
It is tempting to dismiss this utterance as a half-assed attempt at an insult that quickly bloomed into a full-bore self-own. So, let’s do that right away. You could spend a whole night stuffing yourself with frijoles soaked in habanero sauce and washing them down with an eighteen-pack of Modelo Negras and still blow something more intellectually rigorous out of your ass in the morning than these words that Trump actually spewed.
The faint basis in reality that Trump’s words have lie in the fact that General Milley, who is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was worried that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump might order him to march troops into the Capitol and arrest Nancy Pelosi before she could certify that Joe Biden had won the election.
Milley was not willing to do this, if asked. He and his Pentagon buds hatched a plan to do a series of “rolling resignations,” if Trump tried to order them to interfere with the election, although “rolling resignations” do not have enough oomph, for my taste, when declining to stage a military coup against a 245-year-old democracy. A joint press conference featuring the heads of the American military joining each other on stage and singing “Blow that out your pale fat hiney, Mr. President,” a cappella after publicizing Trump’s request for an end to the Constitution would have been much more satisfying and gotten better ratings.
This is all speculation, of course, because Trump never asked the Joint Chiefs to back him in his coup attempt, probably thinking that he might be refused. Instead, he persuaded an extremely motley crew of Proud Boys, Q-Anoners and other drooling near-idiots to bravely pack their pepper spray, suck in their guts, take their Metformin and invade the Capitol with an eye to hanging Mike Pence.
The history of the world is rife with examples of successful military coups. There have also been successful palace coups, the Trumpian equivalent of which would have been John Bolton, or Bill Barr, or even Jared and Ivanka having guts enough to borrow some Novichok from Putin and slipping it into Trump’s Diet Coke. All of them and many others who served in the White House while Trump was President knew that they should have done that, as any patriotic American would have, instead of all of them writing self-serving tell-alls after the nation survived on its own, which is what they are doing.
But there has never been a successful coup launched by a bunch of drunk dribblers with shitty haircuts, lousy clothes and no actual organized plan to seize power. In an alternate universe, maybe, Mike Pence would have swung from an improvised gallows and Ashli Babbit would have been appointed Vice-President in his stead, but in this one, Trump’s forces just wandered around the halls of Congress in incriminating gear, busting things up and taking selfies of themselves committing treason.
So, Trump’s attempted coup went the way of Trump University, the New Jersey Generals and the entire municipality of Atlantic City. It failed miserably, as does anything Trump puts his stamp on.
Except the USA. So far.