Sorry for more coup discourse (I’m agnostic!), but it’s amazing how deniers, as here, all seem to use the same playbook: breezily conflate “coup” with “coup attempt,” and assert definitional criteria as excluding while ignoring how events plainly fit them. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/world/americas/what-is-a-coup-attempt.html

There is ample video and documentary evidence of formal security force (police) and paramilitary participation. Its coherence isn’t required.

It has also been widely reported that Trump refused to use his formal power to impede them with the National Guard.

This isn’t hard.

Remind me, how long did this particular attempt in its violent phase—whatever we’re calling it—take to fail so far?

The comparisons to Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary, and Russia, meanwhile, all overlook the key difference that Trump LOST AN ELECTION, the overturning of which was the whole point.

He tried and FAILED at the thing the NYT is identifying as the “real” danger.

Meanwhile, an expert on coups at the Naval War College advises us that the real way to undermine such anti-democratic danger is through “ridicule” and “umbrage.”

I hope your 5-year nap was refreshing, sir.

Finally, the kicker—and this one’s for @dbessner, who I know is worried that calling it a coup attempt will further empower repressive state forces—here’s what NOT calling it a coup attempt produces: a claim that real coups lurk in all “violent protest.”

How’ll that play out?

To end, feel free to call it a coup attempt or not, but this odd tendency to ignore or elide facts that are staring us in the face seems like weird semantic territorialism that yields little analytical or political reward.