Biden vs. Trump debate

[Dill]

(07-02-2024, 10:57 AM)Mike M (the other one) Wrote: Did you see any military participation? 
Maybe I missed that report from MSM.

Maybe you missed the definition of a coup? 

Andy Craig from the CATO Institute walks us through the definition of "coup" as Political Scientists understand and use the term. Here are some excerpts.
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Yes, It Was an Attempted Coup: Getting this right isn’t just semantics. It’s also crucial to how we respond to what happened.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/yes-it-was-attempted-coup#

...Too Stupid To Be a Coup?

Writing for the Mercatus Center’s Discourse magazine, Michael J. Ard offers a reasonable case against calling Jan. 6 a coup attempt. Unlike some, he is not at all interested in minimizing or excusing what happened that day or how Trump incited it. Rather, his argument is that the whole affair was simply too disorganized, delusional and poorly planned to count as a real, serious attempted coup. As Ard puts it, “We know that this Trumpian ‘coup attempt’ depended on arcane procedures and ‘magical thinking’ and was ill‐conceived and poorly coordinated.”

...But none of those aspects, as such, really preclude the label “coup attempt.” To reach a conclusion on that, we must look at the goals of the plot, not the competence with which it was executed. In short, the riot at the Capitol cannot be considered in isolation.

...To start, we need some definition of a coup and thus what it means to attempt one. A reasonable starting point would be the extra‐legal seizure of power. The end goal of a coup is placing some person or group of people in control of the state—specifically, people who would not otherwise be in that position under the uninterrupted operation of existing constitutional law. The two irreducible elements are the seizure of power and doing so unlawfully.

That, however, leaves things too broad. We do not speak of the American Revolution as a coup; it was a revolution. A coup takes place on a smaller scale, though the boundary is admittedly fuzzy. Coups are typically brief in time—hours, days, perhaps weeks at the most. And they are committed by a relatively small number of people at or near the seat of power. A coup is less about occupying territory, as one might in a war, and more about assuming physical control of the seat of government.

Most often, this involves the military, not just in acquiescing to the result but in actively producing it. Still, a military coup is not the only kind of coup. A palace coup, for example, might involve only the support of the palace guard. And a coup might not even involve those currently holding government offices at all, if we regard a putsch as a kind of coup, which it is usually reckoned to be.

Nor does a coup necessarily involve violence, though the threat of it is there, as it always is behind state power. This possibility is particularly relevant for the kind of coup we speak of when it comes to Trump: an auto‐coup, in which an incumbent head of state leads a coup against the existing constitutional order. Such coups are often examples of a bloodless coup, though not always. Bloodless coups do happen and are generally recognized as still falling under the label “coup.”

It’s the Goal, Not the Competence

After the 2020 U.S. presidential election was over, and at the very latest, after the Electoral College had voted in mid‐December and all of Trump’s court appeals had been exhausted, there was never any legal way for Trump to remain in power. It is this aspect of the events of Jan. 6 that makes referring to that day as a mere riot insufficient. “Riot” fails to convey the scope and gravity of the matter.

The United States did indeed suffer an attempted coup at the hands of the former president, but this coup attempt was not limited to what was done by the mob of Trump supporters at the Capitol. Rather, the entire effort to overturn the election was an attempted coup. Jan. 6 was its culmination but also the moment of its final failure, after which its leader admitted defeat and effectively surrendered, conceding that the lawful transfer of power would take place.

This broader understanding of the attempted coup even includes the hypothetical scenario in which Congress somehow sided with the objections made by Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and other dead‐end Trump supporters in Congress to counting electoral votes from disputed states. This gambit might have observed the form of a legislative procedure—a hollow imitation of lawfulness. But it would have been entirely illegitimate and unconstitutional all the same, a violation of not only the statutory Electoral Count Act, but also, more importantly, the legitimate powers of Congress under the Constitution.

Such a hypothetical outcome would not have constituted a “non‐coup” route to keeping Trump in power; it would have merely represented congressional complicity in a successful coup.
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And the recent SCOTUS ruling, aptly named Trump vs the US, pretty much insures Trump will never be held accountable for his coup attempt.