Don’t Mention the Coup!
The president of the United States is the country’s chief law-enforcement officer and the symbol of national authority and unity.
This incoming president faces a battery of criminal charges relating to his abuse of office and to personal frauds. He’s been convicted of some already; more are pending. He is also the author of a conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election and seize power by violence. More than 1,000 of his followers have been convicted and sentenced for their roles in his attempted coup d’état.
These two sets of facts are obviously in considerable tension. How will they be resolved?
A strong desire exists—not only among pro–Donald Trump partisans—to wish away the contradiction. Trump will be president again. Every domestic interest group, every faction in Congress, every foreign government will need to do business with him. It’s unavoidable; the system cannot operate around him as if he were not there.
What cannot be avoided will not be avoided. And because most of us need to believe in what we are doing, almost every institution in American society and the great majority of its wealthiest and most influential citizens will find some way to make peace with Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. Nobody wants to say aloud, “The Constitution is all very well up to a point, but the needs of the National Association of Birdhouse Manufacturers must come first.” Inevitably, though, our words come into alignment with our interests, and our thoughts then come into alignment with our words.
On the ever rarer occasions when the January 6 insurrection is discussed, the excuses will flow more and more readily. Trump didn’t conspire. It was just a protest that got out of hand. Only a tiny minority broke any important laws. Surely, they have already been punished enough. Anyway, the George Floyd protests were worse.
Even Trump’s opponents will fall more or less in line. As Democrats try to make sense of their 2024 defeat, some are already arguing that the party paid too much attention to procedural issues: too much talk about democracy, not enough about the price of eggs. Many will argue that the best way to win in 2028 is to attack Trump and his administration as servants of the ultrarich—in other words, by dusting off the playbook that Democrats have traditionally run against Republicans. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all campaigned against Trump as a kind of aberration; all welcomed the support of non-Trump Republicans. Next time, things are likely to be different. Trump will be lumped together with all of his Republican predecessors, and the way to succeed in the lumping together is by jettisoning the topics on which Trump is unique (violent coups d’état) and focusing on the topics where he is not unique (tax cuts for the rich and regulatory favors to corporations). The attempted coup of 2021 will be unhelpful old news in a 2028 cycle defined by performative populism.
These imperatives will apply even to that supposed incubator of anti-Trump feeling, the sad dying remnants of what used to be called the mainstream media. (Today, of course, anti-Semitic and anti-vax cranks on YouTube draw much bigger audiences than any program on CNN or MSNBC, so what counts as “mainstream” or “fringe” is a very open question.) If you’re a normal journalist trying to report on inauguration plans or the staffing of the Cabinet or the administration’s first budget, your job depends on access, and access depends on playing ball to a greater or lesser degree. If you keep banging on about an attempted coup that happened four years ago, you are just making yourself irrelevant. And when you encounter somebody else who bangs on about it, you will be tempted to dismiss them as irrelevant, too.
The coup makers won. The coup resisters lost. Washington is not a city that spares much sympathy for losers.
“This never happened,” advises Don Draper on the television series Mad Men. “It will shock you how much it never happened.” So it will be with the first attempt by a serving president to overthrow the government he was sworn to protect.
Not all of us, however, have to live in the world of Washington transactions. Some of us need to volunteer to keep talking about the inconvenient things.
Trump really did try by violence to violate the first rule of constitutional democracy: Respect elections. Constitutional democracy matters, whether or not the theme helps Democratic candidates for federal office, whether or not it energizes media consumers, whether or not it advances the lobbying agenda of the National Association of Birdhouse Manufacturers. Those volunteers don’t need to blame those other Washington players for doing what they feel they need to do. The volunteers have only to remain faithful to their purpose: to push back against the Draper doctrine that the unwanted past can be made to disappear. It did happen. It should still shock us how much it did happen.