“A politically impotent, conspiracy-addled president whips up a rabble of costumed selfie-snappers and then goes home to the White House with no plan except to watch them get rowdy on TV.” Ross Douthat
Last week’s storming of the Capital was a colossal failure for the idiots who made the attempt. It was a failure for the GOP. The blowback on them has only started. The word that best describes the whole enterprise is “inept” which, when you think about it, pretty much describes the entire Trump project from start to finish. Trump lost the election. Badly. All of the foot stomping and waving of paper, the frivolous lawsuits; impotent. The idea that Pence was going to intervene in the electoral vote count, delusional. The notion that an angry mob was somehow going to force the vote to be overturned — by yelling and brute force — absurd.
To compare what happened in DC last Wednesday to a banana republic is an insult to banana republics. A real coup would have required the involvement of the military. Not going to happen.
I don’t doubt that there was some collusion (there’s that nasty word again) among Trumpist bureaucrats who impeded the response. In the end, all they did was amplify the stench and stain that will surely spread wider as we learn more. They should consider themselves lucky that it wasn’t even more “successful.” Consider where we’d be if they had broken through the last lines of defense: held hostages, killed Pelosi, Pence, etc. Would they, even then, have managed to overturn the results of the election? Of course not. The national outrage, shock and sense of disgrace would be even greater.
This botched coup was a total failure. We have won back the Presidency, the House and the Senate. The GOP (if you can still call it that) is on the ropes and flailing. We really need to do a better job at owning our wins.