As Donald Trump watched rioters storm the Capitol on television on January 6, 2021, one of the president’s top aides drafted Trump’s first tweet that urged protesters to remain peaceful, ABC News reported.
Last year, a congressional panel investigating Trump’s role in the January 6 events outlined how the former president was reluctant to call in additional law enforcement to stop rioters during the first few hours of the Capitol breach and instead spent much of his time watching television or making calls to his attorney and Republican allies.
New details of what went on inside the White House during that time show Trump needed the hand of Dan Scavino, who was his deputy chief of staff and is now senior advisor to Trump’s reelection campaign, to try to calm protesters.
Nobody’s ever prosecuted for a successful coup.
If you successfully take power, you’re not going to prosecute yourself. Only failed insurrections can be prosecuted, so it’s always going to be a matter of judgement as to how close they came, how determined the leaders were, etc. This is different from virtually every other crime where the more serious version is a successful X, but you can often be prosecuted for attempted X.
To me, it seems pretty clear that Trump was attempting a coup. He wanted a mob at the capitol, he was aware they were armed, and wanted them to be armed (“They’re not here to hurt me”). He let things go for as long as possible to see if he could successfully take power by force, and only allowed messages to be sent on his behalf and recorded a video once it was clear that the mob wasn’t going to succeed in taking hostages, etc.
Also, as an aside, in retrospect the departing president having all their presidential powers for months on end after they lose an election seems ridiculous. In the past, the worst thing that would typically happen is some minor corruption like pardons for friends of “friends” and big donors. But, technically the president has all the power of the executive branch at their disposal, and they’re given presidential immunity for just about anything they can justify as being vaguely within the scope of the job.
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