Member Newsletter
Today we’re launching the first installment of a three-part series reporting never-before-published details on the failed Trump coup attempt which unfolded in the final days of 2020 and climaxed on January 6th, when a mob of feral Trumpers stormed the United States Capitol building. These stories are based on a trove of documents from co-conspirator Ken Chesebro. You can read our introduction to the series here, which outlines the overall findings, gives details about the document trove we worked with, and more. In the first installment, we report the plan to have January 6th essentially never end, or rather continue up to inauguration day, January 20th. The plan wasn’t so much to directly achieve the goal of installing Trump as President as to create so much spectacle and chaos with no end in sight that the Supreme Court would feel compelled to step in and, Trump’s lawyers hoped, install Donald Trump as President, much as it did 20 years earlier in the disputed election which ended with Bush v Gore.
Along the way, we learn that Ken Chesebro was actually live-tweeting the coup through a sock puppetry online identity called “Badger Pundit,” even locking horns with online law professors as the events unfolded. There’s also the planned game of chicken, with contemplation of whether Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence might become acting President first as the coup plotters worked to gum up the legislative process enough lure SCOTUS into the action.
One point about this plan which is worth noting explicitly is that it is a microcosm of the chaos-based authoritarianism we have now seen unfolding around us for years, and saw again in spades in the legislative chaos last week. As I mentioned, the plan outlined here was not really to allow or make it possible for Congress to install Donald Trump as President. It was rather to make Congress play the role of chaotic, dysfunctional laughingstock, a body which was clearly unable to bring the electoral chaos to a conclusion. In other words, the plan was to discredit parliamentary democracy as a functional system and thus provide an opening and justification for the Supreme Court to step in, as an unreviewable power, to install Trump as President against the electorally expressed choice of the American people.
It is a common, recognizable part of the authoritarian toolkit. It is difficult to justify or make good on extra-constitutional or dictatorial actions without first discrediting the processes and institutions to which these choices are properly and constitutionally assigned. That is why chaos in Congress like we saw last week is not just a show of incompetence or undisciplined exuberance on the part of feral right-wingers. It’s part of discrediting the institutions to make way for something else. It is also how and why we see the appetite for strongman action grow as Congress is stymied by chaos games and minority rule antics which make legislation impossible.
Thank you to our members for making this series and all our work possible. More installments to come over the coming days.