The January 6 paradox
Perhaps the insurrection unintentionally *ensured* a peaceful transfer of power - this time.
Also, below the paywall: what could possibly go wrong when they try to adapt an all-American sitcom for Great Britain? Everything. Literally, everything went horribly wrong.
People who’ve quit Twitter are like vegans: you’ll know when you meet one because they’ll tell you at every opportunity.
And that includes me. (The Twitter quitting part, not the vegan part. God, no.) I’ve likely bored you all to death by constantly making reference to it, contrary to my New Year’s Resolution to bore you all to death about a wider range of subjects.
But just as a vegan starts feeling the old urges again when he walks by KFC a good fried-chicken place, I still find myself lurking on Twitter much more often than I should, even if I won’t reactivate my account. And over the past few days I noticed that an argument about the Beer Belly Putsch is still raging, more than two years afterward.
At the risk of looking like the straw-man enlightened centrist1 in a far-left political cartoon, I actually think Mr. Grossman and Mr. Taster both kind of have a point.
Blum is correct when he notes that the transfer of power from Trump to Biden ultimately went ahead as it should. He’s arguing that the insurrection stood outside of that process and ultimately didn’t affect it.
But I’d actually go further: I’ve long believed the January 6 riots ended up ensuring the peaceful transfer of power by causing a (sadly short-lived) backlash against Trump.
They mostly fell back into line after Biden was inaugurated, but after the insurrection it looked like enough Republicans decided they no longer enjoyed the taste of Trump’s boots and openly called upon him to step down when legally required, if not earlier.
Not all Republicans, obviously. The likes of Josh Hawley doubled down, and Ted Cruz had all vestiges of self-respect beaten out of him by the autumn of 2016.2 But when Congress is almost evenly divided between the parties, just peeling off a few temporarily-sorta-kinda-principled Republicans is enough to get the job done.
Had we not seen this half-man, half-bear, half-pig creature marching around the Capitol Building on January 6, I suspect these Republicans would have kept supporting Trump’s half-assed legal challenges and at least remained quiet about his increasingly unhinged rhetoric.
I don’t think any of these court cases would have succeeded by Inaurguration Day, but if the GOP was still completely united behind the Orange God-King I’m not sure Inauguration Day would have occurred as it did. January 6 gave Republicans who always secretly hated Trump the cover they needed, just long enough to get him out of the White House.
Well, then, it all worked out so there’s nothing to worry about, right?
Thing is, now we’re getting to the part where I find myself agreeing with Grossman.
The hardcore MAGA election deniers had a bad midterm election in 2022 (and that most of them generously conceded defeat shows how sincere they’d been; say what you will about Kari Lake, but she either believes this stuff or she’s committed to the bit in a way that would impress even Andy Kaufman). It does seem like Trump has lost some influence in the GOP, to the point where even some MAGA grifters are moving to Team DeSantis.
But he’s not gone. Most polls (not just “his” polls, but the ones from the FAKE NEWS outlets) still have him leading the race for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination, sometimes by a pretty healthy margin. Even if DeSantis has the momentum, and keeping in mind we still haven’t seen the effect of NIKKIMANIA!!!!!!! Trump must still be considered the front runner.
Some of the “soft” Trump supporters might have melted away, but there remains a hard core so dedicated to Trump they’ll literally pray to him.
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