The Republicans Have a Chance at a Historical Coup Over. Will They Take It?

There was a moment in time when the German Weimar Republic could have kept the world from ever learning about Adolf Hitler. After Hitler’s November 8^th 1923 ‘Beer Hall Putsch,’ (Putsch is the German word for a violent coup d’état) failed, the Weimar government captured him and charged him with treason. Had the government dealt firmly with Hitler, it is very unlikely that the world would ever have learned his name, but the Weimar government took a different approach: they vacillated between a need to enforce the law, and the knowledge that Hitler had damaging information on them and fear of what would happen if he used it. He faced almost no real consequences for his violent attempted coup d’état, and came out more popular and powerful than ever. Today in our own country, we sit at a similar crossroads as we consider how to judge Donald Trump for his own violent, illegal attempted coup. It is the Republican Party in the Senate that is caught between the desire to enforce and honor the law, and a fear of what Trump and his followers will do to them. If just 17 Republican Senators remember what happened to Germany almost a century ago, they will vote to convict Trump and bar him from ever legitimately attaining power again. Unfortunately, the signs are that most Republican Senators have forgotten history (if they ever knew it to begin with), and they’re most likely going to let Trump off the hook, further emboldening him and strengthening his hold on their Party. They are likely to let this golden opportunity slip through their fingers due to a toxic cocktail of fear, tribalism, and blinkered self-interest. We must help them remember…before it is too late.

The Historical Lesson: A ‘Struggle,’ Against Democracy

On November 8^th 1923, in the Bürgerbraükeller Beer Hall in Munich, Hitler and his Nazis announced that a revolution had begun in Bavaria that would soon sweep on to Berlin and overthrow the Weimar Republic. Hitler’s plan was to follow the example of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome,’ from October of the previous year, and at this early state sought to put Erich Ludendorff – who was for all intents and purposes the military dictator of Germany during the last 2-years of World War One – at the head of a new, right wing dictatorship. But the heads of the Bavarian government who had signaled support for the coup got cold feet and bailed on the Nazis, leading the putsch to collapse and the death of 20 people and the capture of Hitler and the other high-ranking Nazis. The Weimar government quickly realized that Hitler had a lot of embarrassing information that he could reveal at a real trial, especially as regarded the fact that key Bavarian officials had shown favor to his attempt, and that Ludendorff (still a hero to many in the country) was involved. They therefore allowed the trial to descend into a farce where Hitler was in complete control due to his damaging leverage over them, and made sure that the focus was not on WHAT he did and the fact that he was an egomaniacal, rage-filled, fundamentally broken monster, but on WHY he did it. Hitler was therefore allowed to air his grievances against the Weimar government (which he primarily equated with Communists and Jews) and he blamed them for losing the Great War and all the outrages of the Treaty of Versailles.

The Weimar government wasn’t done helping set the stage for Hitler’s later horrifying rise. He was convicted of high treason, but instead of being deported to his native Austria (as he should have been), or given a long sentence in prison, he was instead sentenced to only 5-years for his crime at Landsberg Prison in accommodations noted Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw called, ‘more akin to those of a hotel than a penitentiary.’ There Hitler dictated his infamous book ‘Mein Kampf,’ (German for ‘My Struggle’) to fellow Nazi prisoners, making him more popular than he had ever been before when he was released only 8-months into his already lenient 5-year-sentence. Hitler didn’t come out chastened or repentant, but a celebrity who was now recognized as the leader of the Nazi Party and the most powerful figure of the ultra-nationalist, uber-right wing; the only ‘lesson’ he learned was to use more legitimate-seeming levers to gain power when he had his next chance to destroy the German republic and set up his own Fascist autocracy.  

Profiles in Cowardice

Donald Trump’s attempted coup culminated in the violent insurrection at the Capitol Building on January 6^th, but it didn’t begin then. Trump began laying the groundwork for his attempt by spending years saying that the only possible legitimate outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election would be his victory and reelection; a defeat for Trump could only be the result of election fraud and not because more voters supported his opponent (who would eventually become now-president Joe Biden). When it became increasingly clear that Joe Biden had won the election and networks called it for him on November 7^th, the GOP response was unprecedented, as the vast majority of Republicans in Congress refused to call Biden the President-elect and their mood was best articulated by an anonymous Republican Senator, who admitted that Biden won the election, but then rhetorically asked what the ‘harm’ would be for ‘humoring,’ Trump and not contradicting his false claims that he was the real winner. But as Trump kept going further down the rabbit hole and indicating that he would not agree to a peaceful transfer of power, no Republicans in power were brave enough to contradict what had become an openly telegraphed coup attempt.

The establishment GOP (the non-true believers) had followed Kentucky Senator and now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s lead during the entire Trump Presidency, and spent almost 4-years ignoring the most awful things that Trump did and said in order to achieve their 3 main goals of packing the courts with young Conservative ideologues (regardless of their qualifications), getting a large tax cut for the wealthy, and cutting regulations. They were prepared to do whatever it took to defend Trump regardless of his actions in order to achieve those deep goals. They even defended Trump when he illegally used Congressionally-mandated aid for Ukraine as leverage to get the Ukrainian government to help him win reelection by telling lies about President Biden. The House impeached Trump for his extortion attempt, but only one Senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, voted to convict him in the Senate; the rest, regardless of whether they had a reputation as being political moderates, hung together and made sure that Trump was not held accountable for his actions. When explaining her decision not to vote to convict Trump, Maine Senator Susan Collins (a supposed moderate), claimed that no conviction was necessary because Trump had ‘learned his lesson,’ by being impeached. The most charitable view of Collins’s stance is that she was naïve as to who Trump is as a human being, but it is more likely that she was actually cynically lying and her real reasons not to convict were that she was running for a 5^th term in November and she couldn’t win without Trump’s base coming out for her.

Even after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the election, receiving 7 million more popular votes than Trump, and winning 306-232 in the Electoral College, the GOP kept humoring him. They spoke platitudes about Trump being within his rights to challenge the election results in court, and even when court after court threw out his specious charges, they never contradicted his lies when he told his supporters that he not only won the election, but won in a ‘sacred landslide,’ or when he openly sought to influence Republican state legislators across the country by inviting them to the White House and heavily leaning on them to get them to ignore what the voters in those states had done and back him instead. Trump’s supporters in Congress didn’t even say anything when he was caught calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (a Republican) to demand that Raffensperger ‘find’ him the 11,780 votes he needed to steal Georgia’s 16-electoral votes. It is hard to believe that Trump was not doing the same thing to other ‘Battle Ground,’ Republican Secretaries of State and Governors at the time, because just flipping Georgia’s 16-votes would not have swung the election to Trump: he needed several states to flip because he lost by a fairly comfortable margin in the Electoral College of 306-232.

From the moment the networks called the race for Joe Biden on November 7^th until the January 6^th insurrection forced their hands, the transparent hope of Republican non-believers, like McConnell and others like Representative Liz Cheney, the House Minority Whip, was clearly that they could just ride out the storm to January 20^th without having the Party split over dealing with Trump.  

The Mad Mob’s March

Once the Electoral College certified Biden’s 306-232 victory in December, Trump became increasingly desperate. He threw his considerable weight behind 2 legal challenges he tried to have heard in the Supreme Court, where he felt that personally appointing 3 of the 9 Justices would guarantee that the court would have a second term that would find a way to give him a second term. After the Trump team’s failure in courts across the country, he and his closest followers began to talk of a last stand of sorts on January 6^th, when Congress would meet to do the (normally perfunctory) job of reading out and accepting the Electoral Votes as submitted and certified by each state. Some of Trump’s most devoted followers, like disgraced former Lt. General Michael Flynn, urged him to invoke martial law, but Trump instead sided with those, like his personal lawyer and former New York Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who proposed the idea that Vice President Mike Pence – in his role as President of the Senate – would be able to do more than just announce the results (which is all he’s really able to do in that role) and could simply ignore the results from enough states to keep Trump in power. Pence publicly and privately poured cold water on this theory, but Republican members of the House lined up behind disputing the results of the Battle Ground States that Trump lost on January 6^th. Their plan was always quixotic and doomed to fail, because the Democrats have a majority in the House and there were too few Republicans in the Senate who were open to the idea of stealing the election to actually get any votes thrown out, which is why McConnell told his caucus not to object because it had no chance of success and would only force members to either take a vote against Trump and anger their base, OR to back a coup that would destroy the government if it actually succeeded. But Josh Hawley of Missouri said that he would object to the counting of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, and he was followed by several Senators, led by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, agreeing to object to the other Battle Grounds as well, meaning that the January 6^th certification of the results would take longer and be more combative than ever before in our history. All the while, Trump, Conservative media, most Republicans in the House, and many in the Senate kept lying to their supporters by saying that Trump was the real winner and that they could help ‘stop the steal,’ on January 6^th. Instead of telling the truth, they said that their meritless objections could actually keep Trump in power, repeatedly saying that their supporters need only march to the Capitol to pressure Congress and stop the certification of Biden’s win,   

The rest is, of course, what Trump was impeached for a 2^nd time. He told the mob to march to the Capitol, where they arrived after the counting had begun and most Republicans in the House and 11 in the Senate were in the process of objecting to the votes of Arizona. The Capitol was evacuated while the rioters violently rampaging through the Capitol, their actions leading to the deaths of 4 rioters and a Capitol Police Officer, Brian Sicknick, was murdered while trying to protect Congress. While this was ongoing and members of Congress were being held in a secure location away from the mob, Giuliani was busy calling supporters like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville and imploring them to object to as many states as possible as soon as Congress resumed its Constitutionally mandated duty, in order to drag the proceedings into the next day (the 7^th). We know Giuliani did this because he left a message on what he thought was Tuberville’s phone, but was actually that of Utah Senator Mike Lee – a Republican but one who wasn’t challenging the results or aiding Trump’s undemocratic coup. Giuliani claimed on the call that a delay into the 7^th would give Trump’s team the time to present new evidence of wide-spread voter fraud. Giuliani was lying about the evidence (which he has never produced in court or anywhere else), meaning that the real reason is far darker: Giuliani and Trump wanted to give the insurrectionists more time to (in the best light) loudly intimidate Pence and Congress into illegally letting Trump stay in power, but could honestly have  been about giving the rioters more time to capture Pence and/or other key leaders and compel them at threats to their lives to keep Trump in power.

Republican Senators Have a Last Chance to Make it Right

All of these things happened and cannot be covered up or sacrificed in the name of superficial, self-interested ‘unity.’ Donald Trump tried to overturn a free and fair democratic election because he didn’t like the result, and most of the Republican Party was either complicit in his effort, or silently standing by and letting it happen. What originally started as a stupid, angry, pathetic man’s attempt to cope with losing turned into a psychotic and increasingly autocratic attempt to forcibly hold onto power at any cost. It is hard to believe that Trump ever truly believed he won the election, but it is hard to tell because for literally his entire life he has been able to ignore what he doesn’t like, and has had enough money to get people to accept his world view. He could say that he ‘won,’ even when he made terrible business decisions or his marriages blew up due to his narcissism and infidelity, and he could always find people to say that he was right. But here was finally a situation where he could say, ‘I won,’ as often as he wants to, but aside from a small and shrinking circle of sycophantic cultists, a majority of those in government refused to let him warp reality, declare himself a winner, and stay in power.

The reason that Trump’s coup is so incredibly dangerous for our democracy is that it revealed that the majority of the Republican Party in Congress and in state Republican Parties across the nation were willing to go along with it regardless of the fact that he so clearly lost the election. And some of those Republicans who did stand up for democracy at the very end once it became clear that Trump was not going to accept his defeat no matter what would likely not have acted as they did if the election was actually close. As we just saw, Biden won by 7 million popular votes and 306-232 in the Electoral College and people like McConnell still wouldn’t publicly acknowledge his win for over a month, Trump appointees made the transition as difficult as possible, and Republicans supported Trump filing garbage lawsuit after garbage lawsuit. How would they have reacted if Biden won by the same margin as George W. Bush’s victory over Vice President Al Gore in 2000, when Gore received over 500,000 more popular votes, but Bush won in the electoral college 271-266? We know that Trump would declare a huge victory in that case (heck, he did the same thing this time even though Biden won by 7 million votes and the same electoral college victory that Trump called a landslide when he defeated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016), so how would he react if more Americans voted for him, but Biden won the Electoral College, and only by 537 votes in one state? There is no chance he’d leave willingly, and little chance anyone in the Republican Party would defy him in favor of Biden.

Because of all those facts, Trump needs to be convicted and barred from office ever again because far too many Republicans have proven that they no longer believe in democracy when it doesn’t go their way. Instead of coming up with a platform that a majority of Americans can support, all Republicans do now is tell people to hate Democrats and terrify them of Liberals so much that even a Trumpian lifetime dictatorship is preferable. We have seen that they will bend language enough so that they will continue to use the language of ‘liberty,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘independence,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘democracy,’ while they work to extinguish the real meanings of those words forever.

Republicans have the chance, though, to make sure Trump doesn’t run ever again, and give us the space to try to save our democratic republic. They need to look to the Weimar Republic to see what happens when coups go unpunished, and to their own history to realize that Trump didn’t, ‘learn his lesson,’ as Collins said last year during Trump’s first impeachment. Hitler had never been in power, so while the Weimar government failed horribly with him and the entire world paid for that mistake, there is even less excuse for Republican Senators in terms of dealing with Trump, because he was just in power for four-years. They know who he is: he does not learn lessons, grow as a human being, or get better. Just like Hitler he is empty inside except for hatred and narcissism. Our system truly cannot survive another Trump term, nor can it survive if the legal principle that presidents are fully above the law becomes precedent. Like Hitler, Trump attempted a coup, and like Hitler his coup failed and led to bloodshed. Weimar let Hitler use the aftermath of his failed Beer Hall Putsch as a springboard to total power over Germany in under a decade.

Republican Senators have the chance to forge ahead and to not repeat history. I just wish I could be optimistic that at least 17 of them will actually take it.