Evaluating the "Stupid Coup" (Mark Danner) before Trump is out of office

Joe Conason (Uncovering The #MAGA Plot Against America National Memo 01/17/2021) writes bluntly about the need for accountability for Donald Trump, including for the January 6 assault on the Capitol building by a lynch mob directly incited by Trump himself:

The events of Jan. 6 represented the worst threat to democracy and the rule of law that we have seen in our lifetimes. The violent authoritarian impulse within the Republican right has metastasized under Trump into a potent and very dangerous force. Uncovering the roots of that threat and isolating its sponsors will be a lengthy and complicated process that will involve the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, state and local law enforcement, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, many committees of the House and Senate, and almost certainly a national investigative commission on the order of the 9/11 commission. And there will be trials.

The radicalization of the Republican Party is deep and wide, as Conason notes:

The support structure for the demonstration that turned into an insurrection ranged across the Trumpist movement, encompassing figures like Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and Charlie Kirk, who runs the far-right college outfit Turning Point USA and boasts close ties with Donald Trump Jr. Both of them have tried to erase evidence of their organizing efforts.

Joe Conason is not new to these observations. He was warning explicitly about the radical politics and authoritarian tendencies in the Republican Party in his book Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (2003) and It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (2007). What we currently know as "Trumpism" did not being in the Republican Party with Donald Trump nomination for President in 2016.

Mark Danner also writes about the Capitol riot and its implications, which he witnessed firsthand in ‘Be Ready to Fight’ New York Review of Books 01/14/2021 (02/11/2021 issue). He gives this account of the rally before the assault on the Capitol:

“This isn’t their Republican Party anymore!” Don [Trump] Jr. roared. “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party!” Preening like a rock star, he extended his hand-mic to the crowd to catch the answering roar. Did the Republicans now gathering at the Capitol hear it? Did Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the electoral vote certification, hear it? For Don Jr. was shouting out a simple truth that for all its undeniability many in the party had never quite believed or managed to grasp in all its implications. Trump owned them. And as his owner’s prerogative he imposed an unstinting and singular loyalty: not loyalty mostly to him, with some prudently reserved for the Constitution and the law. No. Loyalty entirely to him. Today would be the day of choosing. [italics in original]

Danner quotes from Trump's speech, which may be the most infamous speech in the history of the Presidency:

We’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn’t that will be a sad day for our country…. We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing…. We fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

Danner may be a bit too credulous on this point: "Trump reportedly had to be dissuaded from personally leading the march to the Capitol."

No, he didn't. He's a coward An obese, cowardly trust-fund baby who incites others to take physical risks and inflict physical harm on others but is obvious too plain yellow to take any such risk himself. Even though if he had joined the march, he at least would have had massive personal protection from the Secret Service.

But Danner is on the mark with this:

By refusing calls to intervene, he prolonged and protected the coup he had incited. Thankfully, Trump’s disordered, erratic mind has never been given to systematic planning. That he finally lost his bet on the sycophantic unscrupulousness of his vice-president had more to do with a handful of votes in the House of Representatives than with the vaunted truism that ours is “a country of laws, not of men.” Had the Republicans held a bare majority in the House, it is alarmingly easy to imagine the results of the presidential election being overturned.

As it is, the overwhelming majority of House Republicans, even after an attempted coup forced them to scurry abjectly for their lives—and left five people, including a police officer, dead—voted for exactly that, as did eight Republican senators. With his up-thrust fist, young Josh Hawley of Missouri will remain the poster boy of the coup. Both Hawley and Ted Cruz of Texas, highly credentialed lawyers out of Yale and Harvard respectively, like Pence discovered only belatedly that Trump was serious. Like the lowly innkeeper and everyone around him indulging Don Quixote’s conviction that he had arrived at a magical castle, they all humored the president about his chances to overturn the election. After all, as one “senior Republican official” asked a week after the vote, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.” For Hawley and Cruz, voting to overturn an election was merely a way to buff up their political résumés. What could be the downside?

He also makes a stab of thinking about how historians may view what he calls the "Stupid Coup" in the context of recent history:

Our future Suetonius will have work to do, describing these several decades in the life of the “indispensable” nation. The genocides of the 1990s, the “Supreme Court election” of 2000, the attacks of September 11, the war of choice in Iraq, the torture and endless drone assassinations of the “war on terror,” the economic collapse of 2008, the election of Donald Trump, the hundreds of thousands of dead in the Great Pandemic—and, finally, the Stupid Coup. Will Trump seem as striking and unusual to our historian as he does to us? Will he make more sense when viewed against the March on Rome or the Beer Hall Putsch? Or will Trump be seen as the beginning of something and not its ending? [my emphasis]