The Nation: “Trump’s Coup Attempt Is Far From Finished”

From “The Nation”

“Subverting Justice,” the 394-page report released last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee on disgraced former president Donald Trump’s machinations to overturn the results of the 2020 election, outlines the details of a coup plot that only narrowly failed.

That’s a fact that cannot be lost on any of us, as Trump continues to spin his big lies about the last presidential election, and as he sends ever-more-ominous signals about his intention to run in the next one. The facts of the former president’s sedition, which are now more fully detailed than ever before, should inspire members of Congress and state election officials to act—according to the dictates of the Constitution—to bar Trump from ever again holding public office.

All this makes sense, but there are dozens of different things that could happen that would derail all of this.  The last sentence in the excerpt is a reference to the wide-ranging 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and exercising it is indeed one such possible cause of derailment.

Others include criminal indictments at both the federal and state levels concerning fraud, tax evasion, extortion, witness intimidation, election tampering, as well as, of course,  inciting insurrection.

Another factor to keep in mind is the attrition of the Trump base due to everything from epiphanies to deaths.  Obviously this will be irrelevant if Trump is convicted of one or more felonies, but, as Senior Energy Analyst Glenn Doty points out, the rate at which the base is being refreshed is far lower than the attrition rate.  When this hits a critical point, Trump will fall into irrelevancy very quickly, because all the congresspeople in red states will no longer need him to carry their districts/states, and they will do what they’ve been dying to do since the onset of all this horror, i.e., drop him like a hot rock, and try to pretend that they were never actually associated with him.