Thread by @svdate

NEW — What if you attempted a coup but people were unwilling to wrap their heads around what you had done?

A year after Jan. 6, 2021, that is the peculiar situation in which Donald Trump finds himself.

huffpost.com/entry/trump-co…

Instead of being carted off in handcuffs for inciting an insurrection against the US, or even just being banished from federal office for life by the Senate, Trump instead remains the leader of one of the two major political parties and is considering another run for the WH.

Fiona Hill, a former NSC analyst in the Trump White House, was among the first to call what Trump tried a “coup,” just five days afterward, writing in an essay: “I’ve been studying authoritarian regimes for three decades, and I know the signs of a coup when I see them.”

Eleven months later, she is appalled that most Americans still are unable to grasp how close they came to losing their democracy.

“A total failure of imagination. This was a coup. It still is. It’s ongoing,” she said of Trump’s continued attempts to delegitimize Democrat Joe Biden’s election win and return to power. “If we were looking at this overseas, we would say: Absolutely, that’s what it was.”

How does the guy who tried to overthrow the republic get rehabilitated instead into a legitimate candidate in one of the two major political parties?

There's plenty of blame for that, but let's start with the "leadership" of the Republican party.

Downplaying Jan. 6, or even memory-holing it entirely, meanwhile, quickly became the consensus strategy for the Republican Party across the country.

Elected GOP officials, with rare exceptions, have from the very start gone along with and defended Trump, despite his key role in drawing his followers to the city on that particular day and then urging them to march on the Capitol at the appointed hour.

Even with tear gas still in the air and blood stains on the marble the night of Jan. 6, 147 Republican members of Congress — including a full two-thirds of the House GOP caucus — voted to throw out election results from states Biden had won in an attempt to return Trump to office

The following morning, when Trump called into a Republican National Committee meeting in Florida, he was rewarded with a long ovation from members. Neither the RNC nor its chair, Ronna McDaniel, has to this day criticized Trump for his actions leading into and on Jan. 6.

And as Trump continues to lie about the election results, the RNC has encouraged him by calling “election integrity” a top issue for 2022.

And the two top Republican leaders in Congress, after initially criticizing Trump for causing the Capitol assault, have both dropped that message.

Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, despite excoriating Trump on the floor of the chamber, nevertheless voted to acquit him on the impeachment charges that could have banned him from federal office for the rest of his life.

And House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, of California, has gone even further, fully embracing Trump with a pilgrimage to his Palm Beach, Florida, social club just 22 days after pleading with him on the phone to call off his mob.

And then there's the role of the media, worst of all, political reporters.

As Trump and his allies worked to minimize Jan. 6, they largely have had the acquiescence of the national political media.

Just one year after the attack, articles and broadcast pieces about Trump rarely mention his attempt to overthrow democracy in his effort to remain in power, and instead treat him as any other potential presidential candidate for 2024.

“There’s this normalization effect that we saw throughout the Trump candidacy and the Trump presidency,” said Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist at The Washington Post.

She cited factors ranging from reporters’ fear of losing access to Republicans, including Trump himself, to a fear of being accused of bias. “I don’t know how you normalize an insurrection attempt, yet that’s what happening.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, sees even the grudging use of the word “insurrection” as inadequate.

“It is interesting to me that so many news outlets and commentators still only call it an ‘insurrection,’ which does not express the political design to take control of the government and stay there, in the authoritarian fashion,” she said.

Trump’s defenders typically also elide over Trump’s intentions for that day, focusing instead on the end result, which is that no coup occurred and election winner Biden was sworn into office as scheduled two weeks later.

Sullivan said her discussions with top news organizations found a similar rationale for avoiding more coverage of Trump’s unprecedented actions: that it did not succeed.

“I don’t think it’s a very good answer,” she said.