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Was It an Attempted Coup?
Paul Craig Roberts is perhaps the political pundit with a personal background that matches closest to my own. He and I are both about the same age, grew up in the Atlanta area when public schools were segregated, entered Georgia Tech in the late fifties, and eventually served in senior management at the Department of Treasury under President Reagan.
Roberts wrote the following article this week following the public release of the Durham Report. According to Roberts, Durham exonerates Donald Trump of any wrongdoing in connection with the Russia Hoax and cites FBI senior personnel Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok as the principals behind the fabricated attacks on Trump and fails to place significant responsibility on former FBI Director James Comey and current Director Christopher Wray.
I think we witnessed a non-violent coup attempt to overthrow a sitting duly-elected President through fabricated charges of treason that coupled with tampering with public information dissemination just prior to the 2020 election perhaps resulted in Donald Trump failing in his re-election bid.
The FBI Must Be Held Accountable for Russiagate
Actually, Roberts wrote this in the first month of Trump’s Presidency, foretelling accurately where this was going.
This is where the Republican Establishment failed their voters and the American people. No excuses.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/02/16/trump-presidency-rip/
Published in General
Pretty hard to argue with that.
Yes, AND:
This apparently unprecedented activity was in the context of other unprecedented activity, including direct, public insubordination by most-senior defense officials, treasonous collusion with realtime adversaries to coordinate notification in case of unpleasant orders, refusals to deploy and adherence to an alternate chain of command by those senior defense officials. That’s just the DoD.
The executive branch mutinied while the Intel Community not only facilitated, but suborned and coordinated illegal assumptions of power by decision-makers and lackeys alike. Not every decision-maker has the authority to make every decision. Everybody works for somebody, and none of them are empowered to select a new boss when they don’t like the one who legitimately has that authority.
Individual collapses and betrayals such as those of Paul Ryan and John McCain are run-of-the-mill human failure, even if it is moral failure (a willingness to do ill). More concerning is the collapse of the rule of law, brought about by people like Strzock and Comey, covered for by the Gang of 51, excused and beatified by the media, and the particular derelictions of duty by innumerable screw-ups with delusions of decency scattered throughout the executive branch.
The Executive branch has a deep sickness, and no longer resembles a class of “public servants” carrying out the will of the people in accordance with the law as directed by legitimately constituted authority. The IC, which exists largely but not exclusively within the executive, is the core of the rot. Momentary opportunists and long-term plotters alike in the “more government” ends of various institutions have produced a coalition of the wicked, and still vie for power, which is why there’s no clear winner.
You could write a full-length book filled with these criminal accounts and never cite the same crime twice.
To me, this really makes the United States a very unattractive place for productive, law-abiding individuals because we are all already subjected to probably the most complicated income tax laws ever conceived with an upside-down criminal justice system to enforce it and now we must expect that it will be administered by criminals.
I would agree that this was an attempted, yet ultimately unsuccessful, coup (let’s leave the subsequent election aside).
But I believe that it’s also important to look into why we’re saying “unsuccessful.” Somewhere, in the bowels of DC and beyond, the “system” emerged battered and bruised and worked despite the best efforts of some powerful people. This extends to two attempt to impeach a President, both of which were defeated through the Senate, where the supposedly feckless Republicans held the line.
Agreed.
I fixed the title, the body was all right.
I didn’t mean to suggest it needed fixing.
They kept Trump from governing and always on the defensive . With no help from the feckless. Mission accomplished.
I disagree, although they made it as difficult as possible. It’s inconsistent to cite any number of successes in the Trump presidency, which is true, and also say he was “kept from governing.” I see it as a testament to him that he was able to govern despite the best attempts of committed Democratic opposition.
As discussed befre, we disagree about the overall success. It is unlikely that people motivated and powerful enough to try something like this were only willing to try a single tactic.
Another way of saying it might be that the Russia Collusion thing was only a single aspect of a larger effort. We do see plenty of loose ends such as the Whitmer kidnap job and the Ray Epps/pipe bomb stuff as examples of FBI targeting a particular political polity. And so forth. Heaven knows that the scope of the Russian Collusion coup and cover-up opens the door to an awful lot of good follow-up questions. I know I won’t convince you, not in a comment anyway, so I won’t belabor the point.
We may never be able to satisfy all comers to their chosen level of evidence. Me, I see a pervasive pattern of (mis)behavior all going in one direction. Sure, there’s an organic aspect to it, but it’s not as though anybody beyond a few token goats get wrapped up for it. There’s certainly no urgency on the part of hard-working, honest, ACM and Bill Barr approved public servants to bring the corrupt to justice. That lack of urgency is what we would expect in a well dug-in coup.
“For if it do succeed, none dare call it treason”
Heh. I thought it was right the first time, but fair enough.
It didn’t mean that he was powerless, until the last days. They did succeed in largely neutralizing and ultimately unseating him. But this is including election shananigans, which you explicitly left to one side, so fair enough.
Well, OK, but I’m not sure that we disagree enough to require me to be convinced. I am not denying that there was a concerted effort to undermine him throughout his Presidency.
Amen, brother.
Leaving the argument about how successful it was for later, it was significantly worse than an “attempted” coup.
From the moment the sitting Democrat president approved of the joint Executive Branch – DNC (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Clinton campaign) election interference operation in late July of 2020 through the following two and a half years of “hacked the election”, undefined “collusion”, and the Mueller Report, this was the culmination of the fundamental transformation promised us back in 2008. It tore mightily at the fabric of the voluntary compact that is the U.S. of A. (Don’t even get me started on the unauthorized impeachment inquiry conducted by the Speaker of the House. She had no authority to use the resource and funding of the people’s house…and enough of the establishment GOP proved spineless. There has been no proper accounting and accountability for the whole unconstitutional mess and nobody seems to care.) And in the end, the smug, condescending, docile acceptance of the embarrassingly fraudulent “81 million” votes to just move on provided the approval of We the People after the fact.
They broke it. It was intentional.
The four years to Team Biden gnawing on the rotting husk is just a bonus. They giggle about the whole thing every night over at the Obama’s.
Who was the force behind the attempted coup?
The Marxists and the globalists (sometimes those labels are redundant). This was not strictly an internal job. Media and corporations played along. Rogue agents in foreign countries assisted. The Davos folks assisted. Too much dark money floated around. WEF got their puppet, as did China, and his EOs one by one support the Great Reset agenda. And last but not least, the hissy fit voters ensured they would succeed.
Whoever was behind the framing of Gen. Flynn. That was the CIA.
And I think that if Trump was elected once, and the the same government forces rigged the second election to get him out of office, that’s not just losing at the ballot box by popular will, that constitutes a successful coup.
Well, it’s too bad that Ratburger went away. I wrote about this stuff.
TL;DR, there’s a reason the Obamas never went through with their much-advertised return to Hawaii, even with the big old doomsday mansion they bought. They stayed in DC to inconspicuously help run a shadow government during the Trump adminstration. Turns out the 2016 election steal money didn’t pan out, so the democrats went into damage control mode.
Somewhere here, more recently, I wrote about the power struggle in the current structure. There are multiple factions vying for power, so it’s not as tough there’s some movie-script tight plot. No, it’s a messy real-world plot, in which the good guys don;t always win in the end, and the bad guys rarely get any sort of justice, and sometimes it;s hard to tell who’s who — especially if you let your understanding age out of relevance.
Which is where we get folks like Andrew C. McCarthy and Jonah Goldberg — obsolete worldviews giving otherwise (at least previously) decent men vertigo, causing a series of increasingly wrong mis-steps, unti they finally become a menace to their own side.
Nah. It’s easy to argue with that,
A coup is a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of government power. There’s no such thing as a non-violent coup.
It was a corrupt political intrigue. That’s bad, but not a coup.
I think that although the Clinton Crime Family, the FBI and the Intel Community did not have the total success that they wished to have, they inflicted a huge amount of trouble on Trump early on.
But once this greasy crowd of grifters took out Gen Mike Flynn, a man who had been a lifelong Democrat, Trump’s ability to have an open field of contenders for the many posts within the government that he was expected to fill was knocked out from under him.
Who would want to move to Washington DC for a new position, only to be pilloried in the manner that Flynn had had to deal with? To have various slurs against one’s reputation aired openly in the press, and to perhaps, as Flynn found he had to do, end up bankrupt?
Once people were realizing that accepting a post in the Trump admin might ruin both reputation and finances, Trump had far fewer candidates to pick from.
The lib-leaning press was more than happy to run at least one article a week about what a poorly organized man this new president was, as he was flailing about trying to full those posts.
We need a word for something this stupid.
Wow. There’s no such thing as a bloodless coup pushing a leader off into exile?
I always found it odd that Trump being the next Hitler and all that did not just shut down the Mueller probe by fiat.
Any country that shrugs at this slow moving coup cannot withstand tyranny. There will be martyrs but not mensuration.
Definitely feckless. You characterize it as holding the line, based on the failure to directly remove President Trump via impeachment or prosecution. The system worked.
With an attempted coup this flimsy, this internally inconsistent, this fact free, it should have been no problem, barely an inconvenience, to 1) stop it early and 2) punish the perpetrators. Instead, it worked. Republicans were in fact pushing in the wrong direction throughout, sternly warning Trump not to overstep or interfere in the investigations (i.e. the coup).
Joe DiGenova is on the local (WMAL) station on Mondays and he said that a “seditious insurrection” required armed power and that the definition was met when the various SWAT teams went after innocent victims.
I am late to this thread and missed the addition of a modifier to the word ‘coup’. I think it was a coup and an argument could be made that it was successful. If you include the media along with the FBI/CIA/IRS/Democratic Party, they prevented the implementation of policies of an elected president and cost him the next election. In addition, they are preventing others from joining him.
Just because no guillotines were involved doesn’t mean there wasn’t/isn’t an insurrection.
What we need is a catchy phrase – what about “The fundamental transformation of America”? They never said to what.
It’s as much as a coup as 1/6 – (more of own) – the fools that rushed the capital do not have the power of the state, were not armed, or the power to leak corporate media juicy tid-bits about a political enemy.
So the system didn’t work? The R’s didn’t stop the impeachments? A plot hatched and supported at the highest levels of government is flimsy?
No. I think that you need to be more careful with terminology, and think about it carefully.
I think that it makes sense to call something a “bloodless coup,” if there is little or no actual killing. Technically, “bloodless” would require zero fatalities, though we might use the term a bit metaphorically to refer to a coup with only a small amount of bloodshed.
This is not because a coup is non-violent. It is because sometimes a violent coup works with little or no resistance.
I think that it is a serious error to use terms like “coup” carelessly, just as it is a serious error to use terms like “rape” carelessly. If some woman is seduced and charmed into sex, that’s bad, but it ain’t rape. Don’t call it rape.