Thomas Edsall of the New York Times wrote a column (2 October 2019) presenting and endorsing the paranoid projections of degreed and tenured leftists who accuse President Donald Trump of intending a “coup” in the form of refusing to leave office if he loses the next election. Hadding explains why the accusation is sadly unjustified. (This is an excerpt from the Outlaw Conservative show of 2 October 2019.)
On Tuesday 1 October 2019 President Trump made a post on Twitter to the effect that the movement to impeach him amounted to a coup. Trump’s enemies are acting as if this were some kind of crazy talk, but Trump is far from alone in that opinion. Even some of his enemies have been using that word to characterize the efforts to undermine or terminate his presidency, for more than a year.
24 August 2018, Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency:
“I think impeachment would be a bad idea. If President Trump is somehow forced to leave office before the end of his first term, one-third of America will believe it was a soft coup….”
5 September 2018, David A Graham, The Atlantic, discusses Bob Woodward’s book Fear, and an anti-Trump op-ed written anonymously (probably by Jon Lerner) for the New York Times:
“… the actions described in the book and in the op-ed are extremely worrying, and amount to a soft coup against the president.
“There is either a soft coup underway or the president is unfit for office.”
The point of the concern about Trump’s use of the word coup, and his comments in 2016 about electoral irregularities, is that if the electoral process is now being voided by a “coup” or if the elections themselves are crooked, then the system is already dead and there can no longer be any moral argument for respecting the Constitution and not simply seizing power. Michael Hayden warned against trying to remove Trump from office precisely because it would induce “one-third of America” that currently respects the Constitution to begin thinking outside of the Constitutionalist box (as has been for decades the exclusive prerogative of the anti-White left, especially in the form of crooked rulings by courts). The fear is that the White majority, struggling against reduction to minority status, may cease fighting with one arm tied behind its back.
We have been headed in this direction for some years now. See my article from 2012, Welcome to the Banana Republic.