“We’re going back to the Capitol, right where it started. And it’s going to be huge.”
That’s what Matt Braynard, former data chief for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, proclaimed on former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast last week.
The “Justice for J6” rally supporting so-called “political prisoners” charged in the Jan. 6 domestic terror attack on the Capitol is apparently planned for Sept. 18.
The Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) on Friday stated in a bulletin that, based on internet activity, it is anticipating an increasing yet “modest” likelihood of violence associated with Trump-fueled election conspiracies.
The bulletin the DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis supplied ABC news explains:
“Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former President Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized.”
This is not the first alert DHS has been monitoring.
In June, the DHS followed a concerning conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is going to be “reinstated as president” in August.
Some wonder why so many baseless conspiracy theories could be successful at taking people in, particularly one that dismisses the legitimacy of the most secure presidential election in history.
Just as the wealthy right-wing donors ginned up thousands of Trump supporters across the country to participate in last year’s protests opposing (Democratic) governors’ COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, wealthy donors are behind efforts to undermine the presidential election.
According to tax documents The Intercept obtained:
“The group, the Bradley Impact Fund, is linked to a larger foundation that was identified in a recent report as a central player in distributing money to organizations pushing conspiracy theories about election fraud, denying the results of the 2020 election, and undertaking legal efforts to overturn the presidential vote.”
The United States came dangerously close to losing democracy January 6 when thousands of spiteful, armed Donald Trump supporters descended on the Capitol to do the failed president’s bidding to “stop the steal” of votes he still claims are his.
Although this act of “domestic terrorism,” as FBI Director Christopher Wray defined the attack, did not elicit the outcome Donald Trump and his supporters intended, it successfully demonstrated how fragile our republic is.
Trump loyalists all over the country had been planning insurrections for months, acting on Trump’s insistence either he win or the election was rigged.
Police agencies all over the country had been preparing for unrest months before.
Two days before the terror attack, The Hill ran the headline “DC braces for pro-Trump protests amid Electoral College challenge.”
Last June, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) helped organize a bipartisan group of Democratic and Republican officials to simulate the day after a possibly contested election, for which every scenario resulted in “street-level violence.”
The most damning, though, was reported on Friday, when the House oversight committee released notes taken by Richard Donoghue, then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen’s deputy, of a December 27 telephone call from Trump, who told Rosen:
“Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] congressmen.”
What’s another term for a “failed coup”?
A rehearsal.
Donald Trump’s sad band of sycophants are in such denial he lost fairly and squarely, they are willing to latch onto any cockamamie wish fulfillment floating in their general direction.
This is almost laughable except for the fact that we saw the danger their allegiance is capable of perpetrating.
They claim to “love their country.”
At the end of the day, though, their only real love is for a man–an ideologue who has lured them into his deep-seated sense of inadequacy and narcissism.
Quoting Robert Reich, in Raw Story:
“For the first time in the history of the United States we did not have a peaceful transition of power. For the first time in American history, a president refused–still refuses–to concede, and continues to claim, with no basis in fact, that the election was ‘stolen’ from him. For the first time in history, a president actively plotted a coup.”
He concludes:
“This final revelation–Trump’s 27 December call to the acting attorney general in which he pleads “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me”–should trigger section 3 of the 14th amendment, which bars anyone from holding office who ‘engaged in insurrection’ against the US. The current attorney general of the United States, Merrick Garland, should issue an advisory opinion clearly stating this. If Trump wants to take it to the supreme court, fine.”
Image credit: Colin Lloyd via Unsplash
