Yes, There Was A Coup (And Donald Trump Was Involved)

This article was inspired by Christopher Caldwell, specifically, his 7/28/2021 New York Times article “What if There Wasn’t a Coup Plot, General Milley?” Much to my dismay, it was not some kind of Alternative History article examining what American would be like without the coup plot of Donald Trump, but instead a serious attempt to argue that a Trump coup was never attempted.

Here’s just one example of this article whitewashing what happened:

On the other hand, Jan. 6 was something familiar: a political protest that got out of control. Contesting the fairness of an election, rightly or wrongly, is not absurd grounds for a public assembly. For a newly defeated president to call an election a “steal” is certainly irresponsible. But for a group of citizens to use the term was merely hyperbolic, perhaps no more so than calling suboptimal employment and health laws a “war on women.” Nor did the eventual violence necessarily discredit the demonstrators’ cause, any more than the July 2016 killing of five police officers at a rally in Dallas against police violence, for instance, invalidated the concerns of those marchers.

For the record, that event did invalidate the Black Lives Matter cause in the minds of much of conservative media — some of which went so far as to say Black Lives Matter should be declared…