Washington and New York. Donald Trump advisers contemplated provoking a constitutional crisis and deploying armed forces to suppress resistance under a 1792 law to keep the then-president in power after his lost 2020 election, with some observers warning that attempts at a coup of State of the former president continue to threaten the democratic order of the United States.
Analysts and commentators, in assessing the criminal indictment filed against the former president for his efforts to reverse the election results last week, point out that actions to derail the 2020 electoral process were not only contemplated, but cannot yet be ruled out. the continuation of these anti-democratic efforts in the 2024 electoral contest.
One of the “most chilling paragraphs” in the criminal indictment, highlighted by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, revolves around a conversation between Jeffrey Clark, an ultra-conservative Justice Department official, who against orders from his own boss, the Then-Attorney General, who refused to endorse Trump’s charge that there was widespread election fraud, met secretly with White House counsel Patrick Philbin on January 3, 2021, 17 days before the presidential transition of power. There they discussed strategies to keep Trump in the White House despite the election results, and when Philbin commented that there would be “riots in the streets of every major city in America” if such a thing were attempted, Clark replied: “well, that is why the Insurrection Law exists.”
Columnist Bouie concludes that since “Trump considered invoking the Insurrection Act – which authorizes the use of military force to suppress civil unrest, insurrection or rebellion – to stop the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd”, it is likely that if “Trump had stolen power, he could very well have attempted to use the Insurrection Act to suppress the inevitable protest and resistance, which could have killed hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Americans in the attempt to secure his illegitimate control.” of power”.
It’s not just a hypothetical version of a columnist, and it’s not something that just belongs in the past. Veteran columnist Maureen Dowd, also of the New York Times, wrote about the latest criminal accusation against Trump, stating that “the fact is, we are in the midst of a coup, not a post-coup. The former president is still in the midst of his diabolical ‘who will rid me of this meddling democracy’ plot, hoping that his dark knights will gallop out to complete the task”.
Inciting violence in order to order the military to restore law and order is a well-known tactic in the world’s coup playbook, but here in the United States there was reluctance among analysts to use that term, although the events of January 6, 2021 with the violent assault on the Capitol incited by Trump to stop the final certification of the vote began to change that. But now there are increasing warnings that such efforts to incite violence for political ends could continue beyond January 6, and that the former president’s trials could contribute to that effort.
