Who will stop the next coup attempt?
Follow us down a bleak rabbit hole
a thought exercise confronting the most harrowing details and implications of recent testimony before the House select committee on the January 6 insurrection.
What if Vice President Mike Pence hadn’t been there to stop an attempted coup on American democracy?
What if some other second-in-command had been in place, someone who allowed himself to become beaten down by the incessant, months-long pressure campaign from President Trump to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election? What if he — or perhaps by then, a she — woke up on the morning of Jan. 6 and succumbed to Trump’s 1 a.m. Twitter post demanding from him “extreme courage?” What if he acquiesced to a disturbing phone call later that morning in which the president berated him and called him a nasty euphemism for ‘wimp,’ for refusing to violate the Constitution to help him stay in office?
Would another vice president have buckled at the sight of a noose and gallows erected outside the Capitol and hordes of Trump supporters calling for a hanging? Would mortal fear, or loyalty, or blind partisanship have been enough to persuade our hypothetical VP to shrug off principle and duty and instead, use his ceremonial role in certifying electoral votes to reject them, voiding a free and fair election?
Worse still, what if he never had the chance to throw the election because the seditious mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol spotted him fleeing to an underground loading dock, overwhelmed his Secret Service detail and acted on their murderous threats?
The coup may have succeeded. What if Rusty Bowers hadn’t been the Arizona House speaker when Trump began urging Republican state officials to break their oaths and defy the Constitution in the name of party loyalty?
Would another official who voted and campaigned for Trump, just as Bowers did, have yielded to the repeated overtures from the president and his attorney John Eastman, happily going along with their absurdly illegal scheme to replace the state’s electors with a group more favorable to the president?
Would another state House speaker have folded under the weight of tens of thousands of emails, text messages and voicemails threatening his life? Would this other official have watched the caravans of Trump supporters descending on his neighborhood, the very same that terrified Bowers’ own gravely ill daughter, and finally agreed to just give the president what he wanted? What if someone else had caved when his own congressman, Andy Biggs, called in a last-ditch attempt to pressure him?
The coup may have succeeded. What if Trump and his supporters had been successful in their campaign to scapegoat and vilify rank-and-file election workers because those workers didn’t have near the resolve that Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss in Fulton County, Ga., had?
How would another mother-daughter election worker team, just trying to do their civic duty, respond to the specious lies being propagated about them by Trump and Rudy Giuliani, his top campaign lawyer? Could another mother have maintained her courage while the president alleged she was a “professional vote scammer and hustler,” as Trump called Freeman? Or when Giuliani alleged that a video showed her handing her daughter a flash drive containing fake votes when all she really gave her was ginger mints?
For Moss, simply doing her job led Trump supporters to invade her grandmother’s house; Freeman was advised by the FBI to leave her home for her own safety.
What if honest election workers stopped showing up for duty once they realized the risks? The coup may have succeeded.
Four days of House hearings have made it clear that the collapse of our union on Jan. 6 was not buttressed by the sturdiness of our institutions alone, but by the individual actions of a handful of politicians and the unwavering civic duty of election officials and workers dutifully counting ballots and assessing vote totals under severe duress.
Testimonies from compelling witnesses such as Bowers and Greg Jacob, a top White House lawyer for Pence, have lain bare the stark contrast between those who viewed their oath to defend the Constitution as a sacred public contract, and a president who viewed it as a cheap trading card.
It’s clear now, if it wasn’t before, that the threat to our democracy did not end when Biden placed his hand on the Bible weeks after the Capitol riots. As eager as many Republicans and Democrats are to put Jan. 6 in our rearview and treat it as an anomaly — a spontaneous, dastardly attempt by a disgraced president and a mob of violent sycophants to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, Americans cannot become complacent.
Heed the words of J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and legal adviser to Pence, who punctuated his June 13 testimony before the House committee with an ominous warning.
“To this very day, the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge that, in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor, as the Republican Party presidential candidate, were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020,” Luttig said.
Indeed, the claim that Trump actually won in 2020 is now a key pillar of many Republican political campaigns
local, state and federal. It’s a noxious refrain that has earwormed its way into the hearts and minds of many Trump supporters only too eager to believe it.
Republican voters have nominated at least 108 candidates for statewide office or Congress this year who have repeated Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, according to a Washington Post analysis. The majority are likely to win in their Republican-leaning districts or states. And Trump, of course, remains a front-runner for the 2024 nomination. We struggle to understand how, even Bowers, our apparent guardian of democracy, unequivocally stated Wednesday that he would again vote for Trump if he was the GOP nominee.
What if Trump is again nominated, again loses, again blames fraud, and again incites followers and fellow partisans to ‘stop the steal?’
We know the answer. We saw it with our own eyes on Jan. 6. If we’ve learned anything from several weeks of hearings, it’s just how quickly the germ of a lie can metastasize into a cancer that kills American democracy. If those of us who cherish the ideals of our republic let our guard down, the next coup attempt may well succeed.