Was there an attempted coup in the United States?
Supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building on January 6, encouraged by himself and interrupting the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
“One of the darkest days in US history”: condemnation of congressmen for the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters Waving Trump flags, hundreds of people broke barriers and windows to enter the building where Congress meets. Several rioters were killed and some policemen had to be hospitalized in the confrontation. The Congress was closed.
V iolent and shocking, but what happened was not a coup d’état.
This Trump insurrection was an electoral violence, very similar to that which affects many fragile democracies.
What is a coup Although coups do not have a single definition, researchers who study them – like us – agree on the key attributes they must possess in order for what academics call a “coup event” to take place.
4 killed in the assault on the Capitol Washington for Trump supporters The coup experts Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne define it as “a manifest attempt by the military or other elites within or the state apparatus to overthrow the acting head of state using unconstitutional means. ”
Essentially, three parameters are used to judge whether an insurrection is a coup:
Are the authors actors of the State, such as military authorities or government officials? Is the head of the government the target of the insurrection? Do the conspirators use illegal and unconstitutional methods to seize executive power? Strikes and attempted strikes July 3, 2013 there was a successful coup in Egypt , when the head of the Abdel Fattah al-Sisi army forcibly removed the country’s unpopular president, Mohamed Morsi.
3 possible scenarios of the cris is politics in the United States after the Trump supporters’ assault on the Capitol Morsi, the first democratically elected leader in Egypt had recently promoted the drafting of a new Constitution. Al-Sisi also suspended it.
This qualifies as a coup because al-Sisi took power illegally and introduced his own rule of law on the ashes of an elected government.
Coups, then, do not always succeed in overthrowing the government.
In 2016, members of the Turkish army tried to remove from power the powerful president of Turkey , Reçep Erdogan.
Soldiers seized key areas of Ankara (the capital) and Istanbul, including the Bosphorus Bridge and two airports.
But the coup lacked coordination and widespread support, and quickly failed after President Erdogan called on his supporters to confront to the conspirators.
Erdogan is still in power today.
Trump supporters pointed to a branch of executive authority with its act: Congress. Another requirement for a coup. What happened at the Capitol? The uprising in the Capitol does not meet the three criteria for it to be a coup.
Trump supporters targeted a branch of the executive authority – Congress – and did it illegally , through the invasion and destruction of property.
These events comply with the provisions of points 2 and 3.
But on the first point, the rioters appeared to be civilians operating of their own will , not state actors.
“It is not a protest, it is an insurrection ”: Biden’s strong message after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol President Trump incited his supporters to march on the Capitol building less than an hour before the crowd invaded the grounds, insisting that the election had been stolen from him and stating: “We will no longer tolerate it. ”.
The events occurred after months of spreading lies and electoral conspiracies infu However, it is unclear whether the president’s motivation for inflaming the ire of his supporters was to storm Congress and to raise a perception of fraud in the minds of many Trump supporters. He tepidly asked them to go home as the violence escalated.
For the moment, it appears that the riots in Washington DC were carried out without the approval, help or active leadership of the government actors such as the army, police or officials sympathetic to the Republican Party.
It is not clear that President Trump’s motivation was that protesters stormed Congress. Non-innocent elites American political elites are not innocent, however.
By spreading conspiracy theories on voter fraud, numerous Republican senators, including Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, created the conditions for political violence to break out in the United States and, specifically, electoral violence.
Scholars have documented that belligerent political rhetoric fuels the risk of election-related violence.
Elections are delicate times because they involve transference of political power.
When government representatives degrade and discredit democratic institutions in the midst of latent political conflict, contested elections can trigger political violence and so-called mob rule.
When the representatives degrade the institutions in electoral moments, the so-called “government of the to peat. ” Towards a turbulent future? The shocking events of January 6 reflect political violence of the kind that too often ruins elections in young democracies or unstable.
The elections of Bangladesh suffer from perennial violence provoked by mobs and political insurrections due to years of government violence and the wrath of the opposition.
Your choices of 2015 and 2018 were more like war zones than democratic transitions.
In Cameroon , armed dissidents perpetrated acts of violence in the elections of 2020, directed against both government buildings and opposition figures and innocent bystanders.
Its objective was to delegitimize the vote, in response to sectarian violence and government abuses.
The electoral violence of United States differs in the causes and context of that observed in Bangladesh and Cameroon, but the performance was similar.
There was no coup in the US, but this insurrection promoted by Trump is likely to lead the country down a politically and socially turbulent path.
This art The article was published on The Conversation and reproduced here under the Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.
Clayton Besaw and Matthew Frank are researchers at the University of Central Florida and Denver, respectively.
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