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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf. His first administration was a shit show, but besides putting a few migrant kids into cages, he mostly harmed the reputation of the US.
His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.
Of course, the Democrats reacted with a lot of lawsuits. Some with merit, some pure lawfare. In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas. Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.
While I am reluctant to defend the woke mob, I will also notice that government can do a lot of things that most social movements can not do at scale. The BLM riots happened because local governments were willing to turn a blind eye to rioting rather than employ police violence. So the government should at least get half-credit for them. But a bunch of criminals looting is small fries compared to the kind of damage the federal government can do.
Saying that you are less worried about government because it has checks and balances is like saying that you are less worried about nuclear weapons than you are about knives because nukes need a code to activate them while knives let anyone stab people. Sure, the median crazy killer will murder more people with a knife than a nuke, but if the safety mechanism fails the nuke-wielding crazy will be able to do orders of magnitude more damage.
Well, I guess the question here is "is it really any worse to try to overturn an election, claiming it was fraudulent, than to agree an election was free/fair and then try to overturn it anyway?"
Because, well, after Trump won in 2016 there was a scheme to have the Electoral College throw out the results, and there were riots trying to prevent the inauguration.
It's especially ironic that you mention the phrase "peaceful transfer of power", because I found an interview with one of the organisers of the latter, in which he said:
Don't get me wrong; J6 was bad. But to claim it was unprecedented is... inaccurate.
From that article, ten electors wanted to defect. Five ended up defecting from Clinton, two from Trump, who had a margin of 37.
Personally, I think that trying to defeat Trump through faithless electors would have been a terrible idea. Still, I think what Trump did was worse. The constitution at least mentions electors, and that attempt to steal an election would have been subject to the SCOTUS oversight. By contrast, the constitution is silent about armed goons breaking into the Capitol, and it seems unlikely that the SCOTUS would have been in a position to rule against them without the mob interfering.
I do not find your J20 thing convincing in the least. To my knowledge, Legba Carrefour was not a fixture of DC Democrats. Now, if you have evidence of Obama, Clinton, Pelosi or the like telling the disruptJ20 rioters something along the lines of "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore", then I would concede that this is equivalent to J6, but otherwise I do not blame the Democrats more for their fringes than I would blame Trump for the odd Qanan loon.
Please forgive my provincialism, but I still don't get the precise mechanism by which that was as terrible as it's often treated. Even if they hadn't been thrown out, what would they have done there? Or is it all just symbolism?
Presumably, their plan was to force Congress to certify Trump as the election winner at gunpoint.
All coup attempts seem silly until they succeed. Hitler marching on the Feldherrenhalle was far more silly than J6.
Take the vote for the Enabling Act. I would argue that the presence of the brownshirts during the vote was a clear factor in persuading Zentrum to vote for the act which turned Hitler into a dictator. If anything, the surprising thing was that the SPD showed balls of steel by voting against it.
Is it possible that Mike Pence would have stared down the barrel of a gun and certified Biden? Sure.
Is it possible that the SCOTUS would have overruled a certification for Trump under duress? Sure.
Is it possible that the military leadership would have arrested Trump on the spot? Sure.
So while Trump was unlikely to succeed, I would not claim that his coup attempt was totally absurd -- more like shooting with a handgun at someone 80m away than trying to shoot the Moon.
With zero guns? My god man. There's a slight problem with your theory.
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