If all had gone according to the former president's fever dream on Jan. 6, the morning of Jan. 7, 2021, would've ushered in an attempted decapitation of democracy.
On Jan. 7, the Capitol would still have been occupied by thousands of "tourists" waving their Jesus, Trump and fascist flags like the well-regulated militia they aspired to be.
Still giddy from the adrenaline high of having corralled most members of Congress in various bunkers hidden around the Capitol, the hunt for coffee in the trashed offices of their hostages would've begun almost as soon as the first waves of weariness and disbelief at the magnitude of their actions came crashing in.
The military and National Guard troops from as far away as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio and New York would have formed a perimeter around the Capitol, making it impossible for anyone to enter or leave.
Following the resignation of the president's entire communications team, it would've been left to several Fox News anchors, hastily deputized as official mouthpieces, to explain to America why what looked like a coup was actually a previously scheduled "martial law exercise."
"Don't let the liberals gaslight you," the propagandists would've said in a coordinated assault on the truth. "This is not a coup. The trials of the vice president and the speaker of the House will proceed in an orderly fashion on a date to be determined. After the full extent of their anti-American activities have been revealed, they will be hung by their necks until they are dead as an example to those who would attempt to 'steal' or enable the stealing of another election."
At the Oval Office, the former president and a small coterie of true believers, vaguely satanic and trollish, would still be celebrating having stopped the previous day's certification of the electoral count. Nothing like that had ever been done in American history, and they just wanted to luxuriate in their victory a little while longer.
But their reverie would be interrupted by officials from the Pentagon, who would inform the president and his enablers that he no longer had jurisdiction of the nuclear football and that he was in violation of several laws, from his assault of a Secret Service agent to inciting the armed mob action that led to the takeover of the Capitol. This would send the (now former) commander in chief into a rage: "I'm the friggin' president. That's my nuclear football. Mine!"
No American would have gone to bed on Jan. 6. We all would've greeted the dawn of Jan. 7 with bleary eyes of disbelief, convinced we were all participants in some collective waking nightmare.
Gathered around our various screens by the hundreds of millions, we would've been witnesses to a crime in progress.
The jaw-dropping testimony before the Jan. 6 Committee last week about the former president's dereliction of duty was a stark reminder of the danger our country was in that day.
Had the insurrectionists succeeded in capturing the vice president or any fleeing members of Congress, no imagined scenario would have been zany or tragic enough to convey what really would've happened.
Still, I'm at a loss to figure out what former President Trump planned in his least violent fantasy for that day. What did he expect? I get that he wanted Vice President Mike Pence to exercise power that he didn't have to reject certifying the election.
Somehow in the confusion such a move would've generated, Trump thought he could sneak a whole fifth column of fake Trump-loyal electors into the process. They would presumably throw states Joe Biden won into Trump's column. Meanwhile, did he assume that the insurrectionists would be content with manhandling a few politicians and taking selfies in the Senate chamber before leaving the building peacefully?
Trump is many things, but he isn't naive. So, how did the self-described "effing president" expect to get a second term when every American tuned into the events would have already concluded that the Capitol takeover had transformed one of our nation's icons into a crime scene?
There would have been no debate about whether Trump himself was an insurrectionist had his plan to stop the certification succeeded. The odd thing is that the former president apparently believed that, by some magic, his reliance on terrorism would've earned him legitimacy — beyond the Qanon crowd and a tiny circle of zealots.
But no one would've taken his extra-constitutional shenanigans seriously. Once the insurrectionists surrendered under threat of death and the vice president and Congress were safe and accounted for, the president himself would've been frog-marched out of the White House in manacles in front of the world's television cameras.
Trump's "treasonous" vice president would've been installed in his place to serve out the remainder of his term. No pardons of any of the participants would've been issued.
Ironically, the way Jan. 6 played out in the real world was the best of all possible scenarios for the former president and the GOP. They're still very much a potent force in politics because true believers have been spared the sight of Trump being booked for federal crimes. Had things gone the way he wanted them to go, he would've been in federal custody by the end of the next day, at the latest.
So, what was Donald Trump's endgame on Jan. 6? Truth to tell, he didn't have one. All he had was an infamous boast that might serve as his epitaph one day: "I'm the effing president!"
