The Coup Continues

The January 6 coup attempt is not over. In the aftermath, the ground is being prepared for the next coup. It was Republican officials who rejected attempts to invalidate fair elections. When the next elections come around, many of them will have been replaced.

True to form, Mr. Trump was able to supply the mob but not the procedural victory. His coup attempt was frustrated in no small part by a thin gray line of bureaucratic fortitude — Republican officials at the state and local levels who had the grit to resist intense pressure from the president and do their jobs.

Current efforts like the one in Florida are intended to terrorize them into compliance today or, short of that, to push such officials into retirement so that they can be replaced with more pliant partisans. The lonely little band of Republican officials who stopped the 2020 coup is going to be smaller and lonelier the next time around.

...there isn’t really any middle ground on overthrowing the government. And that is what Mr. Trump and his allies were up to in 2020, through both violent and nonviolent means — and continue to be up to today.

When it comes to a coup, you’re either in or you’re out. The Republican Party is leaning pretty strongly toward in. That is going to leave at least some conservatives out — and, in all likelihood, permanently out.

Steve Benen makes the same point on MSNBC. 

The then-president's point — Trump wanted Americans to see a far-left menace that eclipsed anything seen on the right — came to mind when reading Reuters' latest report on the "sustained campaign of intimidation" against U.S. election officials at the state and local level.

From the Reuters article, here is more about the nature of the threats: 

Through public records and interviews, Reuters documented 102 threats of death or violence received by more than 40 election officials, workers and their relatives in eight of the most contested battleground states in the 2020 presidential contest. Each was explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the typical legal threshold for prosecution.

Almost all of the 102 threats of violence appeared to be inspired by Trump’s debunked claims that the election was rigged against him. The messages often included highly personal, sometimes sexualized threats of violence or death, not only to the officials themselves but also to their family members and their children.