The assault on the US Capitol building by a violent mob earlier this week represented a shocking attack on American democracy. Having previously warned that Donald Trump’s refusal to concede his defeat in the election could be a matter of deep consequence, Dana Allin explores the implications of these recent events and the questions being raised about whether it is safe to leave Trump in office for the remainder of his presidency.
On 23 February 1981, Spanish military officers led an armed assault into the parliament building in Madrid, taking ministers and some 350 members of parliament hostage for 18 hours. Post-Franco democracy was still fragile, and there was no reason to assume that the coup would fail. At 1.14am the next morning, however, the young Spanish monarch Juan Carlos, in uniform as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, went before television cameras to demand an end to the siege. ‘The crown,’ he declared, ‘the symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, cannot tolerate, in any form, actions or attitudes of people attempting by force to interrupt the democratic process.’ The plotters gave up.
The officers who stormed the parliament did not know that a Spanish TV crew just happened to be filming that day from a hidden perch above the hall. The drama was broadcast to Spain and the world, and I remember watching in astonishment at the age of 23. In my memory, the film is black and white, but Google informs me that this memory is false.
And I now realise that I have carried another bit of false consciousness in my head through forty ensuing years of adulthood. It was a state of consciousness in which I never even wondered – except perhaps in the most academic parlour-gaming – whether anything similar could happen in my native country of the United States. On Wednesday, 6 January, it did.
An attempted coup?
Since Wednesday, there has been much parsing of the definitional distinction between what happened at the United States Capitol building and an attempted coup. It is true that Donald Trump, though nominally in command of the United States military, sent a mob and not the army to besiege the Capitol building. What he expected that mob to do once it reached the Capitol is a question that will be discussed at some length by commentators, historians and, very possibly, criminal prosecutors and defence lawyers inside a courtroom sometime after 20 January. For now, we can only go by Trump’s words, which indicate clearly that he dispatched his MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) acolytes from a rally at the Ellipse to stop the Senate and the House of Representatives from confirming Joe Biden’s election as the 46th President of the United States. They did in fact accomplish this for several hours of ensuing mayhem.
The world, it is safe to say, now sees America on a continuum with that uncertain Spanish democracy of forty years ago. This evidently amuses such adversaries as Russia and China and distresses such allies as Germany, France and Britain. Events of the past few days – indeed, the past four years – force a reckoning for American self-regard based on the notion of American exceptionalism. Utah Senator Mitt Romney campaigned in 2012 against then president Barack Obama, alleging Obama’s insufficient devotion to the notion. This allegation was, in my view, egregiously false. But Romney, the lone Republican who voted last year in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial to remove the President from office, has remained a paragon of outspoken integrity. On Wednesday night, after returning to the Senate floor from his place of hiding, Romney said this:
We gather today due to a selfish man’s injured pride and the outrage of his supporters whom he has deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning. What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States. Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy.
Before he, too, had to take cover from the ransacking mob, Texas Senator Ted Cruz on the same Senate floor had argued, in effect, that the electoral vote should not yet be certified because too many of Trump’s followers believe the lie of a stolen election that Trump and his enablers, Cruz included, have fed them. On Thursday night President Trump finally conceded that he will have to make way for a new American president, whose name he still declined to utter. It seems very unlikely, however, that Trump will abandon the falsehood of a fraudulent election – a falsehood that will continue to undermine American democracy, as my colleague Benjamin Rhode wrote yesterday on this site. Washington and federal police forces will almost certainly be better prepared to face another angry onslaught on 20 January, the day of Biden’s inauguration. But their unpreparedness on Wednesday still astonishes. It may have been a consequence of benign and less benign factors: reluctance to put federal forces on the streets at a time when the possibility of a coup was being openly discussed; the racist assumption, conscious or not, that a white crowd could be handled more gently than a black one; and the fact that this particular crowd had been sent by the President of the United States.
Calls for Trump’s removal
As I write, twelve days remain of the Trump presidency. There are serious questions being raised about whether it is safe to leave him in office for that long. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have called on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the US Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove Trump from authority on the grounds of incapacity to fulfil the office. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, a steadfast Republican ally, has also called for Trump’s resignation. The presumed dangers obviously include Trump’s access to the proverbial – but also very real – nuclear codes, but there are also more subtle threats. It has been reported that when National Guard troops from Washington DC, Maryland and, somewhat later, Virginia, were finally deployed on Wednesday night, it was at the command of Vice President Pence rather than Trump, who apparently refused. If true, this was, on balance, a good thing, but it is uncharted constitutional territory, and also would be uncharted national security territory if, for example, the White House has to deal in the coming days with an Iran crisis. (Such scenarios are not completely unprecedented: in the throes of Watergate, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger told national security officials not to accept orders from Nixon without checking with him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger first.)
The last time I wrote for this website I argued that a problem of ritual – the president’s refusal to officially concede his defeat and acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory – could be a matter of deep consequence. I was not preternaturally prescient in this warning, but I was right.
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