a fit of pique during the final hours of his presidency, Trump told Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel he was quitting to form his own party. “If you do, we will lose forever,” was her concerned response. McDaniel and others have responded by a pact with the devil, overriding what they would previously have seen as democratic norms.

As the storming of the Capitol took place, some in Trump’s camp pleaded for him to call off the dogs in order not to demean his “legacy”. What was that legacy? Fantastic tax cuts for the rich, a disastrous approach to the pandemic, the appointment of three reactionary judges to the Supreme Court who would seek to overturn the hard won rights of women and Afro-Americans - and the rallying of the long-brewing mobilisation of the far right in Republican ranks round a centralised, top-down leadership.

And so we have a broken political system or even a harbinger for civil war. The speed in which the American political landscape has been transformed by this thoroughly corrupt man is truly staggering.

Socialists in America have a daunting task trying to break out of the two-party electoral straitjacket, where election laws confine most political contests to competition between two parties embedded in voting and ballot laws and representing differing fractions of the capitalist class.

The upsurge in trade union militancy during “Striketober”, on top of the huge Black Lives Matter mobilisations in 2020, show that footholds exist for building an alternative politics that can challenge the drift to right wing authoritarian dictatorship and link up with movements for racial justice and those fighting for the rights of women and oppressed minorities.

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