If nothing else, yesterday’s insurgency-cum-riot on Capitol Hill sidelines a few insouciant pundits who quietly enjoyed Donald Trump’s upstaging of liberals, even as they assured us that, ultimately, we had little to fear from him.
'He Won’t Concede, but He’ll Pack His Bags' was the headline on the Atlantic writer Graeme Wood’s pre-election column of 15 October, which informed us that although Trump “has signaled that he’s willing to plunge America into chaos in an effort to remain in the White House ... we should remember that Trump had a vision of the presidency that began with extreme laziness, and that the end of his presidency could go roughly the same way ... [A]ll evidence suggests that he would run from the responsibility ... of overseeing the violent fracture of America.”
Trump's denunciations left him no choice but to humble or destroy all “politicians” who resist him.
Was Wood right? Maybe. And maybe The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was right to assure us, on 10 October, that There Will Be No Trump Coup. Douthat offered us a “final pre-election case for understanding the president as a noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat. Across the last four years, the Trump administration has indeed displayed hallmarks of authoritarianism ... But it’s also important to recognize all the elements of authoritarianism he lacks. He lacks popularity and political skill, unlike most of the global strongmen who are supposed to be his peers ... Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup, because a term like ‘plotting’ implies capabilities that he conspicuously lacks.”
