Donald Trump and the MAGA movement’s coup attempt on Jan. 6 never stopped.
On that day, American democracy was saved by the bravery of the Capitol police and other law enforcement who battled against Trump’s MAGA assault force. It was also saved by the quick thinking of the Senate aides who secured the Electoral College ballots. Vice President Mike Pence, for his part, did the minimum of properly certifying the results of the 2020 election. But Donald Trump and the neofascist movement’s plans to end America’s multiracial democracy were not deterred by what they saw as a temporary defeat on Jan 6.
Why should they be?
Trump, the members of the Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement and right-wing at its highest levels in Congress, on the Supreme Court, interest groups, think tanks, the donors and financiers, and others who organized, aided, and abetted the Jan. 6 coup attempt and the larger plot against democracy have not faced serious consequences for their apparent crimes and wrongdoing. Moreover, the right-wing extremist justices on the Supreme Court have now made Trump and his Republican successors into de facto kings who are above the law and now have the “right” to kill their enemies (and any other Americans) with impunity. Donald Trump’s three remaining criminal trials and the felony conviction in the Manhattan election interference hush-money case are also likely to be voided.
Hundreds of MAGA foot soldiers who participated in the lethal terrorist attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 have been put on trial and sentenced. A recent Supreme Court decision has made it likely that many of them will have their charges reduced if not thrown out on a legal technicality. Trump has promised to pardon the Jan. 6 MAGA insurrectionists (a group he has valorized as “heroes” and like they are holy warriors) when/if he takes power in 2025. Historical precedent strongly suggests that the Jan. 6 MAGA insurrectionists will then become Dictator Trump and his regime’s enforcers.
Ultimately, as historians and other experts on fascism and authoritarianism have pointed out, a coup where the participants are not severely punished is just practice for the next attempt. Donald Trump’s second attempt to become “president” has proven their warning correct. As compared to the relative amateurs who orchestrated his 2016 campaign, Trump has now surrounded himself with real political professionals who share his goal of ending America’s multiracial democracy as seen with Project 2025, Agenda 47, and other plans.
The planning, recruitment, and organizing to achieve a blitzkrieg on American democracy from within is taking place right now. With the appointment of JD Vance as his vice-presidential nominee, Trump has cemented his connection to the most extreme antidemocratic elements in the neofascist movement.
So what is the likelihood that Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans and their forces will succeed in their attempts to end American democracy if he and they take power in 2025?
A new series of simulations by pro-democracy organizations suggests it is quite high. Writing at the New Republic, David Rothkopf shares his first-hand experience and what he learned:
This May and June, leaders from Washington’s policy, political, legal, and national security communities got together to imagine what for many of us remains almost unthinkable: how the United States might change in the wake of a Donald Trump victory in November. The centerpiece of the effort, known as the Democracy Futures Project, was a series of five nonpartisan simulation exercises that envisioned different ways Trump and his administration might dismantle key elements of our democracy.
If there was one core conclusion from the simulations, which brought together nearly 200 experts, it was this: We had better do everything in our power to get out the vote for Kamala Harris and the Democrats in November, because there is currently no effective Plan B on the horizon if Trump returns to the White House.
Rothkopf details how the pro-democracy opposition was wholly unsuccessful in stopping Donald Trump and his regime most extreme assaults on democracy and the basic rights and freedom of the American people:
Each role-play exercise consisted of several rounds, in which the players representing the Trump team would begin by announcing their goals and the steps they intended to take to implement those goals—from rounding up millions of undocumented citizens to imprisoning their political enemies, from ordering active-duty military troops into American cities to replacing all civil servants who refused to follow their orders. Following those initial moves, players representing the pro-democracy “opposition” would respond, trying to stop or influence Trump’s efforts by combating them in the courts or the media, or through state or local legislation. Players were asked to respond as they believed those in their roles would behave in real life.
The experience wasn’t reassuring. In none of the simulations was the pro-democracy opposition able to successfully reverse the overall thrust of the Trump team’s efforts, and on the whole, democratic norms and institutions rapidly disintegrated. Defenders of democracy had some isolated successes in the courts, Congress, or at the state level, and in some cases Team Trump had to settle for less ambitious versions of their initial plans. Market reactions and decisions by foreign actors (both allies and adversaries) had some impact on the actions of the new administration. But in each exercise, the basic rights and prerogatives of Americans were systematically stripped away, and the institutions of the U.S. government gradually ceased to resemble what they have been in the past.
Indeed, one of the more disturbing conclusions of these political gaming exercises was that it is very hard to stop a ruthless president committed to stripping away people’s basic freedoms, especially if he or she is abetted by a compliant Supreme Court or a supine Congress. By installing loyalists throughout the government, firing or marginalizing those who might resist change, taking advantage of the immunity granted by the Supreme Court, and acting through executive orders and presidential emergency powers, a president not bound by norms or law can launch a concerted assault on the rule of law in this country—and such an assault would be very difficult for even a dedicated, motivated opposition to counter.
The conclusion reached by the Democracy Futures Project is not an isolated one. There have been other such simulations, not widely covered or discussed by the mainstream American news media that have reached a similar if not identical conclusion. The guardrails and institutions protecting American democracy from a corrupt and fascist-authoritarian president and political party that has captured the country’s institutions would prove little protection for the people.
Barton Gellman, senior adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice, also participated in Democracy Futures Project simulations. In a recent article in the Washington Post, he shared what could potentially happen if Donald Trump and his regime were, for example, to follow through on their plans for mass deportations of Black and brown “illegal aliens” and other “undesirables” as part of a larger concentration camp system.
In two of our five games, Red overwhelmed Blue with an “everything, everywhere” battle plan on many fronts at once.
One Red administration featured the firing of inspectors general, senior federal workers, special counsel Jack Smith and several generals. The IRS formed a task force to revoke the tax-exempt status of universities and think tanks that “spread misinformation” about the 2020 election. The Education Department mandated that states withhold federal funding from schools that taught “critical race theory.” The Labor Department prepared rules to ban diversity, equity and inclusion policies in public companies. The FBI and Justice Department opened criminal investigations of Joe Biden, his family and members of the former House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. All “Jan. 6 patriots” secured pardons. The Justice Department held that the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional, and the president refused to spend appropriated funds for programs he disliked.
In that game, Blue and its allies struggled to respond. Career prosecutors who pushed back against spurious criminal charges, for example, were fired or chose to resign. The Red attorney general found willing replacements.
In another game, which focused on Red’s mass expulsion of migrants, including American-born children of undocumented parents, Blue expended the bulk of its energy on lawsuits that moved too slowly to match the pace of events on the ground.
This should terrify anyone who understands the historical lessons of such a plan—especially from the likes of Donald Trump, a man who has repeatedly channeled Adolf Hitler and has promised to “cleanse” the blood of the nation from human "vermin."
Attorney Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, has been warning about how the Trumpists and the other enemies of American and global democracy have continued with their plans beyond Jan. 6 by placing their agents in key positions on the county and state level across the country’s election infrastructure. In a new essay, Elias details how "Over the course of the last year, Republicans have become bolder in their plans to subvert the election results in 2024":
They now speak more openly about the need to control the certification process. They litigate more aggressively to be able to subvert election results. They enact new laws and rules explicitly for this purpose.
But it’s worse this election than previous ones because this year, the GOP is far more organized. They might have tried to subvert the results in a handful of places in 2020 and 2022, but this year, they will try to subvert them all, setting the stage now for what’s to come in November.
With fewer than 100 days until the election, Republicans are building an election subversion war machine.
They have sacrificed traditional get out the vote activity to fund and recruit for their massive voter suppression program. They have a constellation of well-funded legal groups supplanting these efforts with unlimited money and grassroots volunteers. They are sending their lawyers into courthouses around the country to lay the groundwork for their anti-democratic plans.
In a conversation with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday, Elias elaborated:
When Republicans couldn't achieve what they wanted to at the county level, they went to the state level. When they couldn't do that, they launched a fake elector scheme, which was just another way of undermining accurate certification of elections. When they couldn't do that, they launched a series of frivolous lawsuits and finally, they attempted to block what on January 6? The certification of the election. So this has been on their radar screen for some time, and it will be on their radar screen for sure in 2024….
I had never seen it before 2020. The idea of tinkering with the certification at the local level was just out of bounds. That is part of the pageantry of democracy — it is what makes us great as a country ... but as Donald Trump proved, the loyalty to his crimes and misdeeds is stronger than peoples' instinct for self-preservation."
Images of the American military deployed in the streets against the American people as part of Trump regime’s coup are not the stuff of speculative fiction or the recent film "Civil War." They are very real. On several occasions while “president”, Donald Trump wanted to unleash the US military against protesters and his other “enemies.” He was only stopped by the senior military leaders who refused to comply with such demands.
In a very important op-ed essay at the LA Times, ML Cavanaugh, who is co-founder of the Modern War Institute at West Point and a U.S. Army officer (now retired) with 25 years of service, explains why Donald Trump is an existential danger to the country who is unfit to be commander in chief and that he must not be elected in November.
Over time a bargain solidified. America permitted a professional military, not loyal to a party or a president, but to all the people through an oath to uphold the Constitution. The country even granted a certain amount of autonomy in strategic matters. In exchange, the military would remain nonpartisan. It would work to earn the nation’s trust and subordinate itself to civilian leadership. Military leaders engage in an “unequal dialogue” with their civilian superiors, in scholar Eliot Cohen’s phrase. This preserves the best military advice possible while staying deferential to America’s civilian leaders. There is, of course, occasional friction between presidents and generals — well worth it to maintain this pillar of national defense.
Trump wanted to destroy that pillar. Given a second term, he probably would. In its place he would enforce a subservience that would end the ability of America’s military to provide its best (or much of any) advice on peace and war. Trump would deploy the military as a political prop in service of his own brand, as he already tried to do. And he would reshape the military and the national security apparatus so that Trumpists would rise and others would not. His second term would be staffed by those prepared to “rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions” based on pro-Trump partisan qualifications, as described in the Project 2025 playbook.
This very same mistake was an enormous Nazi failure: Hitler broke the German generals, and so his decisions went unchecked and included some of the worst strategic moves in the history of warfare.
The immediate threat of a modern commander in chief who favors the Nazi approach would be the inappropriate use of military force on America’s streets (and perhaps even at polling places). The longer threat for this kind of recklessness is unknowable but foreseeable: eroding remaining trust in the military, eviscerating the civilian-military balance, ending America’s centuries-long success story.
Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans and the larger neofascist movement’s inevitable victory is far from guaranteed. Still, pro-democracy Americans need to be organized en masse as part of a larger project of corporeal politics that will involve massive non-violent protests, nationwide strikes, and other disruptions to the country’s day-to-day routine if Trump and the MAGA Republicans take power in 2025. Pro-democracy civil society organizations must focus their attention on the ongoing coup and widespread right-wing attacks on American democracy and leverage their particular resources and networks to stop it.
The American mainstream news media, for the most part, continues to normalize Donald Trump, the MAGA Republicans and movement, and the larger neofascist project. As an institution, they have been extremely resistant to consistently practicing real pro-democracy journalism. Viewers, listeners, readers, and especially subscribers need to embark upon a public pressure and boycotting campaign if the mainstream news media—and especially the elite agenda-setting news media such as the New York Times and Washington Post—continue with their Trump-MAGA enabling agenda.
And of course, the American people need to vote in very large numbers not just to defeat Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans on the margins, but to send a message that their antidemocratic politics and American neofascism has been rejected—and will continue to be. The Republican Party has been fully MAGAfied and needs to be torn down and rebuilt (or outright replaced) in a way that is consistent with basic democratic principles such as respect for the rule of law and civil society.
In his essay at the New Republic, Rothkopf gives these marching orders to his fellow pro-democracy Americans:
The Democracy Future Project’s exercises can’t tell us whether the descent into authoritarianism will be fast or slow if Trump wins. Most likely, it will involve a combination of highly visible steps and subtler, possibly even more dangerous changes far from view. But the exercises make it clear that should Trump win in November, there is every reason to expect the worst. And that’s why there is also every reason to prepare for the worst case. If those who care about democracy start coordinating now to shore up democracy’s defenses, we’ll have a fighting chance of slowing or preventing Trump’s most egregious plans should he regain the White House.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s coup was stopped. It is not common for what experts describe as “autocratic capture” to be derailed while in process. The American people were very lucky. In the end, the best way to stop Dictator Trump and his successors is to never allow them back in the White House again. On Election Day, the American people must make that historic choice.
