…and I’ll be happy, as almost always after seeing what pops up in the crystal ball these days, if events prove me wrong. I think they’re working up their nerve to try something. For the reasons Jack Holmes (Pierce’s editor and wingman) sets forth in the linked piece, I don’t think they’ll be able to pull it off, but I think even the failed attempt could cause some gruesome damage to persons, property and polity.

Many of the high clergy in the Church of the Savvy have been calmly explaining for weeks that although Donald Trump’s brazen and pathetic post-election behavior is corrosive to democracy, it does not technically count as a coup attempt. The president’s myriad lawsuits attempting to throw out the results of democratic elections have not worked, these folks explain, therefore they were never going to work (Logic), and concern about them working—on the basis that no Law or Norm has much mattered for four years—was hysteria. This is too stupid to be a coup! It’s just a grift, because these things are mutually exclusive. And besides, a coup involves using the military or the security apparatus to seize power. He’s just getting laughed out of court.

Welp, now his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, a man the president pardoned just last week for “any and all possible offenses” related to the Mueller probe, has endorsed a call for the president to “temporarily suspend the Constitution,” “declare limited martial law,” have “the military oversee a national re-vote,” and “silence the destructive media.” Wow! Sounds a bit like a coup. Maybe the best part is the idea that you can have “limited” martial law, or that suspending the Constitution would just be “temporary,” or that the only organization that could oversee a legitimate election—read: one where Donald Trump wins—is the military.

Can there be any doubt that the Orange Man regards the prospect of being turned out of office not merely as a personal humiliation but as an existential threat, given the potential legal exposure he will have once his imperial immunity is withdrawn? And although I am not a cable subscriber, and hence am not directly exposed to Fox News, I have seen at second-hand such luminaries—or looninaries—as Sean Hannity urging similar courses of action upon him. The man is angry, and he is frightened, and his various allies and enablers are stridently urging him to assume the purple. Here’s an example—a full-page ad in the Washington Times the other day—quite explicitly demanding the imposition of martial law (“better than Civil War!”).

Again, I think that if he makes the attempt he will fail, but I am increasingly inclined to believe that, goaded by these lunatics and buccaneers, he will attempt something like what the Washington Times ad is calling for. And you know, even a “failed” armed robbery can leave a lot of carnage in its wake. The next seven weeks have the potential to be very dark indeed. Oh, and by the way? There’s this, er, loaded gun that’s been left lying around in the bottom drawer of the Resolute Desk for the past few decades…

balefully,