Is Donald Trump preparing for his next shot at a coup d’état? The fact that we have to ask the question—and that it is not entirely laughable—is one of the reasons we should not have elected him president a second time.
(We should not have elected him a first time, either, but the reasons were different in 2016.)
Here are some hypothetical headlines that sound a lot like what one expects to read about foreign despots staging an autogolpe–or that could easily and accurately be written in any American newspaper right now: Citing ‘Emergency,’ President Dispatches Troops to Capital City; President, Fearing Upcoming Election, Declares ‘Emergency’; President Takes Control of Capitol Police to Address Fictitious Emergency, Mulls Expanding Takeovers to Other Cities; President Installs Loyalists in Key Law-Enforcement and Military Posts; President Accuses Political Rivals of ‘Treason.’
That would be worrisome stuff from any president. But Trump’s actions in Washington (and in Los Angeles before that) are part of a larger pattern of behavior. We should begin with—and, if we were a serious people, we could end with it—the fact that he attempted to stage a coup d’état in 2021, after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Trump’s post-election coup attempt proceeded along lines that will be familiar to anyone who knows the history of such coups, combining raw thuggery with legalistic shenanigans: At the Capitol, there was ordinary political violence, but this was, in reality, less significant than the president’s attempt to cook up legal and administrative pretexts for nullifying the election results while coercing and threatening those who resisted his efforts—and it means something to be threatened by the president of these United States.
Trump’s contempt for law and order is obvious enough, and not only from the felony convictions on his rap sheet and the more meaningful felony convictions he very likely would have endured had the documents case not been quashed. Also indicative of that contempt: the abuse of the pardon power that was not least evident in his general amnesty for the January 6 seditionists, his solicitousness regarding the legal expenses of those who carry out violence on his behalf, his elevation of lightly qualified sycophants to key law enforcement, judicial, and military positions, his undisguisable terror regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case, and his reiterated admiration for autocrats such as Vladimir Putin (if Trump were any closer to him, he’d be sitting in the Russian dictator’s lap literally rather than merely figuratively), Xi Jinping (“He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great”), and Kim Jong Un.
Trump has convulsed the world economy by imposing national sales taxes on Americans (he calls them “tariffs”) in an arbitrary and illegal way; he has proposed a pay-to-play skim targeting microchip manufacturers that is both corrupt and unconstitutional; he refuses to enforce the law against TikTok for corrupt personal reasons. With Uday and Qusay taking the lead while dad futzes around in the White House, the Trump family has used the presidency to extract billions of dollars out of favor-seekers.
The president is worried about the midterms. He is worried about being impeached—again. And he should be worried, inasmuch as he deserved his first two impeachments and would very much deserve a third. The economic signals are not great.
And now the president is dispatching troops to the nation’s capital.
To do what? Logistics and support, we are told—as though Washington’s very real but improving crime problems were the result of insufficient logistical resources rather than the city leadership’s ideological opposition to dealing with vagrancy, harassment, and the kind of low-level crime that eventually becomes major crime. (One report from 2021 estimates that something on the order of 500 people are responsible for as much as 70 percent of D.C. gun crime.) But, of course, this is Donald Trump we are talking about, a creature of the less-respectable quarters of show business: reality television, pro wrestling, and pornography. From the point of view of showmanship, it does not matter what the troops deployed to Washington actually do—it matters only that Trump can say that he sent in the troops and then maybe throw another nauseating parade for himself.
If this were, say, President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the least responsible voices on the right would be talking about “Second Amendment remedies.”
The president’s actions raise the question: Is this only the theater of authoritarianism, or is it a rehearsal of prepositioning assets for a more general state of phony emergency to justify armed federal bullying—or worse—of Democrat-run cities in the run-up to the midterms or, possibly, in the wake of a midterm election in which Republicans desire to nullify the result? In one sense, it doesn’t matter that much: Even if it is only theater, using military resources for theatrical-political purposes is in itself corrupt, an abuse of power that would, even without the broader context of Trump’s abuses and irresponsibility, in itself justify his removal from office.
In another sense, of course, it matters profoundly.
Ten years ago, asking whether the president was laying the foundation for a coup would have sounded, to me, like crazy talk. (And I did hear crazy talk of that kind from time to time, memorably on one occasion from Walter Cronkite speaking about George W. Bush, convinced that the affable Methodist was secretly fronting some kind of Christian mujahideen.) But one cannot discount the possibility that the guy who tried, in however incompetent and cowardly a fashion, to stage a coup d’état the last time he lost an election will try to stage a coup d’état the next time an election doesn’t go his way. It is like petting a dog that you know, for a fact, has rabies—the dog may not bite you, but that doesn’t make you any less stupid.
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