I have been through coups so I can tell you two things.

1. This is indeed a coup attempt.

2. The attempt is doomed to fail.

3. We're all gonna be okay.

I meant three things. :)

Here's how the coup that I experienced happened. (And most coups I have followed on news follow this pattern).

1. Suddenly, national news channels go to static.

2. A while later, you either get a text on TV or read on radio, or an anchor shows up to call for calm.

The anchor or text will tell you that someone from the military - a general, colonel, major etc - will be speaking soon. And that the Great Patriotic Military is fully in control of the country.

3. The military leader (most likely the instigator of the coup comes to say that:

The military has removed the government and taken control in the interest of national security. That elections will be held soon. And until then, business will go on as usual.

Why does it go like that?

Because first of all, you cannot just take over the government by taking over the parliament building (in our case congress).

You cannot make the government and bureaucracy co-operate with you that way. They have ZERO incentive to do so.

And Jesus, NO COUP succeeds without immediately taking over the airwaves.

That shows the population that you have the power to crush any resistance, but more importantly, you want to be the only people defining the narrative and giving orders. This is pathetic.

While these fuckers are trying to stage a successful coup:

1. The bureaucracy is operational,
2. The military is uninterested in any kind of intervention,
3. The media is depicting them as pathetic losers.

Another super important fact is how decentralized the government and law enforcement is here. Pulling off a successful coup in America is exceedingly difficult just because how difficult it is to coordinate such a thing.

There are simply too many ways for anti-coup people to communicate here. The internet is still up! The phone lines are running. The government can easily coordinate - and IS coordinating - to shut this shit down.

You know why this coup is dumb and an epic fail?

Twitter is up!

Everything is functioning as usual. The only thing that has happened is that a few hundred violent assholes incited by the president took over a building where the legislature was meeting.

In a successful coup, Internet would have been the first to go along with TV+radio.