Telling the truth about Trump's 2020 election coup attempt is essential to our democratic future
As the GOP mythologizes the events around January 6 to pave the way for a second Trump term, the need to agree on the right lessons for our democracy has never been more urgent
This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.
A new filing by special counsel Jack Smith in the federal election interference case against Donald Trump is a timely reminder that the former president’s attempted coup should be a deciding factor for voters this November. The filing is part of Smith’s effort to respond to the outlandish Supreme Court ruling granting Trump immunity for official acts as president, a decision that ignored the plain language of the Constitution by effectively placing the presidency above the law. While the filing contains no revelatory details, it nonetheless includes startling new information about Trump’s degenerate efforts to overturn the election (among other things, he allegedly remarked “So what?” when told of security measures needed to protect Vice President Pence from insurrectionists) that should remind all who are willing to listen that Trump engaged in utterly disqualifying behavior. This includes not just his incitement of a mob to storm the Capitol in order to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election, but literally months of prior illegal activities, public lies, and propaganda meant to overthrow the election results.
Though hundreds of participants in Trump’s efforts have been convicted of their crimes, including rioters at the Capitol and those who engaged in fraudulent state elector schemes, Trump’s evasion of accountability has metastasized from grotesque injustice to a direct and imminent threat to the nation, as he is now in a close race with Vice President Kamala Harris, in which his victory would represent the de facto success of his 2024 coup attempt. With his threats of violence should he lose, his stated interest in suspending the constitution, his vows to jail his political enemies, and his desire to be dictator “for a day,” Donald Trump appears intent on ruling in the same manner that his seizure of power in 2021 would have heralded — through violence and lawlessness, all in service to the aggrandizement of his person power and wealth.
The fact that millions of Americans don’t see Trump’s coup attempt as disqualifying is terrifying, even more so when they appear to constitute quite possibly enough votes to put him in office again. But to me, this signals more than ever the overriding importance of working to remind the public about Trump’s unforgivable crimes of attempting to overthrow the election and install himself as America’s first authoritarian chief executive. As I’ve argued before, January 6 is a skeleton key for delegitimizing not only Trump, but also a Republican Party that has retroactively validated his coup attempt by continuing to rally behind him. Through lies and threats, the GOP has attempted to re-write history that we all witnessed. Under Trump’s guidance, the party has created a toxic myth of a stolen election, based on false claims that millions of — you guessed it — illegal immigrants recruited by the Democrats somehow cast ballots that placed not just Joe Biden but unspecified numbers of other Democrats into office. Meanwhile, Trump has vowed to pardon January 6 insurrectionists who have been justly convicted for their crimes. The former president understands that the story of January 6 must be contested, and that doing so is central to his quest for power; for if an undeniably criminal event like the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government can be transformed into a heroic and patriotic undertaking, then it follows that there is no limit to the depravities he and his supporters could commit in the name of defending the nation.
Crucially, as Talking Point Memo’s David Kurtz reminds us in a recent piece, our capacity to tell the truth about Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election is ultimately not subject to the Supreme Court’s corrupt intervention into his case or even to the lack of a conviction. Rather, in the face of those obstacles, the gathering of evidence and the establishment of a historical record are key; as he puts it, “The real value of the fact-based narrative presented by Smith is the story it gives all of us to remember and repeat.” But Kurtz hits on something beyond this that I think has been largely missed by Democrats and others who should know better as they talk about January 6, its lead-up, and its aftermath:
There remains great civic value in repeating that story for ourselves and for future generations so that it becomes woven into our collective memory like the Boston Tea Party or the firing on Fort Sumter or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The Jan. 6 debacle is a part of the nation’s founding story, even though it comes nearly 250 years later, because the same principles that animated its creation were under sustained attack, the same threats that the constitutional system was specifically designed to protect against were on full display, and the reactionary forces of chaos and destruction that always linger just over the horizon advanced to within minutes and feet of prevailing over democracy and the rule of law.
In the face of the GOP’s steady and malevolent myth-making about January 6, I think Kurtz gets at some vital points that the public discourse has been largely missing, at least by those talking in good faith about Trump’s coup attempt: the need for the mainstream to tell not a myth, but a true and coherent story about the insurrection that communicates why it was so disqualifying for Trump; why it marked an existential crossroads for the country; and why it’s important to create a broad consensus about the facts of that day. In particular, I like Kurtz’s idea of framing what happened on January 6 as a reminder of why we have a democracy to begin with: to defend ourselves against “the reactionary forces of chaos and destruction.” One of the challenges in processing January 6 in particular is that the day is haunted by a specter of failure and dissolution of our form of government: if the Capitol could be stormed once, why couldn’t it happen again? What if January 6 was just a preview of worse to come? I think Kurtz points a way forward past this dark question, in which we acknowledge that democracy will always be beset by enemies, by those who stand to lose when equality and freedom for all increasingly become the law of the land, or by those like Trump who crave dominance due to some darkness of the soul. If near-death experiences are inevitable for our democracy, then we should do what we can to ensure that those dark passages are times of renewal and re-dedication to first principles.
Particularly as the November election approaches, the urgency of properly communicating the depth of the offenses against the United States committed by Donald Trump and his accomplices has only grown. In the spirit of Kurtz’s observations, I wanted to set out a few ideas for ensuring that public discussions of Trump’s 2020-21 coup attempt encompass the whole of what was inflicted on the country.
First, I’ve noticed that there’s been an obscuring tendency in the language around January 6 to say things like “Trump attempted to reject the election results” or “Trump attempted to overthrow the election.” It’s not that saying that he tried to overturn the election is false — god knows I’ve used this phrasing countless times — but that it elides the full import of what Trump and his allies tried to do. This is because overturning the results of a presidential election in favor of the loser cannot be separated from overturning American democracy and the rule of law itself; they are one and the same. If Donald Trump had somehow succeeded in getting fake elector slates made official in crucial swing states, and had threatened Congress into approving those, his accession to the presidency would have been democratic in form only. There literally would not have been a democracy any longer if the president was not elected democratically. Such an outcome would have been catastrophic any way you cut it, requiring either mass assent to the degradation of being ruled by an illegitimate autocrat, or the mass mobilization of society and politics to eject Trump from office.
In talking about January 6, then, we need to emphasize the idea that Trump was trying to overthrow American democracy. He was not the mayor of a small town in Montana stuffing the ballot box and illegally gaining power; he would have been a president in charge of executing the law of the land and of running the federal government, creating anti-democratic repercussions in every state and city through his basic illegitimacy and the illegitimacy of any acts he undertook. To this end, words and phrases like “attempted coup” and “insurrection” far more properly convey the gravity of what Trump did than “rejected the election results.”
In turn, when we talk about the attack on democracy embodied in Trump’s actions culminating in January 6, we need to be sure to ground the idea of democracy not only in profound yet abstract ideals, but in the lived realities of everyone’s lives. To me, this disjunction can be found in the insufficient “Trump tried to overthrow the election” language that I’ve just discussed. To take the most cynical or dismissive possible response, we can imagine a citizen wondering how it might actually hurt them personally if a presidential election went to the loser. For a person who voted for the true winner, but who already doubted government’s responsiveness to ordinary Americans, you could see them viewing this as an unjust outcome, yet one without real impact on their ability to live their daily life. Yet this perspective — cynical, superficially realistic — ignores the deeply corrupting and dangerous consequences of the most powerful office in the land being occupied by someone who lacks a sense of accountability to voters or loyalty to the rule of law.
In such a case, literally any crime and horror against individual citizens becomes possible, because the chief executive ultimately feels as if he can get away with anything. And people who think this way are a danger to anyone who not only gets in their way, but in their allies’ way — a trickle-down effect in which lackies commit crimes and cruelties on behalf of an unaccountable president would seem to be inevitable. Just as we shouldn’t talk about democracy and the rule of law in merely abstract terms, neither should we talk about authoritarianism in the same manner.
Although acts of violence were not the only elements of Trump’s coup attempt (more on this below), the assault on the Capitol, including attacks against police officers, threats against lawmakers, and property destruction, rightly shocked the public and in many ways has come to represent the gravity of Trump’s offenses. To a great extent, I think people’s instincts are right — violent acts to hold on to power are uniquely grotesque and offensive. But in talking about the events around January 6, we should take care to talk a bit more explicitly about why, exactly, violence has no place in American democracy. In speeches, President Biden has remarked that political violence is “never, never, never acceptable,” but for all his insistence, I haven’t really heard him or other leading Democrats delve into what specifically makes political violence so taboo.
For instance, we could go a step further and say that political violence is in fact the negation of democracy, the imposition by force of decisions whose legitimacy should rest on popular consent, voting, adherence to the law, and a legitimate political framework. Violence is the substitution of the law of the jungle for the law, a might-makes-right attitude that says that the side with the biggest weapons and willingness to use them should win the day. It’s also crucial to talk about how political violence speaks to the fundamental weakness of its perpetrators, as it signals the lack of popular support for their ends. And without question, we should reinforce a public consensus that acts of political violence delegitimize politicians who engage in or incite them, so that the use of violence to “win” an election renders such an electoral victory fraudulent, null, and void.
Finally, there is an understandable but ultimately self-defeating impulse by some to limit the offenses around the attempted coup to Donald Trump and those who attacked the Capitol — to shape the history around the machinations of a rogue president and those he incited to physical violence. However, Trump’s schemes in fact involved accomplices throughout his administration and the Republican Party as a whole, including many elected officials, who sought by illegal and pseudo-legal means to gain him the presidency. And so, to talk truly about January 6, we must be sure to assign culpability not just to Trump but to his GOP allies as well, while making efforts to emphasize the months of scheming that preceded the publicly visible events of January 6 itself. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, a majority of House members voted to reject the election results — a stunning vote in favor of lawlessness. And in the months and years since Trump’s failed coup, we have unfortunately seen much of the GOP come to embrace the notion that the presidency was stolen from Trump. With the party apparatus and elected leaders now more or less unanimously supporting his 2024 presidential bid, the GOP has retroactively embraced or forgiven his crimes against the United States. For the sake of a truthful discussion that properly defends American democracy, we must always talk frankly about the Republican Party’s embrace of failed coup leader Donald Trump.
I understand that including an indictment of the GOP and not just the uniquely odious Donald Trump, who is so closely tied in many people’s minds to the signature violence of that day, might be seen as at cross-purposes with maintaining a public consensus as to the historical meaning of January 6. However, the country is not well-served by imagining that the lesson of the coup attempt is that a single bad actor threatened the country. The true lesson is that the United States faced a coup by a mass reactionary movement as much as by a single malevolent man, however important his dark charisma and shamelessness were to reaching that precipice. Going forward, we will not be able to maintain anything close to a healthy democracy if major elements of the GOP continue to claim that no crimes against democracy were committed that day. We must tell a true story, and the GOP must either repent of its prior errors by admitting its complicity and assenting to reality, or be sent to electoral oblivion over the coming years for its abandonment of democracy in favor of political violence and authoritarian power grabs.