The President Who Played With Fire
What was Trump really hoping to accomplish by inviting a mob to raid the Capitol?
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Is anyone still wondering what then-President Donald Trump expected to happen if he and his mob had successfully hanged Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, among others, on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 — and successfully stopped the final vote certification?
I expect his plan was similar to the strategy the Nazis used in 1933 in Germany, when that nation’s parliament building was set ablaze by insurrectionists. Hitler was the new chancellor of Germany at the time — a position of power similar to being president.
From the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:
On February 27, 1933, the German parliament (Reichstag) building burned down. The Nazi leadership and its coalition partners used the fire to claim that Communists were planning a violent uprising. They claimed that emergency legislation was needed to prevent this. The resulting act, commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolished a number of constitutional protections and paved the way for Nazi dictatorship.
Insert Black Lives Matters or Antifa, for “Communists,” and it fits like a glove.
The plan of some hate groups who were part of the Capitol raid was then and remains capturing, trying extrajudicially and executing all Democrats deemed traitors [along with “disloyal” Republicans] — or otherwise force them from office — and then seat loyal Trumpists in their place. That’s how you get to a new “Reichstag Fire Decree.”
Many media pundits who have no experience with a coup d’état in a democracy fail to account for the transition period to dictatorship. So, they keep scratching their heads, trying to figure out how Trump would benefit from the Capitol assault, given stopping the vote certification on Jan. 6 would not have allowed Trump to remain president — per the Constitution and existing law.
But the transition period in a democracy that is being bent into a dictatorship often involves using the existing institutions and traditions of that democratic government extrajudicially to achieve and consolidate total power.
The fast-take analysis of the Capitol raid too often fails to recognize that the next move by Trumpists wasn’t going to be legal — though it would be presented by them as being so.
The propaganda used by usurpers always attempts to offer a legal pretense — down to the accounting for and legislating of the final solution.
