I don’t really know enough to give you any sort of realistic, detailed counterfactual on what might have happend had Vice President Mike Pence gone along with Trump’s January 6th coup attempt, but let’s do some thinking about it.
The key thing we have to contemplate is how close we came to a civil war on January 6th, 2021. Given what we know of what the coup plotters wanted to do once they got Pence to punt on the certification of Electoral votes….oh boy. It seems as though they believed they wanted to use the extra time to get state Republicans to approve rival Electors that they could use the muddy the waters.
And, remember, there would have been a ticking clock to all of this — January 20th would be just days away. And the moment January 20th rolled around and we STILL didn’t know who POTUS is — especially in the context of the Insurrection Act having been invoked — then, well, it seems clear the country probably would have devolved into chaos.
At this point, it’s possible that the U.S. Military might have stepped in to sort things out. But the point is — Pence bought us all time by destroying his political career and we’ve squandered it.
Now, we’re careening towards a disaster just as big, if not bigger.
Given how dire some of my personal predictions about the next 18 months are, it’s very possible that Mike Pence may have single-handedly given the Republic four years to — somehow — save itself.
And what have we done with that time?
Jack shit.
Rather than using the fours years that Pence afford us by lighting his political career on fire, we’ve just mentally masturbated over the “who shot John” elements of Trumplandia, not really addressing the central issue: Donald Trump.
So here we are, potentially about to either turn into a MAGA-themed autocracy, or have a civil war / revolution. I say this because it seems clear that America was the cusp of a civil war / revolution on January 6th, 2021. It is simply amazing that the the insurrectionists we sooooooo dumb and disorganized that they didn’t try the Paris Commune endgame and simply squatted in the Capitol building until there demands were met.
I fear this will not be the case next time, should such an occasion arise.
I almost went to D.C on January 6th to cover certification, but it was too cold and I knew that I would head home well before dark, anyway. I’m so broke it’s just not practical for me to go to D.C. unless the financial conditions in my personal life are juuuuuust right.
So, even if I had gone up there that day, I seriously doubt I would have been around when the crowd attacked the Capitol. It’s possible, but not probable. And I would have only done it because of the heat of the moment and my natural journalistic instinct to go where the story takes me.
Anyway, the thing about Mike Pence is he is such a fucking Trump toady that he simply did not have the courage to go the same route as Liz Chaney. He could have totally revamped his career had he become a virulent #NeverTrumper. But it’s too late now, lulz.
I just don’t know what to expect in 2024 and 2025. It could be that Trump is just a quirk of history and will fade into oblivion, or it could be that the man single handedly destroys not just democracy in the United States, but manages to cause the collapse of the post-WW2 global liberal order.
It was a Nothingburger According to MAGA, the January 6th Insurrection was a lulz. It was just a bunch of peaceful, fun loving folks who wants to take a looky-loo at the Capitol building while certification was taking place. It was a Antifa-FBI-Deepstate False Flag According to MAGA, the January 6th Insurrection was all just a false flag operation to make MAGA look bad. All the parts of the event that hurt MAGA politically can be ascribed to evil Deep State people shipped into D.C. on “ghost buses” full of undercover FBI agents who slipped into what was otherwise a peaceful event to specifically hurt MAGA. It was a Patriotic Act According to MAGA — specifically Donald Trump — the January 6th Insurrection was done by a group of patriots who simply wanted to tell the U.S. Congress that they objected to the “steal.”
So, tonight we learned that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was prepared to punch the fuck out of Donald Trump had he gone to Capitol Hill on January 6th. I don’t know about you, but just the idea of her doing that is quite cathartic.
Everyone needs to hear Nancy Pelosis response to hearing the news that hearing Trump might march to the Capitol on Janury 6th. pic.twitter.com/PhiM045IDp
Now, obviously, it’s better for all concerned that Speaker Pelosi didn’t get her chance to live up to that treat. And, in a way, had such an event happened and it be recorded — it would have been one of the darker, yet zany events in modern American history.
It would have been a real life parody of something you might seen in a zany Coen Brothers movie like Burn After Reading. But it definitely gives you some sense of how dire the Trump Era was and how much worse it will become whenever dingus Trump becomes president again.
There are rumors that Mike Pence is seriously considering talking to the January 6th Committee. Before we all get too Mueller, She Wrote level of excited about this, we need to put some context to what we might be able to expect from such a historic event.
The thing that Pence SHOULD do, which is the John Dean of the MAGA movement, is just not going to happen. I say he should do this because the only way that man is ever going to be POTUS is as part of a Unity Ticket of some sort. He doesn’t have to become Democrat, he just has to become a MAGA apostate to the point that he inflicts serious political damage to the movement.
Or, put another way, Pence would have to “change the question” when it came to what he was supposed to do. Instead of the question in his mind being, “How do I become president?” the question needs to be, “How do I change the political equation I face so dramatically that being president is even a possibility?”
Because, as it stands — Pence is never going to be a MAGA Republican President. I seem to recall MAGA wanted to hang him, at some point in the immediate past. So, if Pence really wants to be POTUS at this point, he has to burn everything to the ground. He has to flip the circuit breaker do a hard reboot of the American political system.
In the carnage that results from him destroying the Republican Party, he could very well end up on top. Liberals would be so grateful for what Pence had done that they would vote for him at least for one presidential cycle, even if they hate everything else about his politics. This is not hard. The easiest endgame for Pence is also the most painful — but it would work.
At the moment, I just don’t think Pence has it in him. He would pray about it a lot and God would tell him to give the January 6th Committee just enough information that he could still feel as though he might have a chance to be a MAGA POTUS.
Because, just from my casual conversations with my Traditionalist relatives, they hate Democrats and liberal-progressive with such a white hot rage that they can’t even imagine a situation where someone like Pence would do country over party and for the specific purpose of saving the Republic, align himself with people he didn’t agree with politically. They’re so busy thinking of the center-Left as Satanic groomers that they’re completely blinded to even considering the idea of saving America’s democratic birthright.
So, at the moment, I have very low expectations for Pence should he testify.
I hate to break it to you, but there’s absolutely nothing the January 6th Committee can find out that will mean jack shit long term. For macro reasons, Republicans will sweep Congress, impeach Biden and Harris (repeatedly) and set the stage for the epic existential choice of autocracy or civil war in 2024 – 2025.
Having said that, it is very interesting the logic that MAGA uses when it comes to what we all saw on January 6th. There logic, what there is, goes something like this: a combination of Antifa and the FBI organized a small group of informants to do the parts that make us look bad, while the parts that we like were done by patriots who simply wanted to “Stop the Steal.”
It’s tough to even get MAGA people to admit that the protesters were armed. You have to get very specific and pin them down that a pole, too, can be considered a form of armament. Meanwhile, other MAGA people want us to believe that just a “small portion” of the insurrectionists were to blame and, lulz, most of Trump’s policies were great, thank go Ron DeSantis will be the 2024 Republican nominee.
It’s all very, very fucking annoying and points to a very dark future ahead of us. When the autocracy comes there will be people in my family who will have one red line and one red line only — ME. When ICE (or whatever) snatches me off the street for saying President Mike Pompeo is still a fat fuck no matter how much weight he’s lost, THEN they will get upset.
Ugh.
But if that doesn’t happen, we’re going to have a civil war and we’re going to bomb ourselves into oblivion.
I honestly don’t know what’s going on with Canada at the moment, other than what I see passively — and occasionally — on Twitter. I’ve decided to bone up on this issue, however, because things are turning dark rather quickly. My fear is that the truckers who are now apparently camped out around the Canadian Capitol in the middle of winter will radicalize and stage a January 6-like attempted coup.
Given what I know about Canadian politics — that things can change there rather abruptly because of the small population size — my concern is that things might get out of hand a lot sooner than anyone might predict. The next thing you know, some sort of Right wing dictatorship, long predicted for the United States, will happen in Canada (of all places) first.
If something like that did happen, it would only destabilize the United States even more. And, let me be clear, if you’re reading this and getting off on the idea that the United States — or Canada for that matter — might have a Right wing dictatorship soon: please fuck off you piece of shit.
Anyway, the point is — the entire anglophone world is in crisis at the moment for various reasons. New Zealand is the only one that seems to be acting normal at the moment. All the others are veering from crisis to crisis of their own making.
It’s growing quite comical how much we know about Trump’s involvement in the lead up to the “Stop The Steal” rally on January 6th and how little we, as a nation, care.
In fact, I don’t really even understand why we have put so much import on the January 6th Committee’s investigation. We know, in general terms, what Trump’s plot was on January 6th. What we don’t know is the detail that might convince people on the edges who grade Trump on such an absolute curve that it’s debatable that absolute proof would even be enough for them.
At the moment, the MAGA orthodoxy is that January 6th was a false flag operation perpetrated by a Deep State combination of the FBI and Antifa. Meanwhile, the other half of MAGA also absolutely believes that January 6th was organized by a fearless group of patriots who wanted to “stop the steal.”
If you call MAGA on this contradiction, they get very very VERY angry.
Which, of course, makes any discussion of politics with someone you disagree impossible. That’s exactly what the fucking fascists of MAGA want. The more divided we are, the more power they know they can accrue.
No one is going to save us. Get a passport. Know what you believe and what you’re willing risk your life for in the real world.
I did not go up to Washington D.C. on January 6th for one reason: it was too cold.
Now, I wasn’t going to go up there to participate in anything, I just wanted to be around in case anything big happened — which, of course it did. But once you get past being hysterical about the idea of me being near the Insurrection, any idea that I would have been arrested in some sort dragnet falls apart.
First, I wasn’t going up there with my old digital camera. All I would have had is my smartphone and my access to being able to recharge it would have been limited or non-existent. So, it’s very possible that I would have gone to the Stop The Steal rally near the Capitol and simply come home because I didn’t feel I could cover the event anymore.
Next, if I go up to D.C. for a daytrip, I start heading home as soon as it starts to get dark. I have reasons to be at home in the evening and I just can’t see any way I wouldn’t have left really early relative to the actual attack on the Capitol.
The only way I could see myself actually being around the actual attack on the Capitol would be if, in the heat of the moment, I followed the crowd inside. Again, this is where if you’re simply hysterical about the idea that I would be anywhere near the situation, I just can’t help you.
While, yes, there would have been the possibility that I would have gotten so wrapped up in covering the situation that I would have go in with the mob, that’s a very unlikely scenario given what was going on otherwise. And, again, if you just calm down long enough, I would have not be considered a member of the Insurrection itself because I would have been there to cover it, not be a part of it.
I feel it’s safe to say that all that would have happened if I had gone to DC on January 6th is I would have gone up there, my phone would have died just about when Trump finished speaking (because of what time it was) and my regret would be that I was on my way home when the event itself happened.
I have no inside knowledge about what Trump may have known about the January 6th Insurrection, but I do have a sense of how he thinks. I also have noticed some things about him over the last five years of terror and here’s my general sense of what Trump knew — or didn’t know — about what happened on January 6th.
Given what Trump was ranting about leading up to the event, it seems safe to believe that the goal of the “plot” was to scare the shit out of Mike Pence specifically. So, in general, the plot was to gather a bunch of bonkers MAGA people together near the Capitol, give them a bunch of hype speeches then direct them to attack the Capitol where they would either a) simply buy them time b) succeed in scaring the shit out of Mike Pence so he wouldn’t certify the vote.
Other than that, there was a lot of vague activity with the general goal of either buying time or scaring Mike Pence, but I doubt Trump, himself, knew all that many details. Because, Trump is so incapable of keeping a secret that we would know specific what he did know! So when he tweeted something like “January 6th is going to be lit!” that’s a direct indication of what was rolling around Trump’s mind.
But there is a caveat to all of this.
One is, even if we learn specifically what Trump knew and when he knew it, Trump continues to be politically above the law so…lulz. There is absolutely nothing we can do to hurt Trump politically. He will continue to linger in the shadows of America politics, waiting to pop out to destroy American democracy once and for all.
But wait, there’s more! Even if somehow we magically end Trump’s political career, there are a dozen would-be autocrats who will use what they learned from what happened on January 6th, then do exactly the same thing or worse in an effort to nullify a Biden 2024 win.
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