Elected legislators in the United States have now charged former President Donald Trump with an attempted coup. As Congressional investigations of the events of January 6, 2021 continue, public hearings have made known a number of specific strategies from Trump and his supporters, as well as counterstrategies carried out that succeeded in blocking the coup attempt. The events before and after the November, 2020 election that Trump lost to the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, show how important it is that opponents on all sides of the political spectrum work together to defend democracy.
Military forces often play a role in protecting or attacking national electoral democracies. A recently published book shows that the U.S. chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Trump administration, General Mark Milley, the top U.S. military official, decided to fight Trump’s efforts to destroy democracy in the U.S. General Milley realized that President Trump was more interested in his own personal political gains and embraced tyranny and dictatorship in 2020. After considering resigning, he instead determined he wished to fight against Trump while remaining the top military official, and collaborated on a daily phone call with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump’s own chief of staff Mark Meadows to do so. After soliciting advice on how to proceed from Robert Gates, a former CIA director and former defense department cabinet secretary, General Milley also secured the Joint Chiefs vice chair and the other military branch chiefs to join him if needed in his opposition to the President. These military and government officials did what was needed to defend democracy.
Public Congressional hearings that began June 9, 2022 have demonstrated how important insiders within the Trump administration were to blocking President Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Jeffrey Rosen worked with the White House counsel Pat Cipollone to fend off efforts by Trump to install a supporter as head of the Department of Justice. Justice Department officials agreed with lawyers from the White House to resign as a group if Trump replaced Jeffrey Rosen, the Attorney General who was opposing Trump’s demands that he bring fraudulent lawsuits, with Jeffrey Clark, a senior Justice Department lawyer who supported Trump’s demands. They notified President Trump in a meeting on January 3, 2021 that the entire leadership of he Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office would resign if Trump acted to remove Rosen and install Clark as head of the Justice Department. That group of lawyers from multiple Trump administration executive branches did what is needed to defend democracy.
A variety of defenses of the electoral process took place both within the Trump executive branch and from officials in other areas of the government. Other senior White House lawyers, like Erich Herschmann and even at one key point Rudy Giuliani, along with the Department of Homeland Security acting deputy secretary Kenneth Cuccinelli II, opposed efforts to persuade President Trump to use the U.S. military to seize voting machines and rerun the election. The highest ranking Republican has become the best known to oppose Trump’s efforts to remain in office, Vice President Mike Pence, rebuffing repeated attempts of President Trump to pressure him to support the illegal efforts. The fight within the Trump administration was so serious that Vice President Trump’s chief of staff even notified the security service that there might be security risks to the Vice President. Evidence that President Trump agreed with those who wanted the Vice President to be killed supports that estimation. These Republican officials did what is needed to defend democracy.
Some of the more revealing testimony occurred only recently, when a key aide to Trump Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows publicly claimed that Trump ordered the removal of metal detectors outside the Capitol building even though he knew the protestors were armed with weapons. Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadow’s aide, also recounted how the security detail charged with President Trump’s safety also forced the President to return his offices at the White House. Multiple officials and the White House legal counsel Pat Cipollone and others knew that the President was considering accompanying the protestors to the Capitol, and Cipollone advised Trump’s closest staff advisors to ensure that did not happen. After President Trump declared during his speech to the January 6 protestors that he would go with them to the Capitol building, his driver and Bobby Engle, a security official in the vehicle, instead took Trump to the White House over strenuous objections and against orders to take him to the Capitol. While there are conflicting versions regarding whether President Trump tried to take the wheel of the vehicle himself and whether he physically attacked the security agent who refused his orders, it is now clear that the driver and other members of Trump’s security detail physically prevented the President from going to the Capitol. Cipollone and Engle and the President’s January 6 driver did what is needed to defend democracy on January 6 despite the risks to their careers and to their persons.
The defensive maneuvers seen in the United States defending the election results do not mean that the United States is currently a successful democracy. Trump had been emboldened by the success of previous efforts to elect a president in the United States when the candidate did not win the national election. The Republican party candidates for president in 2000 and 2016, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, took office despite losing the popular vote. George Bush did so through the workings of the electoral college and after a dispute in the U.S. court system and the U.S. Supreme Court. The conflicts in 2019 around electoral officials and the recount process resulted in part from the awareness in both Democrat and Republican parties of the way that paid attack teams besieged the Florida recount process in 2000, the so-called Brooks Brothers Riot.
Multiple aspects of the United States government made successes by candidates who lost the popular vote possible. First is the electoral college. Second is the role of the increasingly politicized Supreme Court. Third is the filibuster, a convention that empowers “a minority of white conservatives to override our democratic system,” in the words of a recent analysis. These three mechanisms are a short list of a much longer set of problematic ways that the rule of the few is guaranteed in the United States.
Debates over the effectiveness of entering into government service at defending democracy continue. The recent U.S. Congressional hearings show that insiders within multiple sectors of the Republican administration took important actions to stop President Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. Yet faith in government and the courts continues to decline in the United States, and social divisions have only worsened.
Some may see continuing support
for Trump in the United States as part of Republican Party politics. But the
successes at preventing Trump’s coup attempt of Republican administration
employees demonstrate that small “d” democracy is not a partisan issue. While elections are a weak democratic
mechanism easily
overwhelmed by various
strategies, in the Trump administration Republican officials stepped up to
protect the integrity of the 2020 election results.
Working within a political system founded in violence in many ways, such as the electoral democracy of the United States, means that democracy is only possible when we practice vigilance to keep watch over the violence. Such vigilance is required when working in social relations, rejecting those few who would claim the general interest in order to serve their narrow interests. That is the work that makes democracy possible, even when taking significant risks in confronting those who would do what it takes to claim government for their own personal gain.
