How to Tell You’re in a Guerrilla War

With each passing day, the pro-Trump insurrection that resulted in the occupation of the US Capitol on January 6 is looking less and less like a MAGA rally that got out of control and more and more like a assassination attempt against Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and others as part of a violent, deliberate coup d’etat.

Spare me the semantics of a coup requiring the participation of the uniformed military. Like art or pornography, a coup may be hard to define, but its easy to spot when you see it. At a minimum, we watched an attempted autogolpe, or self-coup, defined by Wikipedia — font of all knowledge — as “a form of putsch or coup d’état in which a nation’s leader, despite having come to power through legal means, dissolves or renders powerless the national legislature and unlawfully assumes extraordinary powers not granted under normal circumstances.”

If that’s not exactly what happened when Donald Trump whipped his supporters into a frenzy with his speech on the Ellipse and told them to march on the parliament and stop its certification of electoral victory by his opponent, I don’t know what is.

(Note to historians and dramatists: the ultimate touch of Trumpian con man cowardice was his promise to join the march, which he quickly broke, instead scurrying back to the West Wing to watch it on TV.)