Thom Hartmann: The Trump Coup Attempt Is Ongoing. The Next Date to Watch Is March 4.
February 27, 2021
US Capitol is still under potential siege (Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash)
By Thom Hartmann
Multiple Republicans, from former NRA spokespersons and rightwing talkshow hosts, to Republican congressional candidates, to the rightwing media are speaking out, loudly, about their concern that Joe Biden has not yet held a State of the Union address.
There are so many demands and tweets that David Badash over at The New Civil Rights Movement compiled a list of some in his article about this topic.
Why, suddenly, are all these right wingers demanding that all the members of the House and Senate, the Vice President and the President all gather together in the Capitol building to hear a speech right away?
Why has this suddenly become such a big issue on the right?
Why is right-wing talk radio talking about it almost nonstop?
After all, the Constitution doesn’t even require the president to give such a speech: Thomas Jefferson used to submit them in writing, and he would know the Framers’ intent.
And the Constitution doesn’t require any particular time or date; it doesn’t even require that they be done annually.
Nonetheless, the clamor for President Joe Biden to convene a Joint Session of Congress to bring all of our federally elected officials together in the Capitol building has gotten so loud that USA Today felt obligated to issue a fact check, explicitly pointing out that there is no set date or even annual requirement for a State of the Union address.
Nonetheless, right wingers are loudly complaining about the lack of a timely State of the Union address. Some suggest that Joe Biden is too weak or frail to pull it off, an apparent attempt to egg him on. Others simply lie and say that it’s required in February but he’s ignoring it.
So why are all these Republicans and right-wingers demanding a State of the Union address as soon as possible?
We may have gotten a clue yesterday when the acting head of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, told Congress that the same groups who attacked the Capitol on January 6 are very, very, very interested in the State of the Union address.
“We know that members of the militia groups that were present on January 6,” she testified, “have stated their desires that they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many Members as possible, with a direct nexus to the State of the Union.”
The Confederacy that declared war against America in 1861 was all about using violence to enforce white supremacy. They promoted their “lost cause” fantasy for over 150 years to keep white rule in place in America, particularly across the South.
To this day, white supremacist Republican politicians fight any attempt to improve the lives of their poorest people, from opposing expanding Medicaid to opposing increases in the minimum wage, all because those efforts could benefit Black people.
I just sent off the manuscript for the next book in my hidden history series, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, and in my research found that literally every single effort to provide Americans with a national healthcare system, from the late 19th century right up to the passage of Medicare in 1965, was opposed by white southern conservatives who repeatedly and openly bragged they were against it because they didn’t want any such benefit to go to Black people.
In my first book in the series, The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, I lay out how the Second Amendment was written the way it was, at the time it was, to preserve the slave patrols in Virginia and South Carolina, and the basis of much of today’s “gun culture” is rooted in white rage and white fear.
As I pointed out in The Hidden History of the War On Voting, the 19th century Confederate losers and their white supremacist followers to this day fought and fight every effort to make it easier to vote so they can continue to suppress the Black vote. It’s why several hundred pieces of legislation making it harder to vote have been introduced in over 30 Republican-dominated state legislatures just in the last ten weeks.
Thus, it’s no coincidence that the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were carrying Confederate flags along with their Nazi memorabilia and T-shirts proclaiming that “6 million wasn’t enough.”
Americans of good conscience know that Donald Trump’s MAGA movement pretty much begins and ends with white supremacy. From “build a wall” to putting brown children in cages to the “Kung flu” and the “Muslim ban,” virtually everything Donald Trump and his followers have pushed flows back to trashing non-white people.
And the one legislative achievement of Trump’s four years in office was a massive tax cut that almost singularly benefited the very, very rich, who are overwhelmingly white.
Black Capitol Police officers on January 6 were beaten, spit on, and repeatedly called racial slurs by the pro-Trump MAGA crowd who were trying to end America‘s democratic republic and replace it with white supremacist strongman rule.
The belief that only white people should hold power or wealth in the United States has been at the core of “conservative” ideology since our founding. It animated nominations for judicial candidates and senior officials throughout the Trump administration, and continues to be a primary value for the mostly white Republican Party.
Some among them want to continue the work that Tim McVeigh started of tearing down a multiracial, pluralistic America with death and violence; their project is now carried on by readers of The Turner Diaries and followers of social media conspiracy theories.
As I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, there have been two attempts by American oligarchs to overthrow the US government and install authoritarian, white supremacist regimes in its place.
The first culminated in the Civil War; the second happened with an attempted coup against FDR that was interrupted by General Smedley Butler. The first was about 80 years after the founding of our republic; it was followed roughly 80 years later by the attempt on Roosevelt. And now here we are again, 80 years after FDR’s death.
The CPAC conference in DC this weekend is celebrating Trump’s Big Lie that he won the November election.
The Trump coup attempt is ongoing, while multiple Republican elected officials think they can ride this tiger safely. They are wrong.
Qanon conspiracy believers are promoting another “rally” in DC on March 4th, the date they think Donald Trump will be proclaimed “President of the World.” The Trump Hotel in the nation’s Capitol has already raised their room rates for that date in anticipation of a crowd.
And now Capitol Police have intelligence that some Trump followers want to use the State of the Union address to reprise their deadly January 6th attempt to assassinate America’s elected officials, so they can replace them with Trump and whichever cronies he brings along with him.
It’s literally the plot device for the TV show Designated Survivor, which was considered dystopian alt-reality fiction when it was first written and produced.
America is at a point of maximum peril as the Republican Party has almost entirely embraced Trump’s white supremacist ideology and is using his Big Lie to push massive voter suppression, encourage more political violence and end the American experiment.
The remaining Republicans who actually believe in American values must step forward and speak out now, or the window in time and history for their party to return to sanity may close forever.
Website of origin is Medium.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute
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