{"id":158175,"date":"2021-01-19T22:51:43","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T19:51:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/not-a-coup-opposite\/"},"modified":"2021-01-19T22:51:43","modified_gmt":"2021-01-19T19:51:43","slug":"not-a-coup-opposite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/not-a-coup-opposite\/","title":{"rendered":"#Not a coup. Opposite!"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Not a coup. Opposite!<\/strong>”
\nI’m\u00a0no Trump supporter, but let\u2019s be reasonable: On Jan. 6, the president did what every politician does\u2014he asked his supporters to fight for him, and\u00a0after\u00a0they fought for him by invading a government building, assaulting four dozen police officers, and hunting down and threatening to assassinate the country\u2019s top lawmakers, he told them he loved them.<\/p>\n

And now, with nothing but the evidence of hundreds of hours of eyewitness footage playing out for the entire country to see on TV, the Democrats rush to judgement and impeach him. And for what? Trump may not\u00a0be to\u00a0everyone\u2019s\u00a0taste, but it takes a particularly fevered imagination to\u00a0describe\u00a0a violent attempt to overthrow the government as a violent attempt to\u00a0overthrow\u00a0the government.<\/p>\n

No one is saying that what happ<\/a>ened at the Capitol was pretty. Lots of things aren\u2019t pretty.\u00a0Urging a mob\u00a0to assassinate the vice-president and\u00a0subvert a democratic election to maintain your grip on power; abusing the presidential pardon to reward corrupt political allies and erode the rule of law; cancel culture. This is all ugly stuff.\u00a0But come on. Let\u2019s lower the temperature. This is a time for healing, a time for unity, not for meticulous investigations into a presidentially-incited riot that led to the deaths of\u00a0 five people and turned the nation\u2019s capital into something resembling a war zone. To everything there is a season: a time to hold people to account, and a time to utterly fail to hold people to account.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s review the bidding. Did the sitting president, who had for two months\u00a0failed to persuade a single court to overturn the election result in more than 60 attempts,\u00a0release his mob of\u00a0unhinged\u00a0supporters upon the Capitol at the precise hour\u00a0when legislators were about to certify his rival\u2019s victory? Yes.<\/p>\n

Did his lawyer call for \u201ctrial by combat\u201d\u00a0before that same mob\u00a0that same morning? Also yes.<\/p>\n

Did the president call for military and law enforcement to join the mob? Looks that way.<\/p>\n

Did the mob grab a police officer\u2019s gun and say, \u201cKill him with his own gun\u201d?<\/p>\n

Grab\u00a0a\u00a0police officer\u2019s baton and beat him\u00a0half to death\u00a0with it? Did they drag another police officer down the stairs and bludgeon him with an American flagpole? Did they murder\u00a0still another\u00a0police officer with a fire extinguisher? Sure. Okay. Let\u2019s say yes.<\/p>\n

Did rioters brandish what law enforcement knows as \u201cflex cuffs,\u201d designed to hold people hostage? Obviously.<\/p>\n

Did some arrive with tasers?\u00a0Check.<\/p>\n

Guns?\u00a0Check.<\/p>\n

Scythes, pitchforks, baseball bats? Jars filled with Napalm?\u00a0Check and double-check.<\/p>\n

Did they place explosive devices in strategic locations around the city that could have served as decoys for their invasion of the Capitol building had the bombs successfully detonated? No doubt about it.<\/p>\n

Did the rioters include highly trained former and off-duty military and police officers? They did.<\/p>\n

Did the rioters say they wished to prevent the legislative branch of government from certifying the results of a democratic election? Of course.<\/p>\n

Did they call for \u201cHeads on pikes\u201d? Naturally.<\/p>\n

Did they construct a gallows specifically designed to hang and kill the vice president who had angered the president, and did they repeatedly declare that they wished to hang him, and did they search the Capitol asking where he was for the purpose of hanging him? Yes, yes, and yes.<\/p>\n

Did they say that they were sent to the Capitol by the sitting president?\u00a0Many, many times.<\/p>\n

And did they receive\u00a0enthusiastic applause\u00a0from the sitting president as he watched rather than fierce\u00a0denunciations,\u00a0demands that they leave the Capitol,\u00a0and\u00a0immedia<\/a>te orders to mobilize\u00a0the National Guard? One would expect nothing less.<\/p>\n

I guess what I\u2019m trying to say is: calm down.\u00a0Let\u2019s end the emotional exaggerations and\u00a0the \u201cTrump Derangement Syndrome\u201d\u00a0and be clear about what this \u201cfailed coup attempt\u201d really was. It wasn\u2019t an insurrection\u2014it was\u00a0simply\u00a0a few thousand\u00a0deranged, homicidal\u00a0people, many of them armed with weapons, combat gear, military training, hostage-taking equipment and uncanny knowledge of the complex and highly classified tunnel systems underneath the national legislature, who with planning and weaponry overcame the defences of the Capitol under the direction of the President of the United States an hour after he told them to \u201cfight like hell\u201d, and after months of him refusing to concede defeat in a legitimate election he repeatedly claimed was rigged. That\u2019s all. If you want to make it out to be anything more than that\u2014I hate to be the one to tell you this\u2014but you\u2019re becoming what you hate. If you want to see a real coup, an innocent man-child has now been forcibly removed from Twitter\u00a0merely\u00a0for\u00a0repeatedly urging his followers to do\u00a0something that was totally not a coup.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important we be precise in our terms: this was not a coup, worthy of impeachment; this was A Very Bad Thing, worthy of being called A Very Bad Thing.\u00a0If we surrender now to the demands of law professors and respected statesmen to convict and remove the president, what kind of precedent are we setting?\u00a0Are we going to remove every future president from office who sends an angry mob to hunt down and kill legislators tasked with ensuring a peaceful transition of power?<\/p>\n

What bothers me most is this: Why would anyone think that when the president told his mob of supporters to\u00a0\u201cfight like hell,\u201d\u00a0and his son said \u201cactually fight,\u201d they literally meant\u00a0\u201cfight\u201d? Is it because the President\u2019s supporters actually, violently fought Or that when they did actually, violently fight, he was\u00a0reportedly very\u00a0excited about it? Or that when people asked him to prevent his supporters from actually, violently fighting, he resisted,\u00a0instead posting a Tweet attacking his vice president as a coward?\u00a0Because if that\u2019s the best evidence you have to show that this supposed \u201ccoup\u201d went all the way to the top,\u00a0well, we might as well impeach Richard Nixon while we\u2019re at it.<\/p>\n

The fact that they didn\u2019t kill legislators and prevent the election\u2019s certification is incontrovertible proof that there was never any chance of them killing legislators and preventing the election\u2019s certification, which is incontrovertible proof that they weren\u2019t even\u2019t trying. This cannot possibly have been a failed coup, because it failed. Also, some of them wore costumes.<\/p>\n

I think the real crime here is hypocrisy.\u00a0How can we express support for\u00a0Hong Kongers, for instance, who want to overthrow an authoritarian regime and install a democratic system, but\u00a0freak out about\u00a0Trump\u2019s\u00a0partisans,\u00a0who want to\u00a0overthrow a democratic system and install an authoritarian regime? They\u2019re exactly the same thing! They both involve\u00a0the word \u201coverthrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what goes around comes around. For the last four years, every time the president paid hush money to a porn star or profited financially from his political office or blackmailed Ukraine or solicited Russian propaganda operations or threatened independent election officials, the Democrats have wanted to impeach him. They\u2019ll have no one to blame but themselves when the new president is subject to graver punishments for lesser, or indeed no, sins.<\/p>\n

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“#Not a coup. Opposite!” I’m\u00a0no Trump supporter, but let\u2019s be reasonable: On Jan. 6, the president did what every politician does\u2014he asked his supporters to fight for him, and\u00a0after\u00a0they fought for him by invading a government building, assaulting four dozen police officers, and hunting down and threatening to assassinate the country\u2019s top lawmakers, he told…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":158176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/GettyImages-1230459654-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[88701,4941,67806,28962],"class_list":["post-158175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-coup","tag-donald-trump","tag-editors-picks","tag-mike-pence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}