Trump's Coup and Insurrection: Biden's Challenge and Opportunity.

• Author: Parmar, Inderjeet
• Position: COMMENTARY

Introduction

President Donald Trump's attempted coup and insurrection's political effects are set to continue in the future because the enabling conditions have deep historical roots, its support reaches far into the U.S. state, broad sections of the Republican Party (sometimes referred to as the GOP or Grand Old Party) and electorate, military, and law enforcement. That it was a coup attempt is in no doubt--it was openly declared as an attempt to reverse the results of a democratic election. Yet, the very fact of the attempted coup, the insurrectionary attacks on the Capitol as well as on numerous state capitols across the country, and how the U.S. authorities handle the perpetrators will have national and global consequences. The U.S. may not be exceptional, but it is no ordinary state. It is the world's pivotal state, and what happens there reverberates around the world. There is a feeling that the imperial homeland is on the brink of a descent into the abyss. (1) Nevertheless, due to the courts, state and county-level election officials, the decisive electoral defeat of Trump, and the sheer weight of popular opinion, the U.S. political system appears to have squeaked through a major stress test. But the political reverberations of Trumpism will remain for some time to come. (2) There is no 'return to normalcy' the country craves, without reforms to a system that advantages the politics of extremism in the Republican Party. (3)

The Legitimacy Crisis Is Deep, Historically-Rooted, and Has Global Implications

This quotation from an Italian revolutionary philosopher from a century ago sums up a core aspect of the crises of American elite legitimacy--the loss of popular authority of a hollowed-out shell of a state and its accompanying political parties:

At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organizational form, with the particular men or women who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognized by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic 'men of destiny.' (4) America's recent uprisings, whether opposing institutional racism, police brutality, and COVID-19 mismanagement, or supporting the baseless post-truth Trump-manufactured allegations of a 'stolen election--tell the tale of a divisive, authoritarian, and incompetent president and America Firsts coercive ultra-nationalism. It is a story underpinned by a decades-long trend of rising inequality and declining life chances whose origins go back to the Reagan revolution and the end of the New Deal order. Since then, government' as an idea has been viewed by political elites as the problem, not the solution to social ills. According to a recent RAND Corporation study, economic inequality climbed in the 1990s and has seen a massive transfer of wealth from the lower 90 percent of the U.S. population to the ultra-rich of around $47 trillion. (5) A new report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) shows that "the collective wealth of America's 651 billionaires has jumped by over $1 trillion since roughly the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to a total of $4 trillion... Combined, just the top 10 billionaires are now worth more than $1 trillion." (6) America is reacting militarily and coercively as its global positions are increasingly challenged, its domestic governance structures hollowed out by decades of tax cuts and open hostility to the idea of government, a domestic population losing faith and challenging the establishment. It increasingly resembles a failing state, which a majority of its people think is heading in the wrong direction. (7) Almost 80 percent of Americans agree that their country is 'falling apart.' (8)

The depth of the problem enables--an admittedly self-serving--Zimbabwean President Mnangagwa to tie U.S. sanctions against his country to the attack on the Capitol, arguing that "the U.S. has no moral right to punish another nation under the guise of upholding democracy" (9) The Venezuelan government contended that the "political polarization and the spiral of violence" the U.S. is experiencing echoes "what it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression." (10) But more worryingly, core G7 states and allies like Canada made contingency plans to cope with post-election political violence in the United States.

The Insurrection Was Planned

According to the Wall Street Journal --a staunch ally of right-wing authoritarianism and the Trump regime-there was no "threat assessment" by either the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or the Department of Homeland Security regarding the planned and much-publicized pro-Trump demonstrations. (11) Such assessments are, however, routinely made ahead of what have been largely peaceful leftist and anti-fascist demonstrations.

The Washington Post noted that the Department of Defense had disarmed the Washington D.C. national guard ahead of the rally, knowing it would delay mobilization and deployment should the need arise. The Post noted that "the Pentagon prohibited the District's guardsmen from receiving ammunition or riot gear, interacting with protestors unless necessary for self-defense, sharing equipment with local law enforcement, or using Guard surveillance and air assets without the defense secretary's explicit sign-off..." (12)

Recent reports have emerged to suggest that some of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol planned to kidnap and assassinate members of Congress. They were armed with automatic weapons, pipe bombs, tear gas, and restraints.

As numerous reports show, there are significant levels of white supremacist and right-wing militia infiltration of Americas police and other law enforcement agencies. A 2017 FBI report indicated that white supremacists pose a 'persistent threat of lethal violence' that has produced more fatalities than any other category of domestic terrorists since 2000. Internal FBI policy documents also warned agents assigned to domestic terrorism cases that the white supremacist and anti-government militia groups they investigate often have 'active links' to law enforcement officials. Unsurprisingly, few police departments prohibit officers from joining white supremacist organizations, while the Department of Justice has no strategy to deal with the issue. (13)

There are also indications that Trump has a strong following--possibly numbering in the thousands--within the U.S. military. Thomas Kolditz, a retired U.S. army brigadier general, argued that the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol was "an insurgency, a crime against the state," and called for Pentagon leadership to root out "sleeper cells...in the military who...think an insurgency is a good idea..." (14)

Billionaires Stand behind Trumpism

There is little that is truly spontaneous about what's been happening in U.S. right-wing politics for the past two decades at least. And despite our yearning to hold a specific individual responsible, individuals are enabled by structures, forces, and conditions beyond their control or making.

The most significant driver in the development of right-wing populism arises from specific initiatives of billionaire right-wing donor networks, especially the Koch brothers' complex. This includes the Mercer and DeVos families and Sheldon Adelson, among others who are central to Koch donor networks. They may disagree on aspects of Trump's 'conservatism' and leadership style but share a love of limited government (with coercive policing), corporate welfare, low taxes, and a war on the poor. (15)

According to research at Harvard led by Professor Theda Skocpol, from around 2003, Koch et al. united and invested billions of dollars to build a major ecosystem of faux grassroots (astroturf) organizations, and networked with policy advocacy, ideological, and protest groups staffed by over 2.5 million largely paid Volunteers' across the U.S. (16)

The Tea Party exploded onto the scene, with Koch network funding and organizational support in and around the GOP across numerous states, driving the party's elected representatives further to the right than the GOP's own voters. They created the machinery for the extreme right that provided the platform for Trump's racist 'birther' movement, his incendiary 2016 election...